White supremacy and the project of American literary history

Abstract

Since the discipline’s foundation in the mid-nineteenth century, white supremacy has presented a constitutive problem for the project of American literary history. In ways large and small, obvious and obscure, structures of racialization have shaped what is and isn’t possible to say about America’s literary tradition. In recent years, this problem has been addressed almost exclusively as an issue of canon-formation—a matter of minority writers’ exclusion from syllabi, anthologies, and prize committees. While these interventions were deeply necessary, in some instances they have also precluded a more structural understanding of how the literary historical process itself produces, maintains, and disguises ideology. Challenging this disciplinary consensus, White Supremacy and the Project of American Literary History offers a provocation to think structurally about the discipline’s history; to account for the lingering presence of the discipline’s founding assumptions, desires, and originary forms; to consider the relationship between literature and history in its evolving institutional contexts; and to confront the limitations of the discipline’s more recent claims to radical or emancipatory politics. Ultimately, White Supremacy and the Project of American Literary History argues the urgent necessity of considering the politics of American literary history beyond (and beneath) the issues of canonicity and canon-formation.