Trump’s election was just one of a global turn rightward. Anti-democratic, illiberal, proto-fascist political movements were gaining ground internationally. Even still, eight years later, the Midwest and the Rust Belt are regarded as at the center and engine of the neo-reactionary and radical right-wing movements today.
By Marc Blanc, Ryan Prewitt, and Simone Sparks
The panelist stood at the front of a large conference room at St. Louis Public Library. A labor organizer with Missouri Workers Center, his topic was Amazon’s use of surveillance against its own employees, whom he was working to unionize. He spoke of infrared cameras that sound an alert when workers move too close to each other, mandatory computer surveys that catalog workers’ speech—brutal new methods of labor discipline. The panelist then asked the horrified audience if anyone’s home was equipped with a Ring camera, a technology and platform owned by Amazon itself. About half of the hands in the room went up, sheepishly. “So it’s not just Amazon,” the organizer said. “We’re surveilling each other.”
The audience featured a large number of artists, scholars, and journalists, all folks writing and creating in and among the left, broadly conceived. Some worked blue-collar jobs at places like Amazon. Nearly all considered themselves anti-capitalists, progressives, or radicals. The members of the audience were, at that moment, conscious of the divergence between their political commitments and their lived political realities. In St. Louis, where the panelists and most of the audience lived, anxieties about property crime facilitate regular moral and political compromises, such as contributing to America’s growing culture of surveillance by purchasing Ring cameras. It was strange how unusual it felt to have honest political reckonings with the places and ways we live.
We organized Aestheticizing Politics / Politicizing Aesthetics: The St. Louis Symposium on Radicalism in U.S. Arts in order to platform exactly these types of reckonings. Seldom, we feel, are activists, organizers, artists, and scholars encouraged to communicate in productive ways with each other about the constraints and possibilities of political movements, and particularly when those movements occupy fringe, dissident, or radical positions with respect to the mainstream. We maintain that the stakes of the present political moment make this type of cross-professional cultural organizing more urgent than ever. Here, we seek to represent the organization and content of our symposium in order to encourage similar efforts that empower leftists and progressives to collaborate and understand each other, regardless of disciplinary boundaries, across the Rust Belt.
Engaging the City
After over a year of planning, the St. Louis Symposium took place on August 23rd and 24th of 2024. The idea for the event was born in the first-ever conversation between the three of us at a St. Louis dive bar in autumn of 2022. As academics invested in the activist potential of our teaching, research, and writing, we had all felt frustrated with the traditional scholarly venues for presenting our work. We weren’t reaching socially diverse audiences, and our own ideas were not benefitting from interaction with people working in different professions. Our ambition quickly developed within moments of meeting: we wanted to bring together, in one room, a wide range of people interested in art and culture’s potential to influence politics. We were confident that attendees would exchange and develop insights about the relationship between art and politics. If we were lucky, new partnerships and collaborations would emerge from the event.
In St. Louis, these matters feel particularly important. The city boasts a rich history of organized class and racial struggle, unfortunately matched by an equally deep record of social division and suppression. The Ferguson Uprisings of 2014-2015 amplified the phrase Black Lives Matter across the world. Before that, St. Louis had produced radical civil rights activists including Percy Green and Ivory Perry and had been host to successful, interracial labor actions such as the 1933 Funsten Nut Strike, organized by Black women employees of the Funsen Nut Company in collaboration with the Communist Party. At the same time, the city remains one of America’s most segregated, and every major people’s uprising here has been met with ruthless police violence. At the time of the Symposium, all three of us worked at local universities which have actively shaped both the liberating and the regressive aspects of the city’s character. To discuss political art exclusively in academic settings, we felt, was to betray our own political ideals and ignore the resources and potential of our city. Assembling community organizers, artists, scholars, and St. Louis residents in one accessible space for both theoretical and practical conversation was both the means and a primary end of the Symposium.
