Universality at War: Race, Nation, and Communism in Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go

This essay shows how Chester Himes’s first novel, If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), centrally engages with and contests two universalisms manifest in World War II-era Los Angeles: that of militarized US nationalism and that of procommunist organized labor. By emphasizing the irony of his protagonist’s nationalist and working-class identities, Himes points to the limits of these universalisms, the disparity between their claims and their lived realities, and instead gestures to emergent multiracial coalitions that look beyond the horizon of the nation to imagine counterhegemonic forms of social justice.