Join us for a fascinating evening that brings together literature, local history, and archival discovery. Dr. Christopher Seiji Berardino (Assistant Professor of English, UC Riverside) will explore the world behind H.T. Tsiang’s remarkable 1935 novel The Hanging on Union Square, recently reissued in the Penguin Classics series.

An émigré, political activist, and self-published writer, Tsiang interlaced experimental prose, street-level realism, and biting satire to capture life in Depression-era New York. His novel follows a restless, unemployed worker through the bustling streets, cafeterias, movie houses, and underground clubs surrounding Union Square—a neighborhood that, at the time, was the beating heart of the city’s radical politics and social movements. Tsiang’s writing, influenced by both Communist ideals and avant-garde modernism, blends humor and protest to challenge the injustices of capitalism while imagining new forms of collective solidarity.

Although Tsiang’s characters move through familiar institutions, he rarely names them directly. This talk uses archival materials—old newspapers, city maps, magazines, and historical photographs—to uncover the real cultural and commercial landmarks that shaped his narrative. By tracing Tsiang’s literary geography through the archives, we’ll rediscover how the Village and Union Square served as hubs of creativity, resistance, and social exchange during one of New York’s most turbulent decades.

Whether you’re a lover of literature, a student of local history, or simply curious about the hidden stories embedded in our city’s streets, this lecture offers a vivid window into the revolutionary imagination of a long-overlooked New Yorker.

Christopher Seiji Berardino is an Assistant Professor and HSI Mellon Faculty Fellow in the Department of English at the University of California, Riverside. Berardino received both his Ph.D. in English Literature and M.F.A. in Creative Writing (Fiction) from Cornell University. His monograph-in-progress, Multitude Modernism: “Democratic Epiphany” in Interwar American Literature, maps the ways in which modernists of color and their allies leverage textual experimentation to express collective potentiality and interracial solidarity. When not teaching or writing, he spends his weekdays spoiling his dog Ajax and weekends surfing with his wife, Hannah.