Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain

Notebook 4 questions the impact of the dark proletariat’s activities on its own affects. It also ponders how the theological imaginary enables or represses liberatory political visions during social breakdown. It investigate Hurston’s novel Moses, Man of the Mountain: An Anthropology of Power, its contemporary relevance during the “second Great Depression,” its place in Hurston’s intellectual-aesthetic project, and the Spinozist and Nietzschean philosophies informing Hurston’s take on several key themes regarding the multitude and messianism.

Down by the Riverside

Notebook 1 argues for the centrality of movement to Richard Wright’s lesser-known novella “Down by the Riverside,” which is inspired by the labor conflicts of the Delta and the 1927 flood. An analysis of Wright’s fiction and historical documents reveals how labor conditions limited economic solidarity among the indebted. However, the flood also reveals the critical consciousness that evolved among the indebted who eventually became refugees in the relief camps. Despite the tragic story Wright tells, he offers readers a glimpse of the Event, wherein fear and guilt are broken and no longer paralyze the oppressed into inaction. Notebook 1 not only attends to the brilliance of Wright’s fiction before Native Son. It also goes beyond Wright’s story to show the debates that developed in Black newspapers over the proper objectives and strategies for reconstructing the Delta after the flood, which echoes the sabotaged need for Reconstruction decades after the Civil War.

Introduction

The introduction offers several vignettes to mark the limits of Marx’s conceptualization of the slave, Agamben’s concept of the decision in states of emergency, and Cathy Caruth and Shoshana Felman’s unacknowledged connection to “European Man” as the image of thought producing their idea of trauma. Each vignette looks beyond these limits by turning to a different canonical work of Black thought. By staging these encounters between different theoretical traditions, the terms and presuppositions for a different understanding of trauma can commence. This introduction concludes with a call to return to the idea of the proletariat in Marxian and Marxist thought, precisely because it offers a more expansive approach for grappling with class exploitation and political disfranchisement than the concept of the working class, as the following notebooks will demonstrate.

W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction

Notebook 3 continues to build on the concept of the multitude. Du Bois calls the region of the multitude that pursues truth and justice the “dark proletariat.” This chapter theorizes the dark proletariat’s revolutionary force analyzing the argument and form of Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, especially the chapters on “The General Strike” and “The Coming of the Lord.” With this analysis, Du Bois’s account of the dark proletariat during the Civil War marks the historical expression of the divine violence Walter Benjamin identifies but cannot historically locate in his enigmatic essay “Critique of Violence.” Divine violence undoes the guilt that binds the oppressed to the law and State. While Benjamin sought his example among the working class in Europe’s metropoles, Du Bois makes the figure of the fugitive slave the protagonist of his narrative.

Conclusion

Thinking Through Crisis argues for the 1930s as a crucial instance of black writing that rethinks the agency irrupting from traumatization. Ford seeks to recalibrate cultural theory’s relation to the practical, exploring the relation between theory and practice by focusing on the work of Barbara Christian and Hortense Spillers.

“Crusade for Justice”

Notebook 2 reframes Ida B Wells as a thinker of the multitude. In her unfinished autobiography Crusade for Justice, Wells sets aside her image as the maverick opposing lynching singlehandedly. Her autobiography grounds her intellectual and activist legacy in galvanizing collective opposition to racism, sexual violence, and class exploitation, with lynching serving as the microcosm of these horrors across the South and a newly imperial United States. This chapter reinterprets Wells’s canonical pamphlets from the 1890s and 1900s through her autobiography’s viewpoint. This notebook also challenges today’s common-sense view that racism is the by-product of “one bad apple” who can be converted to a less racist view by their victims. Lynching involves a collective reinforcing its superiority through informal and formal institutional channels. Only another collective force can counter it. Wells does not find that agency in “the people”—those who are already recognized as having rights—but in the multitude, that complicated mass at once empowering and destabilizing the State. Finally, this chapter challenges leftist romanticizations of the multitude by showing how it can express itself in mass acts of disinformation and terror and the collective pursuit of truth and justice, when guilt and fear are overcome.

The New Day

This fifth notebook seeks to examine the joyous passions of the multitude by displacing self-renunciation with a frenzied ecstasy. This notebook also takes up the concept of “the New Day” from chapter 14, “Founding the Public School,” in Black Reconstruction. Du Bois offers the concept as an affirmative instance in the history of black education that makes this ecstatic communal orientation a condition of possibility for the dark proletariat’s intervention in American education. This notebook does not promise a new model of education but tries to understand ecstasy’s significance to black study and the institutions issuing from that critical practice.