Marcus’s dazzling close readings go a long way toward supporting the idea that political disappointment quite literally ‘found form’ in art, literature, and music, meaning as a place for these sentiments to lodge themselves. Marcus goes beyond merely placing the works in their historical contexts; she harvests historical contexts from within the works themselves.

Marcus shows the ways in which Black activists and writers, in particular, have continued to express their political desires. In doing so, she draws our attention to the centrality of disappointment in American political life.

[This] book has the power to rouse readers out of their disenchantment long enough to consider how a variety of writers and artists since Reconstruction repurposed their sense of failure and frustration into new forms of artistic expression.

In Political Disappointment, Marcus offers an alternative perspective on the mental state of society’s chronic political losers. The book looks at the tendency to dwell in thwarted desire but focuses less on the pathology in that dwelling than on its potential…Marcus is indeed a careful reader and an elegant theorist.

Political Disappointment is an abundant text, overflowing with Sara Marcus's considerable gifts. She is adept at presenting history and narrative with equal clarity; her writing is urgent but also optimistic. This is a book that is sometimes painful but never sacrifices hope or beauty.

Sara Marcus captures a polyphonic chorus of disappointed voices from American radical history in order to illuminate the transformations that such disappointment made possible. In a time of frustrated grief, her work offers grounds for the kind of optimism we need now–one based in a rigorous examination of failure.

In an elegant but earned reversal of conventional wisdom, Sara Marcus presents a new reading of American political culture in which disappointment, not hope, assumes its pride of place. Striking chords much deeper than most contemporary critiques of ‘toxic optimism,’ Marcus’s musical writing plays the changes on all our political losses, moving us to the wordless place beyond them.

Sara Marcus beautifully and convincingly argues that the embrace of loss is the political technique of disappointment, while the possibility for dawn’s break in concert with our kindred—chosen or inherited, living or dead—is its gift. Political Disappointment is an incredible contribution, a needed tool, and a skillful act of caretaking.

Disappointment haunts the American left. In this tour de force, Sara Marcus stares it down and discovers the generative possibilities that emerge from defeat. Whether it’s an Audre Lorde poem, a David Wojnarowicz painting, or the ‘sonic burrs’ in a Leadbelly song, Marcus reveals the solidarities generated by defeat and how they animated the freedom dreams of some of the twentieth century’s most enduring artists and activists. A stunning and timely cultural history.

In the perilous times we inhabit, both utopian and dystopian visions are resurgent in art and criticism alike. Drawing energies from both, Sara Marcus’s generous, capacious study also points beyond them, to how artistic work from Reconstruction’s failure forward spoke eloquently of disappointment—and thus of a stance able to face a moment’s limitation squarely as a means of envisioning next moves. In this book’s inspired retelling, music—both literal and literary—becomes central to US political history, for its unparalleled ability to body forth expressions of the very shape of time.