African American literary critics push the borders of the field through and beyond the literary objects. From history of the book to Black Feminist studies, this field has exploded so much so that it arguably is field held together in name only. One of concepts that Black studies grounds itself in is history. Currently, “The Afterlife of Slavery” (Sadiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, and Fred Moten et al.) is the most accepted historical rubric yet arguments about the imperative of periodization (Kenneth Warren, Brent Edwards, and Mary Helen Washington) also sustain the field's cogency.

Each panelist takes up the question: How does your current work/interest in African American literature stretch, challenge, rethink what it means to be historical in African American literary criticism? This panel pulls together research that grapples with key field ideas and rubrics such as diaspora, periodization, class history, and longue durée (slavery’s afterlife) to identify points of provocation and opportunities for analysis that are both diagnostic and generative for the field.

Discussion with the MLA community is very important to us. Each panelist will speak for no more than 12 minutes to insure time for discussion. Brittany Edmonds, who'll be presiding, will keep strict time to make sure the audience can fulfill its role and members can be heard. We all learn from a full robust conversation.

This panel contains professors at various stages of their careers, of different genders and ranks, who specialize in different periods and themes in African American/American literatures.

In “Still Human,” Christopher Freeburg examines the consistent pursuit of Black studies scholars to imagine alternatives beyond the human in environmental studies, Black feminist studies, and Afrofuturism. Freeburg’s interest lies in wrestling with whether not these groups actually find alternative modes of Black being that transcend modern history’s version of the human. Ultimately, Freeburg’s interest lies in evaluating whether or not new formulations of human are possible without the baggage of historical violence and exclusion that always seems to darken any newfound light.

Jesse McCarthy’s “Who Needs Historicism in African American literature?” addresses the rise of an Afropessimist discourse, and one might even say an Afropessimist style, over the last decade and a half. McCarthy analyzes the impact of this style in order to think about the future of the field, about whether or not one can make transhistorical claims under the weight of earlier generations of scholarship that more or less reflexively understood itself as historicist. McCarthy’s paper aims to answer: can a positive claim for historicism still be recovered and articulated in the teeth of both these countervailing views of our field?

In “Black Modernism Without Harlem,” Zoë L. Henry reimagines Black modernism without its famous central location. Henry’s paper challenges two conventions by, first, untangling and disarticulating modernism from whiteness—thus revealing a set of alternate histories to the story of European modernism with a focus on the aesthetic principles created and most profoundly upheld across global Black literature of the early twentieth century. Second, and building on Brent Hayes Edwards’ The Practice of Diaspora, it offers a new way of understanding Black modernism. In addition to opening the door to seeing African and African diasporic writers in locations as varied as Denmark, Spain, Ireland and Morocco as modernist, such a move calls attention to the limits of “Harlem” as a framing mechanism to begin with.

Ivy Wilson shifts our attention to blackness, labor history, and class through a compelling reading of C.L.R. James’ literary criticism. In “C.L.R. James’ Early Interventions into the Americanist Literary Canon,” Wilson analyzes a 1951 letter to Chinese-American labor activist Grace Lee from the Trinidadian-born C.L.R. James. The letter suggests that Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick (1851) not be read for the ways in which it sketches the existential and ethereal symbolism of the white whale, but rather instead as one that reveals the material and actual conditions of the ship’s crew as workers. Wilson uses this insight to demonstrate how James traffics them between historical materialism and aesthetic mimesis in his readings of Melville. Wilson offers us a way to think seriously about how C.L.R James’s reading of Melville and his commitment to the problem of labor can help us think about the predicament of history in Black literary study.