African American literary study is currently consumed by important debates about getting beyond, moving past, reinventing, and reimagining its identity, nomenclature, and boundaries, across a variety of indices and conversations that include the afterlife of slavery, black feminism(s), intersectionality, and periodization. In talking casually with scholars contributing to these debates they all too often make off the cuff remarks about discovering aesthetic and historical materials crucial to their claims in ways and in places they never expected. This panel is an opportunity to think carefully about how unexpected and uncanny objects become central, not just in our intellectual love of discovery, but in our critical efforts to resolve debates in African American literary and cultural study.

Rarely do scholars explain how an unknown letter from an author’s lover, a film that they watched when they couldn’t sleep, or how an artifact seized our attention when we were explicitly looking for something else. The argument of this panel is that we need to take more seriously how objects and threads from our research and/or everyday life (anomalies, remainders, outliers) can form a central part of how we expand/revise reading practices and rediscover old objects, cultural ephemera or canonical texts.

“Look Where Your Hands Are: Sojourner Truth, the Beloved Archive, and the Textual Production of Flesh,” begins in a surprising moment. In Crawford's words: stumbling upon material on Sojourner Truth, in the 1985 folder of the Toni Morrison Papers at Princeton University, made me wonder about the relation between Baby Suggs’ “touch your flesh” sermon (in Beloved) and Truth’s cartes-de-visite with the words “I sell the shadow to support the substance.” The photographs of Truth have always made me feel something that I cannot see. I look at Truth and feel the flesh that we might call a black body. Is Sojourner Truth the shadow of Baby Suggs? How does leaning into the zone of possible inspiration and source allow us to unknow canonical texts like Beloved and begin a practice of radical unknowing that Morrison describes, in Jazz, as the “severed part remember[ing] the snatch”? If we re-read Beloved through the lens of the shadow of Sojourner Truth’s fugitive black feminism, how does the 1987 simultaneity of Beloved’s sermon on flesh and Hortense Spillers’ theory of flesh gain new dimensions? I re-read Beloved as a literary representation of lived shadowiness that we might call black flesh, not a representation of the melancholic historicism (aptly described by Stephen Best) that relies on non-shadowy witnesses and ghosts as a way of collapsing the black past and the black present. On the meta-level, is the vibrating edge (the isness) of African American literature sometimes the textual production of a close encounter with touching this shadowy flesh that we might call a black body or a black book?

Erica Edwards’ paper, “Troubled Intimacies: Black Feminist Love Letters and the Reagan Regime” calls attention to a stunning literary artifact. The dark pink lispstick kiss-print is still visible at the top of a letter between friends dated July 1982. A young struggling actress named Gwendolyn Hardwick writes to the by-now-well-known writer June Jordan, "Received your letter one evening after having come home from work...after having read articles in the Voiceregarding the acts of genocide against the Lebanese and Palestinian people…" After listing the scenes of state-authored and state-sanctioned anti-black violence in El Salvador, South Africa, the Malvinas and Haiti, Hardwick adds a few simple notes of care: wishes for a speedy recovery after a recent operation, "I love you," another imprint of lipstick, and then, as if an afterthought: "Happy Birthday!" Correspondences like this, exchanges of love that scale down from the global to the body, help us understand the stakes of literary production in an era that witnessed the dramatic expansion of domestic and foreign police actions and, at the same time, saw a flourishing of black women’s arts. What did it mean that at the very moment Black women writers opened up black feminism as a form for experiments in internationalism, their work was being cycled into spectacles of domestic confrontation—“domestic” meaning both limited in scope to the U.S. nation-state and centering around Black heterosexual relations in the home? To consider this question, this paper reads the correspondence between Jordan and her artist-friends alongside Jordan’s literary and extraliterary figurations of safety. I argue that the black feminist love letter draws together our intimacy with state violence and our intimacy with each other.

Christopher Freeburg’s “Urban Blight Texts and the Promise of Pessimism,” uses the scarecrow’s performance of the song “You Can’t Win” from The Wiz(1978) and a moment where “You Can’t Win” confronts Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) to address the imaginative force of pessimism. In Freeburg's words: not until recently would I have ever thought The Wiz would be central to my thinking about structural forces that constrain urban black life. When I was younger the urban dystopia from The Wizhaunted me. I never watched it again. A few years ago, my children happened across it, loved it, recorded it and played the movies’ infectious songs. The scene that struck me the most was the crow anthem, “You Can’t Win.” sung by the scarecrow (played by Michael Jackson). The refrain is magnetic and tragic: “you can’t win, you can’t get even, and you can get out of the game.” Despite the epigrams from famous thinkers that the scarecrow recites, the crows revel in his powerlessness to do anything about his condition. Interestingly enough, the song also bears the same title of a political campaign poster in Richard Wright’s Native Son. The words epitomize Bigger’s feelings of white surveillance and the limitations of racial capitalism. My paper addresses how these compelling moments of “You Can’t Win,” definitive statements of bleak existential crisis, also evoke the challenge and possibility of social transformation in different ways than scholars have addressed. Additionally, how do these texts help us expand and revise our view of ascendant critical rubrics like Afro-pessimism?