This talk seeks to reopen the debate on the origins of present political crisis from a perspective different from a focus on 1989, 9/11, or 2008 and through the reclamation of subjugated knowledge as an insurrectionary presence. The decade of the 1940s, seething with social contradictions and half-buried class conflict, is critical for shaping our own world of eviscerated trade unions, liberal antagonism toward the Far Left, betrayed struggles of Black Liberation, and disenchantment with utopian visions.

The work of the African American gay Noir novelist Willard Motley, and other radicals, will allow us to probe the little-understood Marxist presence in the era’s famously doomed, malevolent, dark culture of fiction and film.