"Speeding Ahead The Red and Open West”: American Modernism’s Communist Periphery in the Core

In what follows, I explore how American modernists imagine post-capitalist futures through poetic forms that encode geopolitical peripheries and semi-peripheries within the imperial American core. Scholars of world-systems theory and critical geography have attended with nuance to the uneven development of literary forms and capital-imperial expansion in the global peripheries. What happens when we bring these critical energies, which charge the contact points between core and periphery, to the interior of the core itself? In doing so we pursue a historical path blazed by artists and organizers who confronted the uneven developments constitutive of, and nourished by, the formation of the American nation-state itself. The sovereignty struggles and revolutionary nationalisms produced by settler colonialism and chattel slavery have resulted in rich and complex accounts of “internal colonization”; a concept African-American Communist Harry Haywood would elaborate in 1948, pre-dating and anticipating Pablo Casanova’s and Rodolfo Stravenhagen’s well-known contributions to spatial studies of social power.[1] The demands by Black and Indigenous people for justice, autonomy, and the restoration of lands shape the combined and uneven developments that structure the spatial terrain of the American interior. These political struggles co-determine antagonisms between core, periphery, and semi-periphery along with other economic and political factors, including: capital’s spatial fixes for devaluation, racialized and gendered migrations into and out of urban cores, shifting futures markets in agricultural land, and expansion/contraction patterns in manufacturing regions, among others. 

Emancipatory projects shape internal core-periphery relations in ways that are often interdependent with emancipatory projects that shape external core-periphery relations. For American modernists with anti-capitalist commitments, the interior periphery operates as a site where residual and emergent forms of resistance fuse together in a formal process that reconceives the rural, the westward, and the southerly as sites of anticipatory communisms, thereby extending and transforming the communist projects in early twentieth-century global semi-peripheries like the USSR. In the case studies below, I explore how Richard Wright’s understudied “Transcontinental” (1936) and Muriel Rukeyser’s more oft-treated The Book of the Dead (1938) feature forms and structures whose kinetics sweep low and left from their origin points in the core corridor of New York-Washington D.C. This focus on just two texts reflects space constraints:; In fact, the American periphery was broadly generative for many other modernists’ literary forms, solidaristic efforts, and political imaginaries; see, for example, the work of Sterling A. Brown, Sol Funaroff, Langston Hughes, Lorine Niedecker, Tillie Olsen, and William Carlos Williams. 

World-systems accounts of uneven and unequal development and critical geographies of social space have clear critical advantages over the regionalist framing that often characterizes the spatial genres of American literature; the static categories of the “South” and the “West” cultivate an ideology of space where cultural and political characteristics align with defined, unshifting spatial borders and contours. “Regionalizing” the peripheries in the American core empties them of contradiction, struggle, and dynamic social and developmental processes, and yields aesthetic abstractions of rural or residual spaces (e.g. pastoral; gothic). By contrast, the materialist intensity and spatial rigor of the concept of combined and uneven development, integrated with an attention to the political internationalism that animated modernists’ political visions, opens up a new spatial history of modernist forms. 

“Transcontinental” and Peripheral Futures

Richard Wright’s novels are characterized by their spectacular, granular buildouts of the social world. In these narrative works, Wright finds realism, naturalism, and surrealism each by themselves wanting, moving him to create original amalgams of the three. Despite this innovative drive, and despite having frequently published formally diverse poems in Communist and Communist-adjacent organs, Wright remains insufficiently recognised as an experimentalist, avant-gardist, or poet. Below, however, we find that Wright’s poetics extend across the uneven landscapes of the American interior, registering a geographically contoured political consciousness.

“Transcontinental,” which appeared in International Literature in 1936, incorporates a dizzying and recognizably modernist array of formal strategies in its surrealist-maximalist representation of an insurgent cross-America road trip whose chief figurative vehicle is a cosmically-sized automobile large enough to hold the entirety of the immiserated working-class and indigenous population.[2] The poem’s dedication, “For Louis Aragon, in praise of Red Front,” announces its affinity with Aragon’s 1931 Communist surrealist poem, whose militancy earned him prosecution by the state as well as a robust defense from an international community of surrealist writers, including, notably, Caribbean surrealist poets living in Paris. Indeed one of those Caribbean writers, Étienne Léro, wrote a poem entitled “S.O.S.,” whose phonic experiments adapt and extend Aragon’s sound and typographical acrobatics. In Aragon’s poem, “U.S.S.R” is orthographically distended and palindromed, a testament to Aragon’s own adaptation and extension of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s 1918 “Left March.”[3] The sources and transformations of Aragon’s poem move in geographical patterns that defy core to periphery dissemination models of world literary production. Incubated in the tectonic chafe of an unevenly developed revolutionary Russia, adapted by surrealist writers in the French core, and further transformed by anti-imperialist writers of the colonial periphery living in the Parisian core, “Red Front” would find its way to Richard Wright in the United States mostly likely through E. E. Cummings’s 1933 translation. 

