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First-person Plural: The Voice of the Masses in Farm Security Administration Documentary }oel mller What narratives do, among other things, is propose ways of imagining collective identity. Nevertheless, few stories are told in the voice of a "we," and the prominence of the choral voice during the Great Depression is therefore remarkable. For instance, the 1930s is the period in which the gospel hymn "I'll Overcome Someday" becomes the first-person plural anthem of mass action now identified with the US Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s: "We Shall Overcome" (Lynd; Lieberman 151). A first-person plural voice of the masses is also one of the characteristic narrative techniques of US Resettlement Administration (RA) and Farm Security Administration (FSA) documentary films of the Depression, as well as of FSA photographic captioning and commentary. This intra-diegetic, collective, narrator-as-protagonist voice can be found throughout the first photodocumentary book to depend on FSA photographs, Archibald MacLeish's Land of the Free, as well as in the texts which are the focus of this essay: Richard Wright's FSA photobook collaboration with Edwin Rosskam, 12 Million Black Voices, and Pare Lorentz's FSA documentary film The River.1 Wright and Lorentz both depend on a first-person plural narrative voice, but they deploy this technique to different ends. Although both Wright and Lorentz can be identified broadly with the Popular Front,2 and JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 29.3 (Fall 1999): 340-366. Copyright © 1999 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. First-person Plural 341 although both are strong advocates of progress through modernization, the particulars of their political commitments differ substantially: at the time he writes and publishes 12 Million Black Voices Wright is a black Communist seeking to celebrate the promise of the Great Migration, black urbanization , proletarianization, and participation in organizations such as the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Lorentz, on the other hand, is a white Democrat intent on promoting both government-sponsored film production and government agencies such as the Resettlement Administration and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). The "we" in question is also not the same for Wright and Lorentz: Wright's masses are raced and classed, whereas Lorentz's are fundamentally national in identity. Finally, in the historical context of the crisis of capitalism, Wright's and Lorentz's divergent uses of formally comparable narrative techniques signify not only distinct political projects, but also different ways of imagining collectivity . While Wright's 12 Million Black Voices gradually moves toward a we-you dialectic, the narration of Lorentz's film The River, on the other hand, drives toward the point at which an us-them dichotomy becomes explicit . Moreover, 12 Million Black Voices has yet to be really heard, as a series of overwhelmingly negative critical responses to Wright's narrative technique have helped to keep Wright's photobook in obscurity. In contrast , Lorentz's RA and FSA documentary films, The Plow that Broke the Plains and, especially, The River, have been received and remembered well. It is likely that Wright's and Lorentz's contrasting ways of understanding the possibilities for solidarity help account for the very different critical responses to their formally similar works. A comparison of Wright's and Lorentz's narrative techniques, and of the reception of those techniques, therefore exposes and helps explain contemporary and longstanding critical impulses for and against particular rhetorical—and above all, ideological—strategies of massification. Specifically, the vast gap between the past and present cultural status of Wright's 12 Million Black Voices and that of Lorentz's documentary films of the late 1930s reflects a bias against attributing agency to oppressed races and exploited classes rather than to paternalistic government and a heroic nation: a bias against dialectical, Utopian, and identity-transforming ways of representing community and agency, and for fixed, mythic, and identity-confirming ways of seeing the same. 342 JNT Finally, comparing the reception of Lorentz's and Wright's narrative techniques sheds light on the relationships between contemporary intellectual practice and the intellectual and cultural production of the 1930s and 1940s, a task which Michael Denning has, in The Cultural Front and "Culture and the Crisis," recently...

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