by: Nomi Krasilovsky (winner of the 2006 American Studies Book Prize for Academic Excellence)

Primary advisor: Lois Rudnick

Secondary advisor : Judith Smith

Graduation date: December 2005

Abstract:

This project analyzes leftist woman writer Sanora Babb's formerly underground but now recently published 1930s novel entitled Whose Names are Unknown. Her novel concerns Oklahoma panhandle farmer and dust bowl victim Milt Dunne and his family, who move to California in search of migrant labor only to find that they are unwelcome and denounced as "Okies." I use sources such as Patricia Limerick's The Legacy of Conquest, Donald and James Gregory's American Exodus to examine the Dunne's condition within the historical context of Western agrarianism, the Great Depression and the dust bowl storms, and the condition of Okie migrant workers. The novel, with the assistance of sources such as Barbara Foley's Radical Representations and Deborah Rosenfelt's "From the Thirties: Tillie Olsen and the Radical Tradition," and Babb's short stories "Dry Summer" and "The Dark Earth," is also examined within the cultural context of Babb's life and the literary left, taking into consideration Babb's status as a woman and communist party member. With help from Michael Denning's The Cultural Front, the project begins by reading Whose Names against the similarly plotted, but as I argue quite different "classic" Depression novel, The Grapes of Wrath. Throughout the bulk of the paper I argue that in Whose Names are Unknown Babb provides us with a unique and unexplored account of the Okie migrant experience that challenges dominant cultural assumptions about masculinity, whiteness, and agrarianism. I show that in her novel--which is structured around Milt's movement from silence to articulation, or, his protopolitical status to one of political awareness and action --she overturns the mainstream ideology of Jeffersonian agrarianism and white masculinity in order to chart the emergence of a "new" kind of socially conscious man. That man is located in the character of Milt Dunne's, or, the male Okie's movement from silence towards articulation. I argue that Babb's novel places her within a continuum of leftist women writers like Tillie Olson and Meridel LeSueur, but I also argue that her contribution to leftist literature remains unique. I conclude that in narrating Milt's transformation from a white Plains farmer in crisis to a racialized Okie migrant who subsequently becomes connected in solidarity with his wife and his fellow migrants, Babb articulates the process by which white masculinity can emancipate itself from the oppression of racism and sexism.

Who would be interested in this project:
Anyone with an interest in American labor history, the Okie experience, the Great Depression, American gender history or American leftist women writers would be interested in this project.