The Read: Andy Hines, Outside Literary Studies: Black Criticism and the University
Friday's Child Is Loving and Giving
Why did I get this book?
I work with Andy Hines at the Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore College, and have been strongly influenced in the past two years by his breadth of knowledge. (In fact, let me encourage you to sign up for a webinar in the coming week featuring Hines and three other brilliant scholars talking about this book: May 18 1-2:30 EST featuring Andy Hines with Roderick Ferguson, Jared Loggins, and Andrew Douglas. Register : tinyurl.com/3trjx438)
Is it what I thought it was?
Yes. I’m not that familiar with the New Criticism—I think my encounter with this kind of “racial liberalism” was with the New Criticism’s parallel figures within historical scholarship—so the extensive engagement with the New Critics and with Black critiques of the New Critics covered a lot of ground new to me.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
Hines makes a particular history of knowledge production and intellectual engagement outside the university into something very tangible and particular, and that really helps me think about that idea more broadly. I’m likely to return to the book for a road map in that respect.
I also think Hines is part of a surging body of scholarship that reimagines and relocates the origins of Black Studies as an intellectual and scholarly project—I could easily see being in a reading group or co-teaching an upper-level course that focuses on this body of thought.
Quotes
“The New Critics saw Black writing as too invested in the particulars of the present for it to be able to enter into the timeless, universal tradition they espoused. This midcentury clash between Black criticism and the New Criticism has largely been passed over in scholarly investigations, despite the essential contributions made by Black writers regarding literature’s social and political function, not to mention their political economic analysis of how the university and the state would anticipate a similar realization from student movements in the mid- to late 1960s.”
“Examples abound of the tendency of academic critics to deploy the category of literature as a proxy for discussing the dynamics of race and racism in midcentury assessments of Black writers.”
“[Tolson] targeted the New Criticism and Allen Tate because it was a literary emblem and a material check against his wider social and political visions which centered poetry’s social and political import.”
“Black radicals in New York labor schools rejected the premise of a cultural universalism tout court…Black radical writers in the midcentury saw the turn to ‘human nature’ in some Black writing as being tied to the Agrarian New Critics and the American university system, which amplified these universalist ideas.”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
Chapter Two, on Melvin Tolson, was also of great interest to me—I struggled once to read his epic poem written for Liberia’s centennial. Tolson seems a complicated figure even for Hines’ own analysis, though, in that his workings of various “bifurcations” with the intent not to resolve them but to explore “the vexed but revolutionary potential that lies in existing between those worlds” ought to include “outside” and “inside” university-based literary studies, both in the sense of being a poet who wish to speak to and about literary criticism (particularly the New Criticism) but also being inside/outside the university. Tolson was thoroughly associated with the university, but also was appreciated by many for his lack of scholarly otherworldliness, his everyday engagements with the world. I also can’t help but think about another bifurcation, of Africa and its diaspora, where the reading of and uses of something like Tolson’s Libretto tend to disappear out of Black Studies and into Cold War-created area studies. The Libretto, in Hines’ recounting, reads Liberia as emblematic of the bifurcations and dilemmas of Blackness, but the African modernity that the Libretto sees into doesn’t circulate into or derive out of Liberia itself—to some extent presaging the complexity (and sometime one-sidedness) of the African diaspora’s encounters with specific African publics and locations through the Harlem Renaissance and into the 1960s and 1970s.
Specifically in terms of what I did not know about the New Criticism, I didn’t know much of anything about the literary critic and poet Allen Tate. Let’s just say that demonstrating that Tate’s version of New Criticism was animated by “racial liberalism” is not difficult for Hines. There’s a stomach-churning example in the opening of Chapter Three where Tate blocks Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson from being honored in a reception at Vanderbilt because he argues that any degree of social intermixing between Black intellectuals and authors and predominantly white university communities is bound to lead to interracial sex and marriage. (Robert Penn Warren adds an even more awful postscript to the episode.) I’ve occasionally thought that mid-century anti-communism generally needs a new intellectual history as a whole, at a global scale, and Hines adds something very important to that proposition, which is that at least in the university context, at least with these particular kinds of American liberal anti-communists, fear of racial pluralism as well as a desire to protect their own class position, was a major driver of their antipathy—and a major justification for the undisguised professional brutality they permitted themselves. It’s yet another stone on a soaring mountain of evidence that those who imagine that at some past point the university was a bastion of tolerance for heterodoxy and a site for “healthy debate” are indulging in pure fantasy. (Hines also made me really want to read more deeply about the life and career of Harold Cruse in terms of this thought.)