Hosting the Symposium at a location where all citizens feel welcomed was fundamental to the event’s accessibility. The campuses of Washington University in St. Louis and Saint Louis University, our employing institutions, would not fulfill this mission. Washington University (or WashU) possesses a formidable endowment and a wealthy, largely coastal student body which set it apart from the deindustrialized city around it, and the main campus’s fortressed layout only emphasizes the sense of alienation that the school elicits from many St. Louis residents. Saint Louis University, while more socioeconomically diverse than WashU, is still a private, expensive school that attracts students and professionals who don’t have previous ties to the city. While we heavily promoted the Symposium to our students and colleagues at these schools, we resolved to host it at St. Louis Public Library—Schlafly Branch.
The library provided a large meeting room, gallery space, and supportive staff. The library incorporated the Symposium into its daily operations and layout, dedicating shelves to the display of relevant books by political radicals such as Malcolm X and Noam Chomsky. Several library patrons, initially unaware of the Symposium and its commitments, popped into the conference room where the panels were held, some simply asking questions about the event, others staying for an entire panel. Most significantly, the public library offered neutral ground for participants to meet on equal footing. There were no registration or entry fees, no unwritten rules of conduct designed to exclude the properly trained from the uninitiated. At one point in his talk, the labor organizer discussing Amazon’s surveillance tactics asked if he could swear, and the answer, once we ascertained that children were out of earshot, was an enthusiastic and consensus yes.
A two-day event, both evenings of the Symposium concluded with readings from local poets and keynote talks at the independent bookshop Left Bank Books, with refreshments contributed by local brewery Earthbound Beer. Community institutions and local businesses thus provided physical space and sustenance while funding for the event came from our universities. We considered this a fair trade, a way to direct private university capital toward a public event on radical politics. Grants from WashU and SLU went toward paying the honoraria and travel costs of our keynote speakers, commissioning local graphic designers to produce flyers, and covering printing expenses.
The Symposium did not emerge from a vacuum; we found inspiration in recent efforts to connect humanities scholarship to community building across the Rust Belt. The Rust Belt Humanities Lab, with which Belt has partnered and whose workshop two of us attended in 2023, presented a similar model of community/university financial partnership and a dedication to what its founders Katharine Trostel and Valentino Zullo call “emplaced humanities.” Through collaborations such as 2023’s “Superman’s Cleveland” event, which engaged independent bookshops, the Ohio Center for the Book, and the Cleveland Public Library, the Rust Belt Humanities Lab is making good on its promise to “empower teacher-scholars to imagine new models for fostering civic engagement within their rooted context.” Similarly, the Black Midwest Initiative holds a biennial symposium that includes presentations from researchers in addition to community organizers and creative workers, illustrating its commitment to “highlighting the ongoing work people are doing, whether academic, creative, or organizational.” As wealthy universities exercise immense influence over the social and physical terrain of St. Louis and its fellow Rust Belt cities, typically with no input from citizens who lack campus affiliations, it’s invigorating to see this regional energy focused on building more democratic and egalitarian sites of knowledge production and cultural activity.
This is not to say that community-engaged arts and humanities scholarship comes without challenges. Debates over accessibility and the appropriateness of theory and scholarly language in contemporary political movements arose during several panels at the St. Louis Symposium. We also took on myths about Rust Belt radicalism and mined the region’s history of insurgency and activism, recovering a usable past for the contemporary left.
Causing a Scene: Topics of the Symposium
The Symposium featured seven panel sessions. Here, we spotlight two: Studying Understanding, and Researching the Radical Right, and Local and Regional Radicalisms.
In the period following the 2016 election, a series of myths came into being about how and whereby the political momentum behind President-elect Trump’s campaign came into being and succeeded in such surprising ways. Overwhelmingly, the well-meaning American liberal was left flabbergasted by this brazen violation of institutional order. One aspect was regarded as more or less stable: the white, Midwestern working class was to blame. Belt has covered this insistence at length, even citing dread at its ever-pervasiveness– Anne Trubek wrote in 2019 that “the thought of another year of Rust Belt Man think pieces fills me with dread and ennui.” Trump’s election was just one of a global turn rightward. Anti-democratic, illiberal, proto-fascist political movements were gaining ground internationally. Even still, eight years later, the Midwest and the Rust Belt are regarded as at the center and engine of the neo-reactionary and radical right-wing movements today.
