Thinking through Crisis turns to 1930s African American literature to offer a critical response to Trauma Theory. This theoretical discourse carries a nostalgia for "European Man" that limits its understanding of racial and class antagonisms. Consequently, its version of "bearing witness" yields a political passivity that cannot address the injustices of racism as they are linked to class conflict. Against the political passivity produced by this idealist approach, this book offers a materialist theory of trauma that develops concepts for identifying the agency that Black life produces amid social breakdown.