The panel begins with a historical overview, as Ryan Brooks analyzes a text that embodies but also (arguably) signals the end of this moment in American literary history, Joshua Ferris’s office novel Then We Came to the End (2007). Brooks contends that the book exemplifies literary liberalism’s ambivalent reaction to the triumph of free-market ideology, an ambivalence that led to the emergence of a distinctly post-postmodern aesthetic in the 1990s and 2000s. Like other contemporary practitioners of the “New Sincerity” (as co-panelist Adam Kelly has described it), Ferris offers a post-ironic social vision distinct from the neoliberal view that “everybody’s ultimately out for himself and that life is about selling and profit” (as paraphrased by the most influential New Sincerity writer, David Foster Wallace). At the same time, by transforming the labor antagonisms of the workplace into the affective and ethical relationships of a “community,” Ferris reproduces the logic of centrist communitarianism, a logic that was used in the 1990s to justify racialized, anti-worker initiatives like welfare reform. Brooks ends by putting Ferris’s novel – in which the novelist dramatizes, reflexively, his own decision not to write an “angry book about work” – in dialogue with the myriad of “angry” texts about work that have flourished in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.
Next, Adam Kelly’s paper engages with the question of the relative importance of race, class, and the Black literary voice in neoliberal times, a debate intensified by the publication of Kenneth Warren’s 2011 polemic, What Was African American Literature? To determine where Colson Whitehead’s critically and commercially successful fiction sits within this debate, Kelly examines the relation of Whitehead’s early novels to the defining technique of “African American literature” as critics like Warren understand it: Henry Louis Gates’s notion of signifying. Kelly argues that Whitehead’s signifying practice in novels such as The Intuitionist (1999) and Apex Hides the Hurt (2006) raises intricate questions about the contemporary Black novelist’s relationship to the literary tradition and the literary marketplace. Writing under neoliberalism’s “new spirit of capitalism,” Whitehead is faced with the reality that Black art has moved from cultural marginality to commercial centrality, at the same time as class divisions among Black Americans are becoming more evident and intensely felt. In this context, the Black writer’s intimacy with ongoing collective struggles cannot be taken as given, and the oppositional work that Black art has traditionally been understood to do is threatened. Looking to Whitehead’s representation of class relations among Black Americans, including the way he figures his own class position, this paper considers his thematization of the problem of writerly sincerity in a time of neoliberal incorporation and professional-managerial consciousness.
Finally, Bryan Santin shows how these contemporary debates about liberalism are entangled with much older debates about racial and economic conservativism. He focuses on Edward P. Jones's 2003 novel, The Known World, which has been read as a new iteration of the “neo-slave narrative” (in the tradition of Margaret Walker, Toni Morrison, and Octavia E. Butler) and as a unique “post-soul” novel (in the same vein as Paul Beatty, Colson Whitehead, and Danzy Senna) written by a Black writer born before the Civil Rights Movement. Combining these earlier readings with the lens of political theory, Santin interprets The Known World as an allegorical interrogation of Black conservatism published just after the turn of the twenty-first century, and thus during the height of post-Reagan neoliberalism. For Jones, he argues, Black conservatism functions as a trope that reveals the limits of an exclusively race-based solidarity and the importance of other forms of class-based political solidarity, but without succumbing to a naive, “post-racial” vision of twenty-first century America.