The Symposium’s first session addressed the recent rightward turn in the region and beyond. This panel agreed that the contemporary radical right maintains highly effective relationships with art, and the speakers each illuminated a different convention of that relationship. The result was a panel full of surprising insights about the nature of the relationship between art and politics, many of which might run counter to commonly held ideas.
One speaker on this panel was St. Louis-based writer Devin Thomas O’Shea, who analyzed the aesthetic origins of one of the most infamous reactionary movements in American history: the Ku Klux Klan. According to O’Shea’s presentation, the KKK got its start as a fiddle band based regionally in the Midwest. Another panelist was Ph.D. candidate Jess Maginity of the University of Delaware. Maginity addressed the outsized political influence of a little-known, reactionary French novel called The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspeil. Among Raspeil’s range of contemporary political influence is Stephen Miller’s sculpting of the Trump Administration’s immigration policy. Raspeil’s legacy, Maginity argues, is of a novelist who exceeds the political expectations of many of his peers. The third panelist was Noel Adams, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Marquette University. Adams delivered a careful and thorough reading of a major reactionary phenomenon: the disguising of reactionary tracts in self-help volumes. Adams analyzed how the genre practitioner par excellence, Jordan Peterson, relies on narrative structures from the bible as evidence for his political-philosophical claims. Finally, Ryan Prewitt presented on the right wing’s use of protagonicity as a tool for radicalization via the NPC memes of shady sites like 4chan.
This panel wound up being among the event’s most well attended. The panel demonstrated the alternative to the flabbergasted liberal in the face of the rise of the radical right in the late 2010s. Instead, what had gathered was a group intent on taking the right seriously and devising political-aesthetic strategies for dealing with its rise. Instead of feeling repelled by such a taboo subject, we felt that we had created a space in which the community could treat right-wing politics with genuine intellectual curiosity and political critique. We felt that this first panel was immediately proof-of-concept for the Symposium: we had enabled discussions that are otherwise incredibly difficult to have, and welcomed a variety of people into these discussions.
The Symposium then turned from the right to the left. Our initial call for papers was especially interested in political art by, about, and from St. Louis and the broader Midwest, both historically and currently. Many of history’s strongest radical movements, writers, and artists were products of the industrial Midwest, and we hold that an egalitarian and sustainable future, if there is to be one, will rise from the Rust Belt. The panel on Local and Regional Radicalisms spotlighted two examples of Midwestern literary radicalism from the 1930s and a report on the current struggle to organize Amazon warehouse workers.
Meredith Kelling, a scholar of 20th-century radical literature at WashU, discussed Minnesota feminist proletarian writer Meridel Le Sueur. While Le Sueur is best known for her Depression-era novel The Girl and her short story collections narrating working-class life from women’s points of view, Kelling highlighted a rarely discussed activity of Le Seur’s: interviewing friends, comrades, and strangers at her kitchen table in 1950s Minneapolis. With a tape recorder gifted to her by the folk singer Pete Seeger, Le Sueur recorded interviews with people who were both prominent and anonymous, sometimes transferring these stories to her own writing. Kelling pointed out the irony that Le Sueur, a Communist Party member, was being recorded and surveilled by the FBI while she conducted these interviews. Le Sueur’s recordings are therefore an act of counter-surveillance to preserve workers’ lives in their own words, as opposed to the FBI’s interpretation of Le Sueur and her left-wing circle. Marc Blanc presented archival research on The Anvil, a Depression-era revolutionary literary magazine published in Missouri. Edited by the working-class novelist Jack Conroy, The Anvil published a litany of diverse authors including Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, Sanora Babb, and Le Sueur. Contrary to myths of a lily-white Midwest, Blanc argued that the magazine’s appeal to a common “heartland” identity made it a particularly fertile venue for interracial writing.
