Ain’t Got No Home

252 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 16 halftones, notes, bibl., index

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-1402-1
Published: March 2014
E-book PDF ISBN: 979-8-8908-8530-2
Published: March 2014
E-book EPUB ISBN: 978-1-4696-1403-8
Published: March 2014

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Most scholarship on the mass migrations of African Americans and southern whites during and after the Great Depression treats those migrations as separate phenomena, strictly divided along racial lines. In this engaging interdisciplinary work, Erin Royston Battat argues instead that we should understand these Depression-era migrations as interconnected responses to the capitalist collapse and political upheavals of the early twentieth century. During the 1930s and 1940s, Battat shows, writers and artists of both races created migration stories specifically to bolster the black-white Left alliance. Defying rigid critical categories, Battat considers a wide variety of media, including literary classics by John Steinbeck and Ann Petry, "lost" novels by Sanora Babb and William Attaway, hobo novellas, images of migrant women by Dorothea Lange and Elizabeth Catlett, popular songs, and histories and ethnographies of migrant shipyard workers.

This vibrant rereading and recovering of the period's literary and visual culture expands our understanding of the migration narrative by uniting the political and aesthetic goals of the black and white literary Left and illuminating the striking interrelationship between American populism and civil rights.

About the Author

Erin Royston Battat is a lecturer in the History and Literature Program at Harvard University.
For more information about Erin Royston Battat, visit the Author Page.

Reviews

“Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and graduate students.”--Choice

"A provocative oppositional reading of American literature." --American Historical Review

"Attuned to the interplays between class, race, and gender . . . a well-researched resource for educators and critics looking to reassess the Great Depression."--Journal of American History

“A fascinating book that fuses two coinciding trends in 1930s America: migration and protest.”--Journal of American Ethnic History

“Battat challenges readers to dig beneath scholarship that dismisses a creative engagement between black writers and the Left. . . . Provides a fresh perspective on the cultural history of this time.”--Arkansas Historical Quarterly

"A major contribution to scholarship on the mid-century literary Left, as well as to political debates--very much ongoing--over the relationship between race and class in the culture and history of the United States."--Barbara Foley, Rutgers University-Newark