Thinking Through Crisis

James Edward Ford III is Associate Professor of English at Occidental College. His writings on the aesthetics of black radicalism, black popular culture, and political theory have appeared in the journals Novel, Biography, Cultural Critique, College Literature, New Centennial Review, ASAP Journal, and multiple edited collections. He is currently working on “Phillis, the Black Swan: Disheveling the Origins” and “Hip-Hop’s Late Style: Disheveling the Origins,” two projects that rethink the origins and ends of black American cultural production.

Acknowledgments | ix

Introduction: From Being to Unrest, from Objectivity to Motion | 1

Notebook 1 Down by the Riverside: Richard Wright,

the 1927 Flood, and the Citizen-Refugee | 35

Notebook 2 “Crusade for Justice”: Ida B. Wells and

the Power of the Multitude | 74

Notebook 3 W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction:

Theorizing Divine Violence | 123

Notebook 4 Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the

Mountain: An Anthropology of Power | 193

Notebook 5 The New Day: Notes on Education and

the Dark Proletariat | 244

Conclusion: From Being to Unrest, from Objectivity

to Motion—A Race for Theory | 291

Notes | 299

Index | 333