A germane exchange over how intellectuals and organizers should communicate progressive ideas to the public transpired during this panel’s Q&A session. One audience member questioned the panel’s position that, to be maximally effective, radical literary and visual aesthetics should closely reflect lived working-class experience. In response to this, the Amazon labor organizer underscored the necessity of emphasizing material issues in conversations with workers rather than appeal to theorists and historical Marxist revolutionaries. The audience member disagreed, pointing to Ho Chi Minh reading Marx’s Capital aloud to peasant farmers in revolutionary Vietnam. This exchange encapsulated both the challenges and opportunities of the Symposium and perhaps all community-engaged cultural scholarship. We learned that people conceptualize methods of achieving social progress differently depending on their jobs and life experiences, and certainly they communicate their perspectives in different, sometimes antithetical, registers. Even the name of the Symposium was subject for debate, as members of Bread & Roses Missouri, a local workers’ theater program, remarked during their presentation that labor rights shouldn’t be a “radical” idea. Regardless of diverging opinions of the accuracy and usefulness of phrases like “radicalism” and the means by which we can build a more equal and just world, most every participant in the Symposium arrived with a consensus belief in the ends of an equitable distribution of wealth and power, abolition of racism and the police state, and bridged gaps between city and campus. This consensus is all that we needed for a generative gathering.
Radical Arts Gallery
One of the unique features of the Symposium was that it accompanied panel discussions of aesthetic criticism with an exhibit showcasing local artists in the public library’s gallery space. In this way, we hoped to connect theory with practice. We quickly realized that finding artists whose works were both available and topical for display would require the slow building of relationships in the St. Louis arts community. We were honored that Ousmane Gaye, an arts practitioner in St. Louis, wanted to join our team and support with curation. Ousmane connected our Symposium to existing artworks in the area like Charlie Bosco’s brilliantly executed multimedia drawing The next year was worse (2024) and Alex Evets’s poignant localized sculpture ARCHETYPAL MISSOURI HOUSE (IN MISSOURI HOUSES ARE INVARIABLY MISSOURI SHAPED) (2023).
Samuel Horgan’s beautiful small-scale miniature sculptures such as For Sale and Angel of History (2023) showed terrain and observed situations from life in Western Pennsylvania. The mingling of nature and abandoned concrete scapes that characterize Horgan’s native Western PA and the entire Rust Belt are represented in these sculptures with astonishing precision. That Horgan moves to index large-scale material conditions in miniature form reminded us of many of the Symposium’s essential questions: How does seeking recently produced artworks—literally looking for what presently exists around us—bear forth aesthetic articulations of Rust Belt politics? What do we find immediately in front of us, and how does that allow us to confront and shape preexisting ideals about political art? What radical consciousness do these artworks engender, and what material politics may they forbode?
Keynote speaker Maxi Glamour’s artwork The Homunculus of Consumerism allowed viewers to station themselves in a small, narrow hallway looking at dozens of plastic costume masks, a hallucinatory encounter with the relational fabric of consumerist culture itself. Emily Elhoffer’s early contributions made our gallery feel truly achievable. Her artworks centered questions of womanhood and embodiment, with her Birth of Glizzy (2022) featuring an invented persona of her own hyperfeminized body in drag costumed as a sultry hot dog, created by both self-made plushy garb and AI process. Elhoffer’s renderings of femininity resonated with themes of fertility and femininity in Anastasiya Vasyuta’s photographic prints Remember to Bring Your Clementine 1 and 2.