Extending the internationalist networks crosshatching the work to which it is dedicated, “Transcontinental” moves in, between, and towards, peripheries in its search for post-capitalist futures. The poem substitutes car for rail in its cross-country journey, stitching together internal peripheries in the automobile’s westward movement, retracing the arc of the transcontinental railroad’s settler colonial pathway and investing it with new, revolutionary content. The poem opens with a geography corrugated by class conflict:

Th[r]ough trembling waves of roadside heat

We see the cool green of golf courses

Long red awnings catching sunshine

Slender rainbows curved above spirals of water

Swaying hammocks slung between trees–

Like in the movies . . .

America who built this dream.[4]

This ruling class landscape, with its inaccessible leisure space and mastery over nature, finds its representational corollary in the culture industry (“Like in the movies . . .”). The poem interrupts this unperturbed patina to ask “who built this dream”; this investigation requires that a “car is commandeered” (52), which will transport the immiserated insurrectionaries through the American interior. Soon thereafter, a closet drama stages an exchange between the poem’s proletarian speakers, who collectivize the lyric, and white supremacists, who function as the voice of capital:

What kind of a growl does your gut make when meal-time comes 

At night your hips can learn how soft the pavements are

Oh let’s do it the good old American way

Sportsmanship Buddy Sportsmanship

But dear America’s a free country

Did you say Negroes

Oh I don’t mean NEEEGROOOES 

After all

Isn’t there a limit to everything

You wouldn’t want your daughter 

And they say there’s no GOD

And furthermore it’s simply disgraceful how they’re discriminating

against the children of the rich in Soviet schools

PROLETERIAN CHILDREN (53)

The elongated consonance of “UNITED FRONT—SSSTRIKE” (53–56) punctuates the poem throughout, linking workers’ labor actions with the orthographic pre-history of Aragon’s poem in Mayakovsky’s insurgent semi-periphery of the USSR. As the poem drives forward, “The pavement drops into the past The future smites our face /America is ours / 10 15 20 30” and “WOORKERSWOORKERS” board the car.[5] The car now begins its geographical sweep, heading into the future and passing the following cities and areas in its path: New England, Hudson River, Manhattan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, through “farms” that are “a storm of green,” to Washington, where the car “vault[s]” over

. . . Washington’s Monument 

Leaping desks of Senators Ending all bourgeois elections

Hurdling desks of Congressmen Fascist flesh sticking to our tires

Skidding into the White House Leaving a trail of carbon monoxide

for the President

Rearing into the  East Room  Going straight  through  Lincoln’s 

portrait Letting the light of history through (54) 

before “Swinging Southward Plunging the radiator into the lynch-mob / Giving no warning.” We then “Look back” to “See the tiny threads of our tires leaving hammer and / sickle prints upon the pavement” and the East is retroactively transformed from a space of conspicuous consumption into a “tree-lined horizon” with “Fields ripe as our love.” Revolutionary hope flourishes in this re-peripheralized East, but such transformation requires a simultaneous westward vision:

See the eastern sky See the white clouds of our hope

See the blood-red afterglow in the west Our memory of October

See See See the pretty cottages the bungalows the sheltered homes

See the packing-box cities the jungles the huts

See See See the skyscrappers [sic] the clubs the pent-houses

See the bread-lines winding winding winding long as our road (54–55)

The “blood-red” west acts as a peripheral future anterior: the color symbolizes at once revolutionary militancy, the violence of settler colonialism, and a re-indigenized land. This vision is authorized by the memory of the October Revolution, which is both and neither East and/nor West as the car moves across the North American continent. The periphery in the core aligns with the revolutionary Russian semi-periphery, revealing the class content of the landscape; cities of the houseless are formally fungible with the living spaces of the colonial periphery, and the “packing-box” is in catalog with “jungles” and “huts.”

