The book’s Introduction addresses the ways in which the notion of crisis functions conceptually to name not only moments of economic and cultural rupture, which become normalized within capitalist modernity, but also moments of epistemological doubt, when the taken-for-granted relationship between language and the social is called into question and subjected to critique. The Depression represented not only a breakdown of the smooth functioning of modernity and its market-based social organization, but also a parallel breakdown in a collective investment in the idea that language can represent the social, as language came to be regarded with suspicion for its role in perpetuating forms of commodification and appropriation associated with a crisis-ridden modernity. In response to this crisis, poetic language was forced to reconfigure its relationship to a society that was itself always in flux. The book’s Introduction thus establishes a basis for its survey of a broad cross-section of the poetic idioms associated with the Depression as both critiques of the idea of market modernity as a progressive, developmentalist force, and efforts to shore up language’s efficacy as a social and cultural form.

Chapter 2 highlights the understudied literary genre of the memoir. I focus on the writings of the peripatetic activist-intellectual Manabendra Nath ‘M.N.’ Roy. Exploring his diverse engagements with early twentieth-century Black radicalism in the United States and anticolonialism in Mexico, the Soviet Union, China, and Germany, my reading of Memoirs ‘1964’ illuminates how literary form negotiates the politics of anticolonial internationalism. Roy contributed to the debates of the Communist International, famously differing with Vladimir Lenin on the “National and Colonial Questions.” Roy also posited the imbrication of race and caste through his critique of cultural nationalism in India. An icon of the interwar era, Roy’s formulations in India in Transition ‘1922’ complicate both Euro-American universalism and the influential paradigm of decoloniality that favors postcolonial nationalism in terms of its cultural difference from the West.