Radical Fiction Research Articles

Demoting Fictional Names—A Critical Note to Predelli’s Fictional Discourse: A Radical Fictionalist Semantics

The first line in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone reads: (Making)‘Mr and Mrs Dursley of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal…’ (Rowling 1997, p. 7) (Making) is an example of fiction-making talk. It is one of numerous linguistic constructs that make up the Harry Potter novel. Contrast (Making) with: (Reporting)‘Mr and Mrs Dursley like to think of themselves as normal people.’ (Reporting) is an example of fiction-reporting. Unlike fiction-making, whether you are doing a good job at fiction-reporting depends on an already created fiction. Some of us will find (Making) and (Reporting) puzzling. With (Making), Rowling (1997) appears to be saying of Mr and Mrs Dursley that they think of themselves as normal people, and with (Reporting), we appear to be saying pretty much the same. Yet, we know that Mr and Mrs Dursley are fictional characters, not real people. But if there are no Mr and Mrs Dursley, then what is the semantic contribution of the fictional names in (Making) and (Reporting)? Some hold that the denotations of fictional names, including as they occur in fiction-making talk, refer to abstract fictional characters (e.g. Salmon, 1998). Others argue that fictional names are not really names but disguised descriptions (e.g. Currie, 1990). Still others insist that fictional names are empty names, contributing nothing but an empty slot to the gappy propositions the sentences containing them encode (e.g. Eagle, 2007).

The semantics of fiction

The paper reviews proposals by Abell, Predelli, and others on the semantics of fiction, focusing on the discourse through which fictions are created. Predelli develops the radical fictionalism of former writers like Kripke and van Inwagen, according to which that discourse is contentless and does not express propositions. This paper offers reasons to doubt these claims. It then explores realist proposals like Abell's in which singular terms in fictions refer to fictional characters, understood as socially created representational artifacts, and irrealist alternatives in which the discourse is fully meaningful even though those terms fail to refer.

Predelli on Fictional Discourse

Abstract John Searle argues that (literary) fictions are constituted by mere pretense—by the simulation of representational activities like assertions, without any further representational aim. They are not the result of sui generis, dedicated speech acts of a specific kind, on a par with assertion. The view had earlier many defenders, and still has some. Stefano Predelli enlists considerations derived from Searle in support of his radical fictionalism. This is the view that a sentence of fictional discourse including a prima facie empty fictional name like “Emma Woodhouse” in fact “is not a sentence, and it encodes no proposition whatsoever.” His argument is broadly abductive; he claims that this view affords compelling explanations of features of fictions he finds well-established, among them that fictions without explicit narrators nonetheless have covert ones. Here I take up his arguments, in defense of the dedicated speech act view. I thus address pressing issues about the status of fictional names and the nature and ubiquity of narrators in fictions.

The Joker city, or the mysteries and miseries of Gotham

ABSTRACT The city mysteries were a nineteenth-century bestselling transnational literary phenomenon that combined radical politics and sensational fiction, adapting historical events along with devices from already existing popular narratives. Born as answers to the new megalopolis, these mysteries were supposed to work as calls to political action by exposing the vices, crimes, and corruption of the city’s wealthy elites, in contrast to the miserable conditions of honest, victimized workers and middle‐class families. However, the ideological coherence of city mysteries was often compromised by their voyeuristic emphasis on the most sensational and lurid aspects of the same social evils they aimed to eradicate in the first place. This article is built upon the hypothesis that, in a very different context, Joker (2019) has filtered staples of the city‐mystery genre through the aesthetics of contemporary popular culture, in order to produce a politically mystifying but unequivocally provocative film.

Maeve Kelly: Women, Ireland, and the Aesthetics of Radical Writing

This article considers the work of Irish writer and feminist Maeve Kelly arguing that she has been not only a radical and, to some extent, seminal voice within modern Irish writing, but an author whose work self-consciously reflects upon the production and mediation of Irish women's writing within British and Irish culture. While Kelly is not unique in adopting a feminist approach in her writing, aspects of her fiction are somewhat discrete within modern Irish literature in terms of how they express, delineate, and resolve the challenges – material, psycho-cultural, aesthetic – attendant upon the representation of feminist political thought and occluded Irish female experience. Particularly within an Irish context, Kelly's writing provides a significant case study of the aesthetic problematics of politically radical fiction. Her oeuvre represents a vital contribution to Irish writing of the twentieth century as well as to the history of women in post-war Ireland.

