UC Berkeley

During the 1930s, artists from the US responded to the period’s social locations of crisis through a remarkable range of cultural forms. The New Deal state and the culture industries played a significant role in amplifying many of these forms, including mass-market literature, documentary photography, and film. This collision between historical crisis, capitalist cultural production, and New Deal liberalism produced a number of discrete cultural formations during the Great Depression. With few notable exceptions, however, scholarly literature about US-American cultural history tends to marginalize “the Thirties,” treating it as an exceptional interlude, a period of cultural production that creates a curious gap in literary historiography between the transition from “high modernism” to “postmodernism.” My dissertation addresses this historiographic problem in the literature by mapping the form and function of popular culture in the Great Depression through the grapes of wrath cultural formation and by illuminating connections between popular culture and crisis.

This project explores the emergence of the grapes of wrath cultural formation during the Great Depression in order to unravel contradictions between popular culture forms, the democratic liberal state, and capitalist ideology. It analyzes popular culture texts by John Steinbeck, Américo Paredes, Gregg Toland, and Hugh Hammond Bennett, among others, that map all too familiar social locations of crisis: economic collapse, ecological catastrophe, and racial anxiety. I analyze the grapes of wrath cultural formation’s bestselling novels and recovered literary texts, its Hollywood blockbusters and state-sponsored documentaries, its popular-press photography, journalism, and lost government archives. Through this analysis, I assert that popular culture’s overwhelming response to the Dust Bowl eco-crisis and the mass migration it produced during the Great Depression in fact established a major cultural formation in the American popular imagination that previous scholars have overlooked or misread. By combining insights from cultural studies, literary theory, and subaltern studies, this project maps the radical edge of the 1930’s popular imagination.

This investigation also demonstrates that the grapes of wrath cultural formation did not die at the end of the Great Depression, but has continued to occupy and unsettle the US popular imagination of crisis diachronically over the past eighty years, ultimately uncovering the US cultural imagination’s twenty-first century return to the aesthetic forms and social locations of the Great Depression’s grapes of wrath cultural formation. The apocalyptic environmental crisis of the Dust Bowl has been scaled up to the apocalypse always of twenty-first century climate change. The logic of neoliberalism and late capital have normalized catastrophic economic collapse and facilitated billion-dollar corporate welfare packages, even as both logics continue to dismantle the social safety net originally established by the New Deal. The Dust Bowl’s racialized crisis of migratory labor in California’s factories in the field (which was met in the 1930s with reactionary vigilante violence and homegrown “Gunkist” fascism in the Golden State) has grown to monstrous proportions and produced horrifying results, ultimately creating migrant concentration camps in the US-Mexico Borderlands. By connecting the Great Depression, the Great Recession, contemporary migrant struggles in the Borderlands, and the Green New Deal through the grapes of wrath cultural formation, Culture in Crisis reads popular culture symptomatically from Steinbeck’s age to our own as evidence of unhealed wounds on the body-politic of the nation in order to reclaim popular culture as a potential site of resistance against our present, late capitalist event horizon of permanent crisis.