The Work of Jennifer Kotter, Ray Materson and Bonnie Peterson Art At The Margins.

Indeed, few if any of the cultural narratives of this country have been rehearsed with such unanimity of voice — a fact that, in itself, might make one suspicious. The story told is that "proletarian art" was a failed venture of an admittedly troubled time, the years of the Great Depression of the 1930s, doomed from its very beginnings because it attempted to place the individualism of creation in service -331- to the social goals of a collectivist ideology. To the extent that such art succeeded, the story continues, it did so only because its creators by accident or design moved outside this ideological orbit and thus from under the stifling, humorless power of Communist Party functionaries. But sustaining this narrative has, in fact, required the obliteration of much of the terrain it is ostensibly designed to map. White women and writers of color, for example, virtually disappear from these histories, as does any serious discussion of efforts to create art by people from working-class origins. The exclusion of women writers and intellectuals from these accounts and the marginalizing of writers of color have been necessary to the process of producing the dubious master narrative I described above ...»