Protest Lit 101

Abstract

American Protest Literature. Edited by Zoe Trodd. Harvard University Press, 2006. American Working-Class Literature. Edited by Nicholas Coles and Janet Zandy. Oxford University Press, 2007. The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Streets of Seattle, T. V. Reed. University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Inevitably when I teach a course dealing with American protest literature—literature that self-consciously aspires to change the world—a student will pipe up at some point and raise some variant of the impertinent question: well, did it? It is tempting at these moments to turn to reliable trump cards like Uncle Tom's Cabin (“It helped spark the Civil War, you know”), The Jungle (“USDA inspections, anyone?”), or Waiting for Lefty (“Strike!”), but the truth is that such shorthand is often more trouble than it is worth. It plays into my students' expectation that, especially in the case of the art of protest, the work's “success” is best measured instrumentally, in terms of its impact on traditional political terrain; and by obliging their preference for cut-and-dry answers over imaginative speculation, it threatens to make much of our classroom discussion, revolving as it does around narrative strategies and specific turns-of-phrase, seem beside the point. Taken to an extreme, this impulse to show how protest literature matters in the world can lead to a narrowly empiricist cul-de-sac, where the best admissible evidence follows the formula, “X read Y, then was inspired to do Z.”