Does twentieth-century global fiction attempt to intervene in the world? Although Virginia Woolf claimed, in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1924), that a work of great literature should be complete in itself—without requiring that the reader write a check or join a society—these papers suggest literature often demands that its readers take political action. In some cases, it seeks to activate the reader to make changes in the present or fundamentally re-shape the future. In others, it may be invested in the appeal of activism, intentionally or not. From India’s Progressive Writers Association, to South African literature’s competing interests under apartheid, to the American Black Arts Movement, this panel explores the myriad ways in which literature caused action, rather than (or in addition to) merely representing it, suggesting a radical recasting of the role of reading and teaching fiction in the midst of our contemporary crisis of the humanities.

Sarah Cole will present “The Novel as Protest: Anand, Modernism, Progressivism,” part of a larger project whose aim is to construct a theory of the novel as a genre of protest. The book will push back against modernism’s long, deep, ongoing polemic against literature engaging in didacticism, propaganda, simple messaging, or heavy-handedness more generally. What would it look like to see the novel as an agent of overt political activity? For this paper, Cole will look at Mulk Raj Anand as a case in point, whose best-known novel, Untouchable, adheres in many ways to English and Irish modernism and yet whose participation in the newly founded Progressive Writers Association gives a different slant to his work and to the 1930s novel more generally. The PWA challenges modernism on its own ground, calling for writers to be overtly political in their literary efforts. What is most interesting about the case of Untouchable for considering the protest novel is to see how the literary effects of its political goals line it up with a tradition of writing that traverses time and the globe. What matters is not to make it new but to make it happen.

Michaela Bronstein, in “Alex La Guma’s Protest Against the Ordinary,” examines a moment—apartheid South Africa—where the enmeshment between the novel and activism was taken for granted even as debates about the nature of the connection raged furiously. Alex La Guma’s novels were dismissed as simplistic protest literature by critics ranging from Njabulo Ndebele to J. M. Coetzee. Yet if La Guma’s plots may seem to offer clear messages about the evils of the apartheid regime, his language suggests a more complex vision. Ndebele famously argued that South African literature needed to represent ordinary life rather than the overdetermined symbols of protest: La Guma critiques the ordinary as a source of knowledge and experience, offering fiction that trains its readers to see a mismatch between ongoing, everyday life and a richly, ambiguously symbolic landscape that can’t be matched to the political exigencies of the moment. La Guma’s representations of activists align them with literary language and non-realist form, as out of place in the ordinary, social present, in service of a vision of collectivity to come in a future beyond apartheid. By marrying the apparent moral clarity of protest plotting to various types of formal complexity, La Guma suggests that literariness itself represents the allure, and the risks, of activism.

Finally, Zoë Henry reads Gayl Jones’s Corregidora (1975) as a metamodernist work of activism, where formal density reveals the action the novel implicitly asks readers to undertake in the world. In “Making Generations: Gayl Jones and the Challenge of Memory” Henry reads Jones’s text in conversation with, and as an extension of, Nella Larsen’s 1920s oeuvre. Here, Ursa Corregidora is prevented from “making generations” to document the crimes of her ancestral slaveowner, who repeatedly raped her mother and grandmother and fathered their children. In the opening scene of the novel, Ursa’s husband pushes her down the stairwell, resulting in her hysterectomy. If the action that Corregidora proposes is already foreclosed, then it is up to the reader to manifest that ancestral record in our own communities and lived experience—to “make the generations” Ursa cannot. It is no coincidence, Henry suggests, that Nella Larsen’s Passing and Quicksand were being resurfaced by Black feminist scholars such as Deborah McDowell in the very period in which Corregidora was written: its own form of Black feminist activism rooted in intellectual memory.