在马克思主义中，无产阶级的概念指的是衣衫褴褛的群众、社会边缘的局外人、流浪者和罪犯，他们在政治上几乎没有用处或毫无用处。但在《衣衫褴褛的革命者》一书中，纳撒尼尔·米尔斯（Nathaniel Mills）认为，在大萧条期间，共产主义左翼的黑人作家所形成的一种被忽视但充满活力的非裔美国人马克思主义模式中，无产阶级是核心。
通过分析这一时期的多部已出版和未出版的作品，米尔斯展示了理查德·赖特、拉尔夫·埃里森和玛格丽特·沃克是如何利用无产阶级来想象新形式的革命知识和机构的。在他们的作品中，流浪汉横行霸道，罪犯争先恐后地入不敷出，英勇的黑人亡命之徒，以及从无产阶级中跌落到社会边缘的个人，都为思考如何抵制资本主义、父权制和吉姆·克劳的剥削提供了素材。《衣衫褴褛的革命者》将无产阶级引入文学研究，为马克思主义在非裔美国文学和政治中的地位提供了新的解释，并阐明了三位主要现代黑人作家的政治和美学承诺。
Ragged Revolutionaries: The Lumpenproletariat and African American Marxism in Depression-Era Literature
In Marxism, the concept of the lumpenproletariat refers to the masses in rags, outsiders on the edge of society, drifters and criminals, of little or no use politically. But in Ragged Revolutionaries, Nathaniel Mills argues that the lumpenproletariat was central to an overlooked yet vibrant mode of African American Marxism formulated during the Great Depression by black writers on the Communist left.
By analyzing multiple published and unpublished works from the period, Mills shows how Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Margaret Walker used the lumpenproletariat to imagine new forms of revolutionary knowledge and agency. In their writings, hobos riding the rails, criminals hustling to make ends meet, heroic black folk-outlaws, and individuals who fall out of the proletariat into the social margins all furnish material for thinking through resistance to the exploitations of capitalism, patriarchy, and Jim Crow. Ragged Revolutionaries introduces the lumpenproletariat into literary study, offers a new account of the place of Marxism in African American literature and politics, and clarifies the political and aesthetic commitments of three major modern black writers.
OR
