on one side, and the alliances between communist internationalism and cultural
nationalism, on the other.These would have included the forms of culturalcon-
tact thatgaverise to abrief proletarian moment in the United Statesand Latin
America (e.g.,inMexico) after the October Revolution and setoff proletarian
wavesthroughout East Asia (e.g.,inKorea,Japan, China).⁶In the United States,
the flourishing of proletarian art and literature duringthe Great Depression and
the PopularFront contributedto what Michael Denning has calledacultural
front and examined as part ofabroader progressive,democratic massculture.⁷
In Mexico, the designation“proletarian”playedakeyrole in the desired conver-
gence of folk and class culturethat,among other things, aligned the project of
revolutionwith the fight for national independence and indigenousautonomy.
In several Asian countries,the proletarian moment broughttogether socialist,
nationalist,and anticolonial movementsthat,fromaEuropean perspective,
complicatethe convenient binaries of national vs. international, socialist vs.
populist,leftwingvs. rightwing,modernvs. traditional, and so forth. Compara-
tive perspectiveswouldgo along wayinidentifying the unique qualities of pro-
letarian modernism, including such peculiar phenomenaasthe proletarian pas-
toral or the proletarian grotesque. The global configurations of culturalleftism
could also provide points of comparison for how and whythe relationship of So-
cial Democracytothe bourgeois heritageconstituted the greatest strength as well
as the greatest weakness of the German workers’movement.
Keeping these largerquestions and wider connections in mind,TheProletar-
ianDreamopenswith earlysociological studies that set out to explain the pre-
sumed threats emanating from the modern massesand continues with the Marx-
The references aretoJamesF. Murphy,TheProletarian Moment: TheControversyoverLeftism
in Literature(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991); BarbaraC. Foley,Radical Representa-
tions:Politics andForm inU.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929– 1941 (Durham, NC: DukeUniv ersity
Press, 1993); ElizabethJ. Perry and LiXun,Proletarian Power: Shanghai in the CulturalRevolution
(Boulder,CO: Westview,1997); Mark Steinberg,Proletarian Imagination: Self,Modernity,and the
Sacred in Russia, 1910– 1925 (Ithaca, NY:CornellUniversity Press,2002); Samuel Perry,Recasting
RedCultureinProletarianJapan: Childhood,Korea, and the HistoricalAvant-garde(Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press,2014); Heather Bowen-Struyk&Norma Field, eds.,ForDignity,Jus-
tice, and Revolution:An AnthologyofJapanese Proletarian Literature(Chicago:University of Chi-
cagoPress,2015);SunyoungPark,TheProletarianWave: Literatureand Leftist CultureinColonial
Korea, 1910– 1945 (Cambridge:HarvardUniversity Press,2015); andJohn Lear,Picturing the Pro-
letariat, Artists and Labor in RevolutionaryMexico,1908– 1940 (Austin: University ofTexas Press,
2017).
See Michael Denning,TheCultural Front: The Laboring of American Cultureinthe Twentieth
Century(London:Verso, 1998). The continuities between socialist and populist imaginaries
and their shared recourse to the discourse of the people will be examined in greaterdetail in
the secondvolumeonTheWorkers’States.
Introduction 9