An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction: Chartism, Radical Print Culture, and the Social Problem Novel, by Gregory Vargo

Reviewed by: An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction: Chartism, Radical Print Culture, and the Social Problem Novel by Gregory Vargo Chris R. Vanden Bossche (bio) An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction: Chartism, Radical Print Culture, and the Social Problem Novel, by Gregory Vargo; pp. xiv + 278. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018, £75.00, $99.99. The rising of the middle class has loomed so largely in studies of Victorian literature that the study of class itself, especially the working classes, long received scant attention. What criticism we have has often focused on representations of class, primarily in what is deemed middle-class literature. Fortunately, scholars such as Louis James and Martha Vicinus have introduced Victorianists to working-class literature, and the modern editions of Ian Haywood and others have made it widely available. The result has been a growing body of critical literature to which Gregory Vargo's An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction: Chartism, Radical Print Culture, and the Social Problem Novel is a valuable new addition. Vargo's book makes two interventions that build on and extend important developments in recent criticism on Chartist writing. First, rather than measuring Chartist writing in terms of assumptions about what it should envision—a fault of some early criticism of this work—it treats this work as a form of social action and asks what it attempts to achieve on its own terms. Second, it does not treat this work in isolation but instead examines the ways in which working-class and middle-class writing respond to, adapt, and revise each other. Among the first books to take this approach were Sally Ledger's Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination (2007) and Sambudha Sen's London, Radical Culture, and the Making of the Dickensian Aesthetic (2012), both of which investigated the ways that Charles Dickens's novels engaged with and borrowed from radical literature and discourse. The project of these studies, as I take it, is to treat ideological formation not as the dissemination of a predetermined set of doctrines but as a process that novelists engage in as they seek to come to terms with their social condition. My own Reform Acts: Chartism, Social Agency, and the Victorian Novel, 1832–1867 (2014) applied a similar approach to other middle-class authors while also investigating movement in the other direction by examining [End Page 469] writing produced by radicals and members of the working classes. Vargo's Underground History shifts the focus even further toward radical literature. While there are discussions of Harriet Martineau, Dickens, and Elizabeth Gaskell, he digs deeper into the archive and devotes more space to radical literature with analyses of William Cobbett, Thomas Cooper, Thomas Martin Wheeler, Ernest Jones, and others as well as non-literary texts from the radical press such as The Book of Murder (1839) and commentary on empire and post-1848 refugees in the Chartist press. Vargo's concern is not only to examine middle-class novelists' engagement with radicalism, but also radical fiction's engagement with middle-class discourse and narrative conventions. In particular, he examines the ways in which Chartist fictions rewrite the narrative conventions of melodrama and the Bildungsroman. Whereas the middle-class forms of these genres locate agency in the individual—in particular the melodramatic villain as the source of evil and the self-making individual of the Bildungsroman—Chartist fiction focuses on the social order itself. The villains of Chartist melodrama are no longer aristocratic rakes but institutions such as the marketplace or the patriarchal family. Vargo's analysis of the ways in which working-class writers and radicals shifted the locus of social evil from individuals to the social system is insightful, but also fits a familiar paradigm. Indeed, while he suggests in passing that Dickens "typically traces crises to the wrongdoing of specific characters," citing the example of Merdle in Little Dorrit (1855–57), many would argue that by the time of his late novels Dickens had himself shifted toward a systemic, rather than individualistic, conception of social evil, villainy in Little Dorrit residing not in Merdle but in the institutions the banker represents and their corollary in the Circumlocution...

