Anti-Racist Reading and After

Grossman, Claire; Grossman, Claire

In his famous essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel” (1949), James Baldwin decried the sort of literary work that schooled white readers in racial virtue. “The protest novel,” he wrote, “so far from being disturbing, is an accepted and comforting aspect of the American scene, ramifying that framework we believe to be so necessary.” Baldwin’s critique was not just of the “brutal” fictions routing readers into sympathy with Black protagonists: he had identified a potent national discourse that instrumentalized literary texts as keys to racial understanding. Pervading liberal wisdom often diagnosed racial antagonisms at the individual, rather than structural, level—meaning that, as Baldwin recognized, prejudice could be corrected through the sympathetic circuits of literary reading. The idea of book-reading as a solution to racism would capture the attention of educators, publishers, social scientists, and writers for decades to come.

This panel takes the present-day upsurge in literary practices concerned with racial justice as an occasion to revisit the critique set in motion by “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” and to consider how producers of literature diverge from, modify, or repudiate the original framework of antiracist reading. Scholars have addressed the cultivation of racialized reading audiences in the midcentury and postwar US, examining, among other phenomena, the development of “official antiracisms” (Jodi Melamed), enduring scenes of racialized sentimentality (Lauren Berlant), and the novel’s instructive rhetorics of whiteness (Gregory Jay). More recent approaches, like Dana Williams’s writing on Ta-Nehisi Coates and Kinohi Nishikawa’s account of African American literature as a corporate publishing sales category, suggest a longue durée of the protest novel tradition in other genres and areas of the field.

Entering the fold of this dialogue, this special session tracks responses and revisions to antiracist reading after the height of US racial liberalism in the 1940s to mid-1960s (Melamed's periodization). The panelists offer three interrelated perspectives on how writers, readers, and publishers have grappled with the enduring impulses of racial-liberal literary thinking. The session's aim is to deepen and complicate the history of antiracist reading after its first (and most discussed) act; to this end, all three speakers will include original archival research as part of their presentations. Following a brief introduction and three 15-18 minute papers, the speakers will use the remaining time to address each other's talks and take questions from the audience.

Joseph Darda will begin by examining the impasse between Baldwin’s early critique of liberal antiracism and the status of his nonfiction works as antiracist texts. Darda identifies a shift in the temporal orientation of Baldwin’s writing, a decisive move away from a future-looking outlook toward a more ambivalent, accumulative sense of time. Revisiting Baldwin’s writing and public appearances after 1968, Darda shows how the author sought to counter official articulations of antiracism that had sedimented since "Everybody's Protest Novel," especially those that put forth a future horizon simply in order to defer meaningful struggles.

The move against antiracist reading’s “solutionism,” as Darda calls it, finds a more clear-cut form in the archive discussed by our second panelist, Paulina Jones-Torregrosa. Jones-Torregrosa uncovers a striking rebuttal to racial-liberal thinking in the 1970s multiracial feminist periodical Triple Jeopardy. Her analysis of the anti-representational approach in Triple Jeopardy’s text and imagery shows the construction of a purposefully unstable political subjectivity for Black and Latinx women; this innovation, Jones-Torregrosa suggests, shirks legibility in order to evade the managing logic of “racial literacy.”

Finally, Sarah Brouillette connects these discursive histories with the practice of employing “sensitivity readers” in present-day publishing. Drawing from original interviews and a digital archive, Brouillette characterizes sensitivity readers as a largely hidden, contingent, and underpaid workforce at the margins of publishing activity. This marginalization relies on sensitivity readers to understand themselves as a shield between the industry and their communities. By perpetuating this affective stance, publishers echo and extend the racialized pressures of the protest novel’s heyday, enlisting writers who are not white to broker understanding across identities.

699 Anti-Racist Reading and After: Calls for Papers