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“Peons, Toilers, and Vagabonds: Labor and Literature in the Black Atlantic, 1900-1945” explores representations of labor in Black Atlantic literature and political thought from the turn of the twentieth century through the outbreak of World War II. Rather than subsuming Black Atlantic labor discourse under the rubric of prefabricated formations such as the Popular Front or Proletarian Literature, I trace the emergence of a distinctive political and cultural tendency that I term “Black Labor Internationalism.” This formulation names a diffuse but interrelated set of efforts to mobilize and represent workers throughout the Black diaspora in the first half of the twentieth century. At the core of Black Labor Internationalism was a group of peripatetic Caribbean writers who travelled across the interwar Atlantic world, fostering a mobile intellectual culture at the interstices of the New Negro movement, Pan-Africanism, and Communism. While it originated in the early twentieth century Caribbean, Black Labor Internationalism drew upon and syncretized multiple diasporic political traditions, ultimately forging a discourse around Black labor that was global in scope and layered in historical consciousness. To trace the evolution of this discourse, the dissertation departs from the U.S.-centric narratives which have structured scholarship on Marxist African American writing. I instead tell a story of Black interwar radicalism that begins in the Caribbean, intersects with the Harlem Renaissance, and then migrates eastward to 1930s London. Working across the conventional geographic and disciplinary divisions of Black diaspora studies, I show how a migratory cohort of interwar Caribbean intellectuals developed a comparative, Pan-African framework to document, narrate, and theorize the struggles of Black workers and subalterns throughout the world.The dissertation’s four chapters are organized around four expatriate Caribbean writers, each of whom chronicled distinct periods in the history of Black diasporic class formation: Claude McKay, Eric Walrond, George Padmore, and C.L.R. James. In the first two chapters I examine how Eric Walrond and Claude McKay represented transformations of Caribbean economies and labor processes from the turn of the century through the 1920s. In readings of Walrond’s short stories and Claude McKay’s poetry, I argue that the contraction and outmigration of Caribbean peasantries yielded new and conflicted forms of Black diasporic class consciousness at the nexus of peasant production and wage-labor. In the second two chapters I trace the eastward migration of Black Labor Internationalism in the 1930s, exploring how London-based Black Marxist intellectuals C.L.R. James and George Padmore sought to establish real and imaginative lines of affiliation between Black workers in Africa, the U.S., and the Caribbean. Black Labor Internationalism, I argue, was “translational” in two interrelated senses. On one hand, this discourse syncretized and fused various vernaculars, idioms, and languages as it explored the role of cultural exchange in the development of Black diasporic political consciousness. At the same time, it was translational in a political-economic sense: Because (post-)plantation economies throughout the early twentieth-century Black Atlantic world combined and amalgamated political-economic forms that Marxism had conventionally relegated to distinct “stages” of historical development, writers were compelled to translate between such discrete forms within their narratives of Black class formation. Throughout the dissertation’s four chapters I demonstrate that Black Labor Internationalists developed original political lexicons and aesthetic forms attuned to the distinctive dynamics of class formation in the colonial periphery. Where previous scholarship has universalized the proletariat as a stand-in for global labor, assimilating vast and heterogeneous bodies of literature under the rubric of genres like the “proletarian novel,” I draw attention instead to a multitude of minor, definitionally unstable, and polymorphous figures of labor that populate Black Atlantic literature. Rather than positing a static equivalence between class strata and literary genre, I trace the contradictory and conflictual processes through which social classes “take form” in Black Atlantic literature and political thought. Building on the diasporic analytic framework developed by scholars like Paul Gilroy and Brent Hayes Edwards, as well as the work of Third World and Caribbean Marxists, I argue that Black Atlantic writers pluralized the homogenous discourse of proletarian literature by translating between discrepant class strata and subject positions. Ultimately, I argue for the need to decenter the industrial proletariat and refuse static conceptions of class in literary histories of labor.

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