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Chapter 4 considers how the US lecture tour provided the expatriate author Gertrude Stein with a chance to reacquaint herself with her native country. The media blitz that accompanied Stein’s 1934–5 tour—she made regular stops for photo ops, book signings, and radio interviews—has prompted critics to examine the way Americans saw Stein as a 1930s celebrity. This chapter is more interested, though, in the way Stein saw America, examining in particular her role as a social documentarian during one of the lowest points in the Great Depression. It specifically analyzes the way she developed a public lecturing practice invested as much in documenting her audiences as it was in speaking to them. It then goes on to compare her lecture-tour memoir, Everybody’s Autobiography, to the state and regional guidebooks being produced at that time by the New Deal’s Work Progress Administration (WPA) to reveal how these two forms of 1930s documentary come together in their renewed belief in the American collective. Finally, the many points of overlap between Stein’s memoir and WPA documentaries become an occasion to question previous readings of the author’s late 1930s politics, which have typically portrayed Stein as a stalwart social conservative.

The opening section of this chapter contains 2,500 words from my published Textual Practice article as the definitions of allegory from Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama are crucial to my discussion of allegory and to the Trauerspiel as a critical framework for my monograph as a whole. I do, however, apply Benjamin’s theory to a very different argument here, moving away from the traditional use of allegory as it appears in the journal essay and towards a modern reinterpretation of the baroque original and its peculiar relevance to a modern commodified society. The connection between allegory and commodification is also a significant one for Barnes in her novel Nightwood, and I will argue that this relationship can be used to explain many of the text’s difficult references to value, price and its most puzzling character, Jenny Petherbridge. The objects within the modern court of allegory are degraded, forgotten, and the context in which they vie for attention is above all destructive, connected to the baroque through the Trauerspiel’s instruments of torture and murder. This section will also examine Nightwood’s character Dr. O’Connor as a modern incarnation of the baroque allegorist in his den.

This chapter describes the New Negro Movement that flourished following World War I. In the context of the rise of political organizations like the NAACP, Garveyism, in addition to vibrant arts and cultural communities, and print culture, Lift Every Voice and Sing became both an inspiration and a touchpoint for the expression and expansion of African American identity.

This chapter expands on the ideas of the late Levy Institute scholar, Hyman Minsky, to show how the financial crisis is attributed to flaws in the constitution of the current financial structure. Papadimitriou traces the emergence of “money manager capitalism,” which characterizes our current economy with its higher level of uncertainty due to the dominant role played by mutual funds, high leverage and pension funds hungry for higher returns that systematically underprice risk. This system was prone to a “Minsky moment,” the rapid debt deflation that we witnessed in 2008. After highlighting the history and shortcoming of this iteration of capitalism, the author concludes that austerity measures are the wrong medicine for the current situation. What is needed is a return to Keynesianism in the form of reinvigorating fiscal expansion to combat anemic growth and high unemployment.

This chapter tracks Finland’s rise from a low-cost to high-cost shipping country from the 1930s to 1980s. It emphasises the rapid transition and development of Finland’s economy by providing statistics on Finnish shipping expenses and wages, considering tonnage losses during the World Wars; discussing both The Great Depression and The Great Boom; and following the modernisation of tonnage from the 1950s.

This chapter introduces the formation of the United Africa Company and explains actions taken to secure shipping space. It discusses Elder Dempster and other merchants and organisations’ reactions to the changes made by the Company in the declining economic climate. It also discusses The Great Depression after 1929 and the resulting sharp decline in shipping activity and West African trade, which was in part contributed to by the breakdown in the financial organisation of the Royal Mail Group. The chapter ends with a description of Lord Kylsant’s failings, downfall, and eventual conviction but focuses on Elder Dempster’s relationship with the United Africa Company, and analyses the disagreements and negotiations made between the two.

The crisis has its origins in part in the ‘high theory’ provided by mainstream economists, who have helped to create the perception that a deregulated financial market could be an instrument of market efficiency, failing to emphasize the ways in which it could be instead a source of systemic instability. Economists generally failed to understand the significance of the micro-structure of a financialized market economy and therefore the origins of the current crisis. Although bearing some similarities with previous crises, the recent financial crisis was different in having at its core the epistemic confusion generated by complex and often ill-defined instruments. Economists can play a constructive role in future discussions on economic policy, beginning with a recognition that they have recently failed to serve the public interest.