The road continues southwest through Kentucky and then further south to Tennessee, before its recursion north “Into Ohio / Into the orchards of Michigan,” and then once again south-westward “Over the rising and falling dunes of Indiana / Across Illinois’ glad fields of dancing corn.” Ebullient indigenous crops animate the fields before the automobile enters the midwestern core: “Slowing for the heart of proletarian America / CHICAGO—100 MILES / WOORKERSWOORKERS” (55). Chicago is the core nestled in the periphery, arrived at only by way of the periphery; it is also the proletarian, and geophysical, center of the transcontinental expanse. The poem continues, rushing towards repair and restitution of indigenous lands, as it toggles vertiginously south, north, and west, “Picking up speed to measure the Mississippi . . . Plowing the richness of Iowa soil . . . Making Minnesota Taking the Dakotas Carrying Nebraska / On on toward the Badlands the Rockies the deserts the Golden / Gate” (56). The final passenger, “Pocahuntus,” boards:

Slowing once again Comrades Slowing to right a wrong

Say You Red Men You Forgotten Men 

Come out from your teepees

Show us Pocahuntus For we love her

Bring her from her hiding place Let the sun kiss her eyes

Drape her in a shawl of red wool Tuck her in beside us

Our arms shall thaw the long cold of her shoulders (56)

Replacing disease-ridden blankets with a protective red “shawl,” this ecstatic restoration of memory and land, together with a proletarian seizure of state power, converge with the alignment of the west of the West with the Russian semi-periphery, initiating “Cities breed[ing] soviets” and “Plains sprout[ing] collective farms” (56–57). The poem’s mutual mediation of struggles for liberation in the United States with communist internationalism generates a revolutionary simultaneity in which peripheral futures flood together. Decoupling the freedom of movement from settler expansionism and by extension, from its temporal-narrative corollary of manifest destiny, the poem embraces and centers the interstitial and the indigenous. As a result, it encodes American spatial terrain in angular, dynamic fashion, reconceiving the residual as emergent. The politics of solidarity, in contrast to arid comparative or analogical heuristics, drive the global compressions of Wright’s figurations and forms. The poem thusly preserves the historical specificity of the American settler colonial interior while also building out revolutionary alliances across very different scales and national iterations of unevenness. 

The Book of the Dead: Semi-peripheral Panoramic Vision

The constitutive antagonism between core and periphery produces further spatial divisions; semi-peripheries proliferate and incubate new zones of negotiation, contest, and revolution. Animated by these energies, the semi-periphery emerges as a key site of textual production. Born in flames by old and new Cold Wars, these semi-peripheral spaces multiply apace with modernities and modernisms. However, as much as the semi-periphery emerges as a spatial category to name the regions situated in the context of Cold War antagonisms, it also gives expression to regional buffer zones in the American interior, distinct and semi-permanent fringe spaces produced by uneven developmental interactions of urban and rural. In the latter case, the semi-periphery functions as both spatial and political category; it is the space and time of transition, where the future is yet unwritten. As we will see, for Muriel Rukeyser, the semi-periphery is the site of both the defeat and resurrection of John Brown, who is at once tenor and vehicle of an enduring abolitionist, anti-capitalist past and possible future. My treatment of Rukeyser’s poem is brief and targeted, aimed at drawing out a rich textual site that points to the widespread nature of the spatial imaginary exemplified by Wright’s atlas of migration, movement, and expansion. 

Like Wright’s “Transcontinental,” Rukeyser’s condensed epic The Book of the Dead moves longitudinally and laterally, from urban centers of the north to rural sites of struggle southward. Also, like Wright’s poem, Rukeyser’s renovates the content of the form of settler colonialism’s westward manifest destiny into a communist arc that resurrects a history of resistance in peripheralized spaces. The Book of the Dead’s eponymous concluding section returns us to West Virginia to make present the abolitionist and labor struggles of the past, before a final transatlantic orientation to semaphores issuing from anti-fascist struggles in Spain. 

