Radicalism in America's "Industrial Jungle": Metaphors of the Primitive and the Industrial in Activist Texts

Abstract

Scholars often view political texts as mere propaganda, characterized by rigid ideologies rather than the nuance of literature. This text argues the opposite through a study of post-1945 American radical movements. Far from generating simple propaganda, social movements create rhetoric and imagery that engage with complex literary tropes. Specifically, this study addresses the use of "primitive" and "industrial" metaphors in African-American literature and four twentieth-century radical movements: the Black Panther Party, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, the socialist tradition of taking industrial jobs, and the work of contemporary anarchists. Comparisons between these movements and Black Arts Movement texts, neo-slave narrative novels, and works of black speculative fiction illustrate the flaws and possibilities of each movement's combination of aesthetics and politics. "Primitive" and "industrial" tropes form the backbone of this comparison because they illustrate how activists imagine the past, present, and future as they attempt to enact these liberation narratives. Moreover, few activists employ one of these metaphors without also relying on the other. Contemporary anarchists, then, dream of a return to hunter-gatherer behavior by dumpster diving in the urban and industrial settings; similarly, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers insisted that the auto worker was the key to revolution even as it decorated its newsletters with panthers and African masks. By focusing on the creative ways that political organizations have used these tropes, this project insists that the juncture between literature and political rhetoric has the potential to accommodate pragmatic political change, complex ethical questions, and rich aesthetic representations.