'Ain't got no home'

The saga of the displaced southerner who migrated to the North and West fascinated Americans during the 1930s and 1940s, appearing in a variety of texts, from fiction and music to the mass media. My project--the first to compare black and white migration narratives--examines how these texts revised American national identity and participated in a broad social movement that linked economic injustice and racial discrimination. These Depression-era texts reject the American success story, calling into question its myths of progress. They imagine a new national story that encompasses, however tenuously, both black and white Americans. Asserting a connection between migration and consciousness, moreover, these migration narratives show how geographic displacement prompts a radical politics and poetics. Many of these texts are sites of dissent that advance the aims of the working- class and African American social struggles in the aesthetic realm, imagining interracial alliances that counter the historical reality of race relations. Examining the "long civil- rights movement" and its economic dimensions through the lens of culture, Ain't Got No Home probes the link between literary forms and social change. The body of my project consists of four thematic chapters that explore the convergences between black and white migration stories, and the limits to their social visions. The first chapter demonstrates, for example, how the archetypes of the black fugitive slave and white pioneer and outlaw merged, resulting in a somewhat problematic rhetorical reciprocity. Chapters on male hoboes (Chapter Two) and migrant mothers (Chapter Four) probe the gendered dimensions of migration and its radical aesthetics. Female hoboes infiltrated the masculine world of the boxcar dressed as boys, while male hoboes crossed the color line in sex and friendship. In contrast, the domestic space of the migrant mother remains resistant to integration. Finally, in novels of interracial unionism (Chapter Three), geographic displacement brings about a transformation of characters' ways of thinking about race and identity. Working against a racial divide in the study of American migration, Ain't Got No Home uncovers parallels between the fundamental cultural categories of labor and civil rights, region and ethnicity, and black and white.