Geographies of (In)Justice: Radical Regionalism in the American Midwest, 1930-1950

In the decades bracketing World War II, a group of Midwestern radical writers promoted a new form of radical literary expression--proletarian regionalism--both to counter burgeoning right-wing extremism in the United States and to renew a spirit of grass-roots democracy, egalitarianism and place-based working class action. For Meridel Le Sueur, Jack Conroy, Nelson Algren, and Mari Sandoz, four of the most regionally conscious and committed writers of the period and the focus of "Geographies of (In)Justice," proletarian regionalism was a vehicle for interpreting localized social, economic, and environmental injustices and for making connections between these places and larger-scale processes of capitalist accumulation. By tracing regional discourses through a broad range of forms, including social realism, little magazines, conference presentations, fictional autobiography, and political allegory, this recuperative literary history demonstrates that proletarian regionalism appropriated many forms in an attempt to interpret and represent an affective geography of capitalism and capture the socio-spatial experiences of people struggling to live and work in the region. Arguing that Midwestern proletarian regionalism presents a counter-narrative to the still-dominant view of regionalism as inherently conservative and backward looking, this dissertation continues work by scholars such as Michael C. Steiner, who have begun to recover a "woefully neglected tradition" of left-leaning regionalism, and puts this tradition in conversation with recent theories in cultural geography (3).;Ultimately, "Geographies of (In)Justice" is an attempt to revise our understanding of these writers' contributions to radical literature and reinvigorate a Marxist analysis of regionalism as a form of social critique and cultural analysis. The central claim of this dissertation is that proletarian regionalism maps and interprets the complex geographies of capitalism and involves readers emotionally in the experiences of being situated within marginalized and often neglected places. By reading this body of literature alongside cultural geography, this research offers a better understanding of how regional writing can be understood as a vital representational strategy for imagining a broad geography of empathy and unity among socially responsible readers, and, as such, can be a force of progressive social action.