In February 1933, a group of radical artists in Los Angeles called the Bloc of Mural Painters transported a collection of works to the John Reed Club office in Hollywood, where they were due to present their first exhibition. Before the event could take place, the city's Red Squad – a special force targeting organizations of working-class militancy and socialist politics – raided the building and broke up a gathering of Japanese American communists. Among the paintings seized and mutilated during the raid was one depicting the Scottsboro Nine: young African American men and boys falsely accused of raping two white women on a train in Alabama. This painting, Elizabeth Sine tells us in her illuminating new book Rebel Imaginaries, was defaced in an especially meaningful manner: with bullet holes in the foreheads and groins of the black male figures.
This anecdote is one of many striking stories revealed by Sine in a work of immense archival depth and humane sensitivity. It also sheds light on what is most memorable and significant about her work, which delicately weaves together discussions of class and race, art and protest, violence and dignified – even joyful – resistance. In six chapters, Sine makes a series of significant historiographic contributions that enhances our understanding of Depression-era protest in California – a state where, Sine convincingly argues, many of the era's tensions played out most dramatically and consequentially.
The book draws out three central features of California's protest culture in the Depression years: multiracialism, internationalism, and surrealism. As a site of overlapping migratory circuits traversed by labourers from the US South and Midwest, Mexico, Japan, the Philippines, and beyond, working-class protest in California took on a thoroughly cosmopolitan character. For the same reasons, workers in the state articulated solidarities and built communities that were both more local and more global than narratives of 1930s Americanism typically permit. Finally, the grassroots cultural networks that enlivened proletarian life in the state married political and aesthetic rebellion in a countercultural movement that Sine designates surrealist.
These central themes are discussed in relation to a wide variety of historical struggles, Californian locales, and social contexts. The first two chapters focus on the renegotiation of workers’ identities amid major industrial disputes in Imperial Valley and San Francisco Bay. These chapters illustrate the convergence of multiple radical traditions in 1930s California, the forging of an increasingly multiracial oppositional culture, and the possibilities for rearticulating masculinity through collective struggle. The following pair of chapters engage with working-class protest beyond the point of production. Sine explores the development of new conceptions of citizenship as Mexicans and Filipinx communities responded to escalating repatriation programmes, and then moves to the electoral arena with a focus on Upton Sinclair's insurgent End Poverty in California gubernatorial campaign. The final chapters draw the discussion of California's political culture toward local histories of art and music, with rich discussions of muralism and jazz in Los Angeles and the Round Valley Reservation.
Sine's contributions here are numerous and substantial. Rebel Imaginaries dwells upon and sympathetically recovers the sense of immense possibility that accompanied the dire poverty of the early Depression years. Sine regards the corporatist resolution of that crisis with suspicion, emphasizing the rich political possibilities that were buried by the emerging social settlement. Sine also insists that we look beyond competing versions of Americanism in the New Deal era, bearing witness to the multiple levels and forms of community that were built at the grass roots of struggle and cultural production in California. And in the especially original final chapter, Sine insists on the centrality of California's Indian population both to its capitalist development and to its culture of resistance.
There are nevertheless aspects of the book which reveal unresolved tensions: some productive, others frustrating. Sine frames their subject repeatedly in terms of a politics of dignity and autonomy, situated in opposition both to a homogeneous national community and to ‘a unifying class-based agenda’ (202). Instead of conceiving of class as precisely a terrain on which multiple struggles cohere, Sine counterposes class unity to cultural and experiential diversity. Equally, Sine's deployment of “surrealism” to describe seemingly any mode of artistic expression that is connected to an expanding sense of social and political possibility is at times a little too stretched to contain real analytical power.
These conceptual problems hardly diminish the achievement that the book represents, however. Indeed, Sine's work invites exciting dialogue, especially around this potentially rich redefinition of surrealism. It is fitting that a book so invested in recovering historical possibilities should prove so likely to clear new routes for scholars of labour and culture in the twentieth-century US.