A second-person voice opens the poem, exhorting “you,” the traveler who takes the “road” “Past your tall central city’s influence,” to “Select the mountains, follow rivers back / travel the passes. Touch West Virginia . . .” Experienced readers of the poem know that we are moving toward the site of the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel mining disaster, where a project for hydroelectric power to electrify the countryside became instead an extractive endeavor yielding profits in silica mining. A majority Black labor force worked digging out silica-rich tunnels without protective equipment or wet drilling, and as a result many died from silicosis of the lungs. In its representation of the West Virginia historical landscape, the poem fuses documentation of the Hawk’s Nest horror, and the racialized labor regimes upon which it relied, with histories of 1) settler colonialism 2) indigenous resistance to settler colonialism and 3) John Brown’s militant abolitionist raid on Harper’s Ferry:

Coming where this road comes, 

flat stones spilled water which the still pools fed.

Kanawha Falls, the rapids of the mind,

fast waters spilling west. 

Found Indian fields, standing low cornstalks left, 

learned three Mohetons planted them; found-land

farmland, the planted home, discovered!

War-born:

The battle at Point Pleasant, Cornstalk’s tribes

last stand, Fort Henry, a revolution won,

the granite SITE OF THE precursor EXECUTION

sabres, apostles OF JOHN BROWN LEADER OF THE 

War’s brilliant cloudy RAID AT HARPERS FERRY.[6]

The capitalist modernization project in West Virginia, and the extinguishing of workers’ lives that accompanied that project, initiates the poem’s presentation of historical precursors, struggles, and defeats materially inscribed into the land. The poem’s figurations of both the possibilities and immiserations produced by the hydroelectric works shape a representation of West Virginia as an emergent semi-periphery, a space in transition. The dynamism of that transition finds its companions in the energies animating the other political urgencies the poem explores: the imperative for residual abolitionist histories to rise emergent, and the development of a political subject who faces simultaneously westward and eastward, balancing on West Virginia as the transitioning contact point of the two directions. 

In the concluding section of the long poem, we receive “signals” from another rising semi-periphery—anti-fascist Spain—and move further westward in the American interior, deeper into the geography produced by settler colonialism:

flashing new signals from the hero hills

near Barcelona, monuments and powers,

parent defenses.

Before our face the broad and concrete west,

green ripened field, frontier pushed back like river

controlled and dammed (Rukeyser, “Book of the Dead,” 108) 

The text insists on confronting the “fact” of the “concrete west” which is both shaped and cursed (“dammed/damned”) by expansionist power. Both a sober reckoning with this power, and the ability of action and art to resist the boundaries and borders inscribed by “acts” of congress, furnish preconditions for “un-making” the ideology and injury of manifest destiny:

and unmade boundaries of acts and poems,

the brilliant scene between the seas, and standing,

this fact and this disease (108). 

A transformed westward movement emerges in the concluding lines. We retrace the historical movement of settlement through Nevada to California, whose brutal legacy remains in pursuit as we seek new a “beginning” in a land now “peopled with watercourses” (111; 108):

Down coasts of taken countries, mastery,

discovery at one hand, and at the other, 

frontiers and forests,

fanatic cruel legend at our back and

speeding ahead the red and open west,

and this our region, 

desire, field, beginning. Name and road,

communication to these many men, 

as epilogue, seeds of unending love. (110–11)

Akin to “Transcontinental,” whose surrealist vehicle sutured interior periphery (Indigenous; Black; Rural) to exterior semi-periphery (the Soviet Union), The Book of the Dead brings us from interior semi-periphery (West Virginia) to exterior European interior semi-periphery (Spain); textual adjacencies create political proximity across global distance. The “fanatic . . . legend” is the key at once to the legibility of the physical map and to the unhinged genocidal enthusiasms of expansionist nationalism; it both propels and pursues us. The “red” of the “open west” colorizes a landscape where aleatory communism and the restoration of indigenous lands and people are mutually constitutive. From West Virginia to wester regions, the now collective lyric speakers of the poem accelerate into a geography where the periphery is the beginning of history, rather than the future anterior of colonial appetite.

Conclusion

American poets who understood themselves as part of an internationale developed poetics of global solidarities; they married these expansive visions to formal strategies that encoded the shifting tectonics of the core, periphery, and semi-periphery within the United States itself. In doing so, the early twentieth-century American avant-garde strove to capture a spatial imagination from its birthplace in conquest and imperialism. Alive to the rise of revolutions and anti-fascist militancy in the semi-peripheries, their poetic works upended stagist narratives of linear historical time and accorded historical agency to non-core states, regions and peoples. I have endeavored here to show how Richard Wright and Muriel Rukeyser incorporated these new conceptions of time, space, and political capacity into their formal mediations of the American interior’s shifting regional power imbalances and revolutionary energies.