Guerrillas in the Industrial Jungle: Radicalism's Primitive and Industrial Rhetoric

Examines the metaphors of the “primitive” and the “industrial” in the rhetoric and imagery of anticapitalist American radical and revolutionary movements.

Guerrillas in the Industrial Jungle traces the history of industrial and primitive metaphors in radical American political activism from the 1960s to the present. Focusing on the Black Panther Party; the League of Revolutionary Black Workers; the International Socialists and the Socialist Workers Party in the 1970s; and twenty-first-century anarchists, Ursula McTaggart analyzes the rhetoric and imagery of these groups alongside African American literature from the same time periods. In the poetry of the Black Arts Movement, neoslave narrative novels of the 1970s and 1980s, and black science fiction since 1990, writers both encourage and critique activists, modeling strategies for political speech and highlighting ethical questions radicals should consider. Activists, on the other hand, confront pragmatic conflicts that literature can sidestep, and their language reflects the need for certainty and strategic decision making. Together, African American literature and radical activist texts reveal new ways of sparking ethical social change.