Labor Pains: New Deal Fictions of Race, Work, and Sex in the South by Taylor Christin Marie (review)

Labor Pains investigates representations of African-American folk workers in fiction from the 1930s to the 1960s, a time stretching from New Deal reforms and Popular Front movements to the civil rights era. Christin Marie Taylor addresses how radical Popular Front ideas and sentiments infuse the fiction of four southern writers: George Wylie Henderson's Ollie Miss (1935), William Attaway's Blood on the Forge (1941), Eudora Welty's The Golden Apples (1949), and Sarah E. Wright's This Child's Gonna Live (1969). Taylor argues that these writers use the "Black folk" trope to engage with labor politics and the legacies of radical aesthetics.

Building on scholarship that examines how African-American writers interact with the literary left, Taylor investigates how these authors create a sense of "feeling" in their fiction to carve a "throughway between radical protest and folk traditions" (19). Such an affective dimension is crucial, she argues, because unlike theories of representation that often pin working folk into a narrow category, theories of affect investigate how writers work with feeling to direct readers' responses: "where representation can be a vehicle for identification and truth seeking, affect underscores unknowability, the truth of nontruth, and the facts of nearness" (23). Labor Pains proposes that the writers included use an emotional dimension to offer a complex sense of social and racial subjectivity.

In a quick survey of previous scholarly treatments of Popular Front era literature by Barbara Foley, Alan Wald, Michael Denning, Paula Rabinowitz, and others, Taylor notes an emphasis on politics but a lack of attention to "feeling." An affective dimension is present, however, especially in works of the African-American literary tradition pervaded by a Black folk aesthetic: W. E. B. DuBois speaks of The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Zora Neale Hurston professes "How it Feels to be Colored Me" (1923), Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, Richard Wright, and others also use the power of affect to communicate profound pain and plight. By reading for a "common cord of feeling," Labor Pains reconfigures the relationship between southern modernism and Popular Front Black radical traditions.

Each chapter in Labor Pains centers on a specific author, and together the chapters are organized along a temporal axis. The works included are carefully curated following several winning strategies. Labor Pains stretches the canon of leftist writing by introducing authors we may not expect to find there; particularly surprising and provocative is the inclusion of Eudora Welty in a group of African-American writers more explicitly committed to political action. Although Welty has often disavowed any political leanings in her work, Taylor argues that despite the lack of "explicit communist undertones" in her fiction, the author can nevertheless be placed "along the spectrum of liberal viewpoints" (101). Welty's Black working folk characters reveal a "deeply empathetic imagination," and her white characters articulate a politics of fear and desire. Welty's fiction communicates the "unsettling feelings of racial segregation," an accomplishment with "farreaching implications for larger studies of southern modernism and black radical traditions" (135).

Noting Toni Morrison's observation that Welty's approach to African-American characters in her fiction is "not patronizing, not romanticizing" but "the way they should be written about," Taylor shows that Welty's story "A Worn Path" shares imagery with Paul Laurence Dunbar's anti-lynching poem "Haunted Oak" and Richard Wright's short story "Bright and Morning Star" (107). The "white terrorism" of characters like Mrs. Larkin in "A Curtain of Green," who almost killed her yard boy, and the cruelty of the twins Eugene and Ran in "A Shower of Gold" are examples that reveal Welty's representations of the abuse of white power in the Jim Crow South. Using Black female characters, such as Twosie in "Moon Lake," who live in fear of violent white men, Welty questions and reverses the pervasive myth of the Black rapist. By including Welty among...