Radical children, radical fictions: terror and extremism in Sam Mills’s Blackout and Malorie Blackman’s Noble Conflict

This article discusses the binding together of the terrorist’s and the victim’s perspectives in Sam Mills’s Blackout and Malorie Blackman’s Noble Conflict. In staging this kind of encounter, the contemporary children’s novel can explore the origins and workings of terrorist organisations, as well as counter-terrorist institutions, encouraging young readers to enter into critical engagement with different forms of violence that are connected with resistance to oppression and injustice. The terror-saturated dystopian visions fashioned by this generation of children’s writers are read as allowing them to raise crucial questions about the rightness of waging war on an abstract concept of ‘terror’ that exists forever in potential and about the justification of the state’s recourse to counter-terrorism legislation that seeks to criminalise not just terroristic practices but also radical thought. The article is shaped by postcolonial and ethical approaches to narrative and readings drawn Michel Foucault and Judith Butler.

Writing sound and radical fiction: the abyssal space of writing, reading and listening

ABSTRACTThis article aims to establish a connection between Daniela Cascella's writing sound and Maurice Blanchot's radical fiction. It will show how Cascella's interest in the relationship between sound and writing pulls her toward a similar abyssal space as the one Blanchot arrives at in his critical essays and own works of fiction. By firstly distinguishing her work, by emphasising its poetic power, from certain trends in sound studies, this essay will read Cascella alongside the writing of Blanchot. It will be shown how both Cascella and Blanchot's writing circles a vanishing point in which the inaugural moment of writing slowly dissipates. The significance of reading will then be explored as a prolongation of this dispossessing temporality of writing. Importantly, then, this article is not trying to say something about the ontological dimension of sound. The commonality drawn between these two authors will be positioned according to the strangeness of writing.

LITERATURE FROM BELOW: RADICALISM AND POPULAR FICTION

InThe Poetry of Chartism(2009), Mike Sanders describes the temptation which confronts literary scholars of working-class and radical political movements to present their endeavors as “archival work [of] discovery, a bringing to light of long forgotten artefacts” (36). Such posture, though dramatic, is unwarranted in Sanders's view because a critical tradition beginning in the late nineteenth century has continued to republish, analyze, and appreciate the writing of Chartist poets. Yet, if the temptation persists (for students of radical poetry and fiction alike), it does so for reasons beyond the difficulties inherent in accessing literature printed in ephemeral newspapers by movements which suffered state persecution. New generations of scholars must “discover” the radical corpus anew because in a profound sense this corpus has not been integrated into broader literary history but has remained a separate tradition, found and lost again and again.

The Radical Fiction of Ann Petry by Keith Clark (review)

The Radical Fiction of Ann Petry by Keith Clark (review)

A Study of Carter’s<i> Wolf_Alice</i> Based on Showalter’s Gynocriticism

One of the most radical and stylish fiction authors of the 20th century, Angela Carter, expresses her views of feminism through her various novels and fairy tales. Carter began experimenting with writing fairy tales in 1970, which coincided with the period of second wave feminism in the Unites States. The majority of Angela Carter’s work revolve around a specific type of feminism, radical libertarian feminism and her critique of the patriarchal role that have been placed on women. In this article, the main concentrate is on heroine’s internalized consciousness which echoes in their behavior. All of the female protagonists in carter’s short stories; such as The Company of Wolves, and Werewolf and mainly in Wolf_Alice have similar characteristics with different conditions, in which they are represented in a very negative light with less than ideal roles. In these stories, the protagonist is a young girl who has many conflicts with love and desire. Carter attempts to encourage women to do something about this degrading representation.

The Radical Fiction of Ann Petry by Keith Clark (review)

The Radical Fiction of Ann Petry by Keith Clark (review)

The radical fiction of Ann Petry

The radical fiction of Ann Petry

Wrestling with the Left: The Making of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (review)