Hines’ understanding of “outside” the university for about half the book draws a lot from Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s “undercommons”, e.g., it is not a strict description of intellectuals operating independently of university institutions but instead a kind of “fugitive” envisioning of Black literary and cultural life in the 1950s that moves in and out of university environments as well as other institutions and locations as necessary for the purpose of attacking racial liberalism and postwar American capitalism. I think that this fugitivity even includes radical political organizations and affiliations, e.g., many of the writers that Hines is tracking actually move in and out of formal interest in or association with communism or socialism, and not merely because of the dangers of those associations in that historical moment, but also it seems to me to avoid being pinned down in a fixed orthodoxy.
The more formal sense of “outside” in the book is the focus of Chapter Four, which looks at institutionalized educational projects like the Jefferson School of Social Science in New York, “labor schools” that were at least partially organized by and financed by the Communist Party. This is an interesting sense of “outside” in that while Hines shows that the schools “worked tirelessly” to separate their pedagogy and curriculum from the “American bourgeois university”, they also were institutions in their own right, built in part from faculty who were forced out of mainstream universities by anti-communist persecution as well as from Black intellectuals and artists who had maintained something of the kind of fugitivity that Hines writes about in his previous chapters. The ways in which these schools handled institutionality are really intriguing—in content, consciously antagonistic towards the white university, towards New Criticism, and so on, but also eroding some of the early 20th Century division between the practical and the intellectual that was rooted in DuBois and Washington’s disagreements. In organizational form, not actually that divergent in certain respects, which might just be a simple functional reality. (Compare to an institution like Black Mountain College that was short-lived in part because of the instability of its institutional structures.)
I did keep thinking a bit about a different sense of “outside” that has always interested me that I can see in the pedagogy of the Jefferson School but that is not the main focus of Hines’ interest, which is the assemblages that “self-taught” intellectuals and artists (Black and otherwise) make from scholarship and formalist artistic practices, often to create work that goes unread or unnoticed by well-known scholars or artists (both those inside and at a distance from the academy). I guess a more Gramscian sense of “outside”? Figures like Hughes, Hansberry and John Oliver Killens don’t quite seem “outside” in this sense (except to the New Critical white establishment of the time, I suppose, and even they knew full well that the writers and critics they were keeping at a distance had stature). Hines is interested not just in the history of organizing the outside (even in the sense of disciplined fugitivity) but in organizing in the present, whereas I suppose I’m drawn, for whatever reason, to those instances of outsider status that are more individuated and idiosyncratic—or when they’re collective or connected, are not really engaged in struggle for some overall transformation but are instead highly localized, regionalized, compartmentalized, with the aim of being left alone rather than fighting against dominant power (a different way of thinking about marronage, I think).
Perhaps as a different way of approaching the same point, there’s an interesting tension between arguing that contemporary American literary criticism should learn to appreciate what it has “passed over” through Hines’ own scholarly work—e.g., it should bring the insights of mid-century Black literary criticism into its own present work, not just as a rewriting of the historical development of literary criticism—while also not losing the particularism of that Black literary criticism. (e.g., not just dissolving it into a kind of universalizing acid bath to emerge as left literary criticism of a more familiar sort)—it’s that tension that has been at the bottom of many long-running recurrences of the “race/class debate” in American thought (and elsewhere: it’s a familiar oscillation within the South African academy through the 1970s and into the present). Hines works the tension masterfully, but it does make for a different kind of inside/outside in the sense that Black writers who operated at the edges of the academy (or in disdain of it) and in tension to white liberals like the New Critics like Ellison or Wright feel a bit as if they’re on the outside of the outside because of their antagonistic relationship to the CPUSA. (For example, Hines writes complimentarily of Killens’ novel Youngblood, among other things for its “muddying” of Ellison and Wright’s critique of communism.)