Outside Literary Studies
Black Criticism and the University
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- £20.99
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- £20.99
Publisher Description
A timely reconsideration of the history of the profession, Outside Literary Studies investigates how midcentury Black writers built a critical practice tuned to the struggle against racism and colonialism.
This striking contribution to Black literary studies examines the practices of Black writers in the mid-twentieth century to revise our understanding of the institutionalization of literary studies in America. Andy Hines uncovers a vibrant history of interpretive resistance to university-based New Criticism by Black writers of the American left. These include well-known figures such as Langston Hughes and Lorraine Hansberry as well as still underappreciated writers like Melvin B. Tolson and Doxey Wilkerson. In their critical practice, these and other Black writers levied their critique from “outside” venues: behind the closed doors of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, in the classroom at a communist labor school under FBI surveillance, and in a host of journals. From these vantages, Black writers not only called out the racist assumptions of the New Criticism, but also defined Black literary and interpretive practices to support communist and other radical world-making efforts in the mid-twentieth century. Hines’s book thus offers a number of urgent contributions to literary studies: it spotlights a canon of Black literary texts that belong to an important era of anti-racist struggle, and it fills in the pre-history of the rise of Black studies and of ongoing Black dissent against the neoliberal university.
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Hines, the associate director of the Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore College, explores in this astute critical work the rarely discussed challenges to the New Criticism movement faced by Black writers and scholars of the mid-20th century. Hines argues that the movement's central tenet of judging and analyzing literature without sociopolitical and historical context is a product of "racial liberalism hesitantly accepted some Black people into previously white spaces, but refused to significantly reconfigure those spaces and institutions that allowed racist practice." Crucially, Hines believes the vestiges of these practices and beliefs remain in place in the university system today. Hines points to Ezra Pound's winning of the Bollingen Prize after praising Mussolini as an opportunity for Black critics to speak out against the movement's myopia—as a white man, Pound was showered with prizes despite his politics, a luxury Hines posits is not afforded to Black writers. Elsewhere, Hines highlights the work of Black writers who resisted the New Criticism status quo, such as Melvin B. Tolson, whose poem "Harlem Gallery" contends with the "bifurcated world" of being a Black man in a white literary establishment. Perfect for scholars and students, this provides invaluable insight into the racial dynamics of mid-century literary criticism.
