Introduction Eve Dunbar and Ayesha K. Hardison; Part I. Productive Precarity and Literary Realism: 1. Black excesses and deprivations in literature and photography of the 1930s Sharon Lynette Jones; 2. Arna Bontemps and black literary archives Emily Lutenski; 3. Black women's 1930s protest fiction Jennifer D. Williams; Part II. New Deal, New Methodologies: 4. Folklore, folk life and ethnography in African American Writing of the 1930s Robin Lucy; 5. New deal discourses J. J. Butts; 6. Black theatre archives and the making of a black dramatic tradition Kate Dossett; Part III. Cultivating (New) Black Readers: 7. Racial representation and the performance of 1930s African American literary history John Edgar Tidwell; 8. 1930s black print cultures Shawn Anthony Christian; Part IV. International, Black and Radical Visions: 9. Democracy unfinished: African Americans writing 'Africa' Nicole A. Waligora-Davis; 10. Langston Hughes and the 1930s: From Harlem to the USSR Cynthia Davis and Verner D. Mitchell; 11. Communism and African American literature in the great depression Nathaniel Mills.