Social media engagement means losing and finding oneself on a sea of disparate and divergent rhythms, which in this chapter is taken as both material condition and metaphor for the mixture of playful surprise and persistent dread that characterizes the digital dimension of contemporary Black life in the United States. This chapter reads together a collection of technologies, digital and nondigital texts, and memory to explore how contemporary Black social media protest draws on and extends legacies of Black textual play.

Chapter 1 sets the scene for contemporary slave narratives, including comparisons to historic slave narratives. The chapter argues that a failure to look at the lessons of the past in the gathering and representation of narratives has limited the capacity for narratives to be employed effectively today. In this chapter, it is argued that different approaches to interview methods and narrative representation are an important step in reconfiguring the way narratives are gathered for the purposes of abolition and survivor growth. The chapter explores the means by which contemporary narratives are gathered and presented, the roles and responsibilities of the interviewer and listener, and examine present challenges to the credibility of survivor accounts. It moves on to explore the power that narratives have for survivors and the value of adopting interview methods that enable rich testimony, to inform policy, and which allow for the intellectual and emotional growth of survivors.

This chapter identifies the US Communist left as a major influence on African American writers and activists during the 1930s. Black writers who began their careers during the Depression era often sought to distinguish themselves from the Harlem Renaissance of the previous decade, and the Communist left furnished a political and literary discourse, as well as sustaining institutional support, that enabled Black writers to pioneer a distinctive practice of politics and art. The chapter analyzes the reasons why Black writers were drawn to the Communist movement, and outlines the Communist-backed organizations and causes that inspired African Americans in the decade. Through a reading of work by Richard Wright, Eugene Gordon, Margaret Walker, Theodore Ward, Ralph Ellison, and others, the chapter identifies the complex dialectic of Black cultural particularity and Marxist theory that distinguishes the literary output of 1930s African American writers on the left.