Reviewed by: Wrestling with the Left: The Making of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man Dan Colson Barbara Foley . Wrestling with the Left: The Making of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man . Durham: Duke UP, 2010. xii + 448 pp. Nearly twenty years ago, Barbara Foley's seminal Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Literature, 1929-1941 reshaped the way we read radical fiction. Along with Cary Nelson, Alan Wald, and a handful of others, Foley helped instantiate "radical literature" as a valid and rich—albeit still marginal—area of study. By [End Page 161] offering both a functional definition of and extensive taxonomy for proletarian literature, Radical Representations crystalized the often-fragmented field, providing a touchstone for subsequent studies of radical fiction. Two decades later, Foley's latest effort, Wrestling with the Left: The Making of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, is perhaps even more ambitious. In it, she takes on not a collection of little-known and marginally canonical works that typically comprise "radical literature," but one of the most studied twentieth-century novels. Foley continues her critical fascination with literary Leftism, yet Wrestling with the Left holds value for all students and scholars of Ellison, African American literature, and literary modernism, demonstrating the far-reaching impact of the twentieth-century American Left and the continued importance of politically engaged scholarship. As Foley consistently reminds us, the popular reading of Invisible Man finds its genesis in the contemporaneous New Critical reception of the novel and in Ellison's self-aware construction of his intentions. While retaining the critique of American racism, he stripped the novel of any overt involvement in the post-World War II ideological battle and, after its publication, sought to avoid being "branded a 'Negro writer'" by claiming literary kinship with Shakespeare, Virgil, Aeschylus, Herman Melville, Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, and T. S. Eliot (69). In part a reaction to the political exigencies of the Cold War and in part literary self-fashioning, Ellison's insistence that the book owed a great debt to classical mythology, Freudian criticism, Burkean rhetorical theory, and high modernism—while ignoring and denying any impact by his earlier dalliance with the Left—established parameters for the analysis of his novel that were consonant with the predominant political and aesthetic sensibilities of the era and that have lingered for more than fifty years. Wrestling with the Left is designed to correct this narrow perspective, not by denying Ellison's claimed influences, but by detailing Ellison's engagement with Left political discourse throughout his career, thus adding the Left as an ambivalent opponent that complicates and informs earlier readings of Invisible Man. Foley adds this layer of content/context in two ways: in Part I, she analyzes previously unknown and severely understudied works that reveal Ellison's explicit involvement with Leftist literary magazines, his attraction to Marxian political philosophy, and his praise for others writing from Leftist perspectives. Wrestling with the Left does not portray Ellison as an uncritical champion of pre-World War II communism, thus avoiding the prototypical, pre-war Leftist, Cold War conservative trajectory of rejection of many 1930s radicals. Instead, Foley produces a shifting snapshot of a writer drawn to the Left, yet profoundly troubled by the American Communist Party's and [End Page 162] the international communist movement's actions vis-à-vis race as anti-fascism changed strategies and Black Americans were asked to make difficult (perhaps untenable) wartime sacrifices. Part I argues that Ellison's intellectual engagement with the Left—with proletarian fiction, with left-leaning anthropologist Stanley Edgar Hymen, and with Richard Wright (who himself struggled to address cohesively the intersection of race and Left politics)—structured political and aesthetic stances that are a necessary prehistory to Invisible Man. Only through the type of careful attention to Ellison's early writing that we find in Wrestling with the Left can we come to terms with the content and the absences of his magnum opus. Part II then builds from this foundation with an exhaustive reading of Invisible Man. Foley's extensive analysis weaves together the novel as it was published in 1952 with the large number of available excerpts, rewrites, and revisions that show a...

The Total Radical Fiction: Vegard Vinge and Ida Muller's Ibsen Saga

Research Article| November 01 2012 The Total Radical Fiction: Vegard Vinge and Ida Müller’s Ibsen Saga Andrew Friedman Andrew Friedman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Theater (2012) 42 (3): 11–29. https://doi.org/10.1215/01610775-1597593 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Andrew Friedman; The Total Radical Fiction: Vegard Vinge and Ida Müller’s Ibsen Saga. Theater 1 November 2012; 42 (3): 11–29. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01610775-1597593 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsTheater Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2012 by Andrew Friedman2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

