This proposed panel, “The Way We Read Now: Reading Contemporary African American Life and Aesthetics” brings together three papers that interrogate dominant approaches to engaging with and interpreting contemporary Black literary and cultural production. Our title, borrowed from a 2009 special issue of Representations, seeks to perform a self-assessment of our own individual critical practices and broader tendencies in professionalized African American literary study. Our aim is not to engage in prescriptive pronouncements, but rather to consider the condition of our critical practices in the wake of several disparate and interrelated institutional, historical, and cultural developments: the twinned emergence of African American academic superstars and the ongoing institutional austerity measures that have thinned the field of African American literary studies, the brief but powerfully seductive era of colorblindness that took hold during Barack Obama’s historic run and election as President of the United States, the explosion of "trauma" poetry among African American poets, and the broad shifts in post-1968 African American aesthetics and discursive orientations that elevate African American satire to one of African American cultural production’s dominant modes.

Collectively, our panel queries the effects of specific textual practices and the forms of reading, good or ill, they produce. Such an approach should not be mistaken for New Formalism (or a New New Formalism), but rather an attempt to take deep descriptive account of African American literary production and the way we read now.

Evie Shockley opens the panel with attention to three interrelated tendencies in contemporary African American poetry: the tendency for “confessional poetry” to not include Black poets in its literary historical and aesthetic territory; the explosion of Black poets exploring what they themselves call their “trauma,” which is nevertheless a disconcertingly expansive category; and the connection, besides the word “trauma,” across this proliferating poetry and the effects of such poetry on the tradition of African American poetry. Shockley, in consideration of these three interrelated trends, asks, “What does our way of talking about Black poetry suggest its value to be?” In her paper titled, “Confessional Poetry, Black Trauma, and the Return of the Sociological Reading,” Shockley will flesh out each of these three tendencies to sketch the ways they might be connected and to consider the implications of those interconnections for Black poets and Black poetics.

In “Block Quote,” Kinohi Nishikawa will consider how African Americanist critics craft their scholarly voices and what those practices reveal about the way we read, or interpret, literature today. In particular, Nishikawa will reflect on modes of citational practice in field-leading critical studies by Fred Moten, Christina Sharpe, Frank Wilderson III, and Margo Natalie Crawford. While there has been robust discussion about decolonizing and diversifying citational practice in recent years, less attention has been paid to how we cite texts in support of our arguments. This paper notes in the above examples a specific reliance on block quotes in a style of criticism that consciously aims to have theoretical import. At its most effective, this method of quoting has the effect of embedding the critic in an ensemble of voices, allowing the work of criticism to perform the intervention it seeks to make. Less effectively, the method is used to transition from one part of a predetermined interpretation to another, with the critic ultimately arrogating theoretical import for themselves. This paper limns the differences between the two uses and calls for greater care toward the objects whose “resistance” we ostensibly wish to recover.

Brittney Edmonds will close the panel with a paper titled, “What’s Reading Got to Do With It?: Black Satire and the Vagaries of Interpretation.” Edmonds will examine the critical problematic of interpretation in postmodernist Black satire. As part of a broader literary historical argument about the substantial outpouring of Black satire after 1968, Edmonds will examine how Black satirist intentionally produced multiple reading communities for a single textual object, placing novel demands on historical reading communities. The effects of such multiplicity provide one key to formal transformations in Black literary practice after 1968 and in the evolution of Black satire specifically. Edmonds will examine two satirists who diverge in aesthetic sensibility, Ishmael Reed and Percival Everett, to demonstrate how the fraught cultural history of Blacks as comic fools and the anti-racism said to be implicit in African American Literature dissolve in the formal disruptions catalyzed by Black satire.