A timely reconsideration of the history of the profession, Outside
Literary Studies investigates how midcentury Black writers built
a critical practice tuned to the struggle against racism and
colonialism.
This striking contribution to Black literary studies examines the
practices of Black writers in the mid-twentieth century to revise our
understanding of the institutionalization of literary studies in
America. Andy Hines uncovers a vibrant history of interpretive
resistance to university-based New Criticism by Black writers of the
American left. These include well-known figures such as Langston
Hughes and Lorraine Hansberry as well as still underappreciated
writers like Melvin B. Tolson and Doxey Wilkerson. In their critical
practice, these and other Black writers levied their critique from
"outside" venues: behind the closed doors of the Senate
Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, in the classroom at a
communist labor school under FBI surveillance, and in a host of
journals. From these vantages, Black writers not only called out the
racist assumptions of the New Criticism, but also defined Black
literary and interpretive practices to support communist and other
radical world-making efforts in the mid-twentieth century. Hines's
book thus offers a number of urgent contributions to literary
studies: it spotlights a canon of Black literary texts that belong to
an important era of anti-racist struggle, and it fills in the
pre-history of the rise of Black studies and of ongoing Black dissent
against the neoliberal university.