H. T. Tsiang's Proletarian Burlesque: Performance and Perversion in <i>The Hanging on Union Square</i>

Horizontally, in any space, Things must be done. --H. T. Tsiang (Hanging 161) In January 1941, novelist, poet, performer, and playwright H. T. Tsiang used a roll of toilet paper to write a letter to the well-known and politically progressive artist Rockwell Kent from an Ellis Island deportation cell, where Tsiang was being detained on immigration charges. Tsiang, a Chinese American writer who had achieved some notoriety following his publication of three leftist novels and a volume of poetry, was being held by the US government as Case Number 56019/532, and he was biding his time while the judicial system decided whether he was eligible to stay in the country where he had resided since 1926. Tsiang's detention was hardly unique; the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 had sent many of his fellow immigrants to meet a similar fate. Yet his unorthodox response to his conditions was a predictably bizarre supplement to his offbeat literary career: in spite of his vulnerable circumstances, Tsiang refused to behave as a model US citizen, offering friends and colleagues evidence of neither his respectability nor his decorum. Instead, Tsiang sent Kent's letter on the most vulgar signifier of his conditions imaginable, his small cell transformed into a stage upon which he could perform his radical gesture of refusal. As though to reinforce the intentionality of his scatological performance, Tsiang also included a traditional typewritten transcript of his letter. The enjoyment of low culture was always at the forefront of Tsiang's economy of pleasure. Tsiang's profane scroll, now collected and microfilmed in the US Archives of American Art, stands as a testament to his transgressive literary performances. His letter recounts the banalities of life at Ellis Island a sharp sense of humor and quirky eye for irony. Everything is fine and gay, he assures Kent on his toilet paper scroll, the locked door, guard and uniform. Written in the deceptively simple language Tsiang used tremendous sensitivity to double meanings, puns, and the hidden logic of words, Tsiang remarks upon how he created a writing table by folding blankets atop his toilet (redoubling his scatological staging); his discomfort having to interact with all white people; his infatuation Kent's eyes (your eyes as if something carrassing [sic] or some sort--I have no words to express); and his endless amusement at a photograph Kent sent of himself, in response to which Tsiang tabulated the number of hairs he could count on Kent's shinely balled pate: 4+8=11 (Letter, 18 Jan.). Yet language constituted but one aspect of Tsiang's artistic expression, and his correspondence having been written from atop a toilet on such paper was as significant as any of the mundane thoughts he recorded. Throughout Tsiang's career as a writer and actor, his public and private cultural production emphasized performance as much as description, and paratext was always as important as diegesis. In Tsiang's hands, a quotidian form such as a letter could be transformed into a pungent performance of insubordination, just as under his pen a novel could become a dramatic production of proletarian burlesque, a peculiar sexual radicalism that combined a commitment to leftist politics a perverse celebration of sexual misbehavior's revolutionary potential. Tsiang's Ellis Island letter encapsulates his penchant for curating performative scenes that were multilayered, obscene, challenging, campy, nasty, and provocative. In this article I study Tsiang's novel The Hanging on Union Square (1935) to consider how he used textual and paratextual performances embodying each of these characteristics to articulate leftist politics in his Depression-era radical fiction while refusing to meet the heteronormative expectations often assigned to proletarian literature. Tsiang strategically deployed an aesthetic and ethics of performance that both queered radicalism and radicalized sexual categories by emphasizing political, literary, and sexual performativity, (1) His profound sense of the ironies in American life was uniquely attuned to the difficulties confronting those who wished to challenge the repressive sexual mores, oppressive economic conditions, and racial and ethnic prejudices that made a mockery of American ideals such as freedom, equality, and justice for all. …

Hamlin Garland, prairie radical: writings from the 1890s

&L mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:Calibri,sans-serif; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Times New Roman; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} "I am a reformer--a radical--a promoter of Democracy...”--Hamlin Garland to Horace Traubel, 13 January 1892 As a self-proclaimed native "son of the middle border" states of Wisconsin, Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, and South Dakota, Hamlin Garland wrote short stories, novels, and essays about the harsh realities of farm life. At a time when rural romanticism was in literary vogue, he described conditions for midwestern farmers as they really were and promoted a wide variety of reforms to improve their lives, including women's rights legislation and single-tax reform. The volume reprints much of Garland's radical fiction and nonfiction from between 1887 and 1894, almost all previously uncollected, including four of his most outspoken stories depicting farm conditions of the time. Fueled by moral outrage and a cry for justice shaped by his own family's hardships in Wisconsin, Iowa, and South Dakota, the radical writing of his early career is filled with compassion and fury. Seeking to reinvigorate an appreciation and understanding of Garland's centrality in the rise of a post-Civil War radical spirit in American expression, this collection assembles the most vibrant and representative examples of his radical 1890s writings.