The Symposium worked in close collaboration with The Chicago Puppet Theatre Collective, displaying Chio Cabrera-Coz’s Juana and the Missing Mayan Book (2023). The scene displayed is from one of Cabrera-Coz’s puppet stage performances, in which the Mayan people battle for peace, independence, and cultural preservation amidst the Spanish invasion of what is now Yucatan, Mexico. Juana, depicted in a state of rest with a Mayan codex and quill in her hands, reminded viewers that people of color need to be seen in a state of rest, while the workings of capital in art often portray people of color in states of subservience–either peripherally or in suffering, laborious roles. Juana reclines in another world where mythology and hope clash against oppression. Similarly, The Cementland Archive’s untitled resonates in its presentation of cultural preservation. The Cementland Archive is a local project that seeks to document and preserve St. Louis’s most iconic abandoned urban exploration destination, Cementland. As culturally definitive gathering places are disappeared by the whims of capital, how do we memorialize infrastructural death and render legible the new property systems that will take its place?
In addition to visual art, printed literature from international left-wing history was on display at the gallery. Local curators Troy Sherman and Lou Vinarcsik’s Collection of Radical Literature (1934–2024) let political ephemera and zines across the 20th century sing from the library’s largest glass case. Printed zines from coal miner strikes in Appalachia to the Black Panther movement to the recent Palestine protests at Columbia University each invoked the spirit of past radical movements. The tangibility of our shared radical histories, and what potentials exist on such a continuum, hung over the Symposium space. To many, the presence of these zines asked: what might we write together? What might we memorialize? A plea to possibility, monuments to the American left’s past beckon amidst an uncertain future.
Reviewing and Replicating the Symposium across the Rust Belt
The most common piece of feedback we received among attendees was eagerness to participate in next year’s event. As it stands, we do not have plans to hold the event next year; however, participants’ excitement to build future plans conveyed the Symposium’s importance and uniqueness. Participants and audience members alike were looking for a public venue to discuss the politics and culture that matter to their daily lives. Academics who had previously been alienated by the conservatism of their profession appreciated the extended focus on topics that are typically confined—when they are discussed at research conferences at all—to a single panel. People working in other fields were excited by the opportunity to learn about subjects that they had long been curious about but hadn’t had a chance to satisfactorily explore. At the same time, the desire for a second Symposium is an acknowledgement that the concept has room to grow. Were we to run it again, we would prioritize securing funding to provide all presenters with a small honorarium, increase photo and video documentation of the event, and extend outreach to the institutions and communities with which weren’t able to coordinate this year. In the process of organizing the event, we learned of several St. Louis activist and arts organizations that would have made memorable additions to the Symposium.
We aren’t yet able to measure the largest goal of the Symposium, which is that it might inspire and inform similar cultural programming in other Rust Belt cities. While our event was specifically oriented around St. Louis, several elements are transferable: first, to successfully connect university campuses and the surrounding cities, events like this must be held at a familiar, accessible public location. Public libraries are among the best options, and many libraries will be eager to collaborate with organizers, as the St. Louis Public Library—Schlafly Branch did. Further, to ensure a plurality of voices, all panels ought to be balanced to include professional researchers, journalists, and community organizations. Finally, forging partnerships with local businesses can help to bring in keynote speakers, supply refreshments to attendees, and make the event mutually beneficial for a range of community members and institutions.
Different cities will present different opportunities and limitations. The St. Louis Symposium took place in our city’s bustling Central West End neighborhood, with many bars, restaurants, and shops within walking distance from the library. While convenient, the Central West End is also an affluent area. Some Rust Belt cities may not have a comparable neighborhood; perhaps similar events in these cities might extend the community orientation of our Symposium even further by focusing on more working-class and less commercial neighborhoods. Although these measures are simple, they were not obvious to us when we were planning the event. In presenting them here, we hope to provide a guide and jumping-off point for politicizing culture at home.
Marc Blanc is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the English Department at Washington University in St. Louis.
Ryan Prewitt is a graduate student in the English Department of Saint Louis University.
Simone Sparks is a graduate student in the English Department of the University of North Carlina-Chapel Hill.
