This proposed panel, “Black Literary Histories Now: Major and Minor Reckonings,” brings together three papers that reconsider some aspect of established Black literary history. The proposed papers trouble conventional literary historical interpretation by way of the perspectives of non-black protagonists, of understudied literary strategies and figures, and of seemingly distractive minor characters. In this way, we think major and minor registers together—as intimately and intricately entangled. Ultimately, this panel aims to model modes of reading and attention that are neither paranoid nor surface, but that instead investigate the relay between those two modes, while attending to the broader context of literary history and criticism.

Adrienne Brown opens the panel with attention to a neglected character in Black literary studies—the white-shoed, silver-spooned George Murchison from Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. In a paper entitled, “‘I like George all right, Mama’: The shallow depths of George Murchison in Raisin in the Sun,” Brown argues that though Beneatha has often been pegged as Hansberry’s surrogate due to their shared restless search for intellectual, social, and political liberation, in terms of upbringing and class position, Hansberry’s biography far more resembles that of Murchison. Despite being introduced in the play as beautiful, wealthy, and shallow—and called an “assimilationist Negro” to his face during his first scene on stage—George falls short of being a compelling rogue. But if George is a distraction, he’s one that the play insists we reckon with. My paper asks to what end this minor reckoning serves. What might Hansberry’s tenderness at best and disinterest at worst for Murchison as well as his strained but sustained relationship to the Youngers in the two scenes in which he appears tell us about her understanding of the political project of black ownership given Hansberry’s own political trajectory towards socialism? And how might Walter’s continual questioning of George’s sexuality—and George’s relatively mute response to these accusations—clue us into queerness’ relationship to property and power in the play?

In “Notes on the Aesthetic History of Black Ekphrasis,” James Ford III joins a debate between Carlos Plasa and Jane Hedley over Black Ekphrasis. In 2016, Plasa argued that considering that Anglophone Black culture workers have used ekphrasis since the 18th century, it is well past time for scholars to account for its endurance. Jane Hedley, the editor of In the Frame, the famed edited collection on Women's ekphrastic poetry, questioned Plasa's framing of Black Ekphrasis. Headley cited Claudia Rankine's Citizen to suggest that America may have entered a "post-Ekphrastic" era that no longer "hypostatize" "white" and "Black" identities. Ford turns to Phillis Wheatley’s To S.M., A Young African Painter, On Seeing His Works” to recover the long tradition of Black Ekphrasis by emphasizing how her poem encourages collaboration among writers, visual artists, and other creatives concerned with the struggles and the abundance within Black life. Wheatley focuses less on vivid poetic description of visual art and more on the formal relation between painting and poem. In turn, Wheatley rethinks the ethical-political bond between painter and poet. His paper will conclude with brief remarks on how today's poets in the museum and text-based painters, like Kenturah Davis and Robin Coste Lewis, remain part of Wheatley and Scipio's ekphrastic legacy.

Finally, in “‘A Passable Human Being’: The Narrative Ethics of Whiteness in William Melvin Kelley’s A Different Drummer,” Brittney Michelle Edmonds argues that the sudden departure of Black citizens from an unnamed Southern town offers sly comment on the vexed status of Black novels and novelists in the period between the world wars and the Civil Rights Movement. Turning to fabulation and experiment as a way to respond and transform the burdening expectations of literary protest, Kelley’s novel, Edmonds argues, inhabits white interiority to stage the narrative incoherence of anti-Black racism. As white characters attempt to account for the loss of their town’s Black inhabitants, they proliferate partial and incomplete stories—on porches, in homes, at train stations. But even as the novel demonstrates the narrative incoherence of anti-Black racism, it also simultaneously tracks how Blackness provides narrative possibility for the white community who compulsively tell stories about their former Black neighbors as a way of laying claim to themselves. Edmonds will close her essay by showing how this understudied novel provides insight into post-war literary experimentation and recovering the work as an early progenitor of an idiomatic style of Black humor that rests on Black sensibilities and epistemologies.