Radical Fictions: The English Novel in the 1950s (review)

Radical Fictions: The English Novel in the 1950s (review)

‘Minor disorders’: Ivan Vladislavić and the devolution of South African English

This article argues that Ivan Vladislavić's aesthetically radical fictions interrogate the authority of English as a language imposed by colonialism and globalisation. Diverging from the romantic legacy of English letters in South Africa, which has seen literature as an ideal expression of an inner truth, Vladislavić's writing deals with the materiality of the sign and, more specifically, the print medium. In his latest, hilarious novel, The Restless Supermarket, the ironical tension between the perception of English as an ideal order and the shape‐shifting materiality of the sign produces what I (following Deleuze) call a minoritisation of English. However, Vladislavić targets not only the high cultural authority of British English, but equally the instrumentalised English of advertising and commercial media. As he ludically reshuffles and defamiliarises the conventions of both ‘high’ and ‘low’ language, Vladislavić places South African English in the larger flow of transnational history and enables language to function as a mode of becoming rather than being.

"It Ain't Your Color, It's Your Scabbing": Literary Depictions of African American Strikebreakers

I wonder why They are so shortsighted As not to realize That every time They keep any worker, man or woman, White, yellow, or black, OUT of a UNION, They are forcing a worker To be a SCAB, To be used AGAINST THEM? --from Negro Worker These lines of verse, published in The Messenger in July 1919, make a point about strikes that is frequently disregarded in the hundreds of pages of fiction by social realists who addressed the major labor struggles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: [A]ny worker / man or woman, / White, yellow, or could be a strikebreaker. In the West, for example, railroad and mining company managers used workers from countries such as China, Italy, Greece, Japan, and Mexico to break strikes, fully aware that these immigrants would have no allegiance to the ethnic groups who had thrown down their tools in protest. Surprisingly, strikebreaking even crossed class lines as upper and middle class male college students also took on the role of strikebreaker to express their antagonism toward workers. (1) The variety of sources of strikebreakers is not fully reflected in the fictional response to the strike. In some of the most significant radical fiction of the early twentieth century, black workers--more than any other group--are curiously cast in the villainous role of scab. In the span of a few decades, these literary depictions ranged from collective racist stereotypes to sympathetic psychological portraits of the pressures faced by the African American laborer. Ample evidence of friction between whites and blacks can be found in some of the U.S. labor movement's key strikes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (2) The use of black troops offers the earliest examples. Black soldiers used against striking miners in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, in 1892 and 1899, because African Americans were believed much less likely than white troops to fraternize with the strikers (Norwood, Strikebreaking and Intimidation, 85). In addition, black troops guarded trains and railroad property during the Pullman Strike of 1894. Regarding African American civilians, the Knights of Labor and the newly developing American Federation of Labor (AFL) successfully attracted African American workers, and examples of interracial unity both in the workplace and during strikes can be found. But as the lines from Negro Worker also imply, some unions excluded black members. If blacks welcomed as members, they faced discriminatory policies under a second-class status. Blacks denied work on union projects despite membership, or they denied better jobs despite seniority. Unions failed to protect blacks from racial hostility, and blacks charged union leaders with ignoring their complaints of discrimination. The development of segregated locals was another sign of trouble. Before the Civil War, Frederick Douglass wrote in favor of labor unity between African American and white workers; however, when he realized that labor was doing little to lessen racial animosity, he came out in favor of blacks taking the jobs of strikers: Colored men can feel under no obligation to hold out in a 'strike' with the whites, as the latter have never recognized them (qtd. in Foner, Organized Labor, 7). As America's industrial revolution picked up steam, this issue came into greater prominence in most mass production industries in cities in the North. Racism fueled an African American labor force ready and willing to break strikes. One of the earliest and most significant fictional treatments of African American strikebreakers is found in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906). The labor struggle in the canonical novel is based on the unsuccessful stockyard strike by thousands of packinghouse workers and mechanical tradesmen of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen in Chicago in 1904. African Americans had been used as strikebreakers in the meat packing industry at least as early as 1894, in response to a sympathy strike by packing and slaughterhouse workers who supported Eugene Debs and the American Railway Union during the Pullman Strike. …