The Great Depression is uniquely poised for literary-critical reevaluation, following the reorienting new lenses of Economic Criticism and the New History of Capitalism. Thinking (more) materially has permitted literary scholars in particular to better apprehend the textured record of modern lives: one where production and consumption infuse interior landscapes and unsettle divisive ontologies; where objects and goods occupy central space in the cultural imaginary and affective ecologies; where the human, natural, and built worlds overlay in unruly, disruptive ways; and where the tyranny of the human subject collapses into a broader network of interconnection that imperils the hoary axioms of civilization itself. This chapter offers a reading of Richard Wright’s posthumously published novel The Man Who Lived Underground (written just after the Depression) in the context of US Southern, African American, and Native American perspectives on the destabilizing and dehumanizing consequences of economic collapse. These contrapuntal readings unveil an American modernity marked by profound, multivalent loss: where money fails to orient, so too does race, and the uncanny (and always, finally, imaginary) freedom from both measures is by turns exhilarating and insupportable.

While new modernist scholars are generally keen to recover and integrate the tradition’s marginalized voices, its implements for doing so remain relatively crude. As some critics have argued, the “pluralizing of modernisms” is not sufficient without a more granular accounting of the mutually constitutive developments of race/racism and modernism writ large. More supple instruments for reading race into modernism have thus acknowledged settler colonialism and racial capitalism as the underlying, instigating features of both modernity as a historical process and modernism as the intellectual and cultural responses to inhabiting its conditions and institutions. Summoning Indigeneity into modernism’s operations frameworks forces us to read against the typical grain of alterity, resistance, or transcendence. This chapter surveys the state of such field-shifting projects while arguing for further innovations that would more radically place – and deconstruct – the idea of “Indigeneity” within the crucible of modernism.