How Black Atlantic literature can challenge conventions and redefine literary scholarship

Abolition Time is an invitation to reenvision abolitionist justice through literary studies. Placing critical race theory, queer theory, critical prison studies, and antiprison activism in conversation with an archive of Black Atlantic literatures of slavery, Jess A. Goldberg reveals how literary studies can help undo carceral epistemologies embedded in language and poetics.

Goldberg examines poetry, drama, and novels from the nineteenth century through the twenty-first—such as William Wells Brown’s The Escape, Angelina Weld Grimké’s Rachel, Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen—to consider literature and literary scholarship’s roles in shaping societal paradigms. Focusing on how Black Atlantic literature disrupts the grammar of law and order, they show how these texts propose nonlinear theories of time that imagine a queer relationality characterized by care rather than inheritance, property, or biology. 

Abolition Time offers a framework for thinking critically about what is meant by the term justice in the broadest and deepest sense, using close reading to inform the question of abolishing prisons or the police and to think seriously about the most fundamental questions at the heart of the abolitionist movement.

Connecting literary studies, media theory, and cultural criticism, The Afterlife of Taste Hierarchies in Contemporary U.S. Art and Literature offers a fresh vocabulary for understanding how we evaluate art and each other in an age of digital mediation. Drawing on works and artifacts ranging from Beyoncé’s Lemonade and Andrea Long Chu’s “China Brain” to Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation and the viral Bernie Sanders mittens meme, Monique Rooney traces how aspirations to refinement and gestures of condescension—once associated with high-, middle-, and lowbrow culture—continue to define aesthetic experience. This book moves between literary and popular forms, attending as closely to the meme’s dispersed creativity as to the novel’s intentional aesthetics.

Agony for Others investigates the phenomenological, rhetorical, and political challenges of representing pain in literature. Pain cries vary between cultural and linguistic groups, and pain expression (such as grimacing or crying) can likewise vary in quality and intensity from person to person, affected by disability, temperament, and past experiences with pain, as well as the experiencer’s own understanding of what that pain is and what it means. Jeremy Colangelo explores pain's role as a subjective indication of objective damage, that, contrary to claims of its subjective privacy, the feeling of pain is always felt in terms of an objectively existing entity (one’s physical body) which is perceivable by others. Thus, pain enters into intersubjectivity through the physical body—one's expressions, words, actions, presence—which then mediates between the self and the other.

Drawing on disability studies, phenomenology, philosophy, and literary studies, Colangelo examines works by Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, Sarah Kane, Elie Wiesel, and Margaret Edson to argue that the belief that pain is incommunicable and thought-destroying obscures its central role in relationships and community formation. Agony for Others demonstrates that pain is not excluded from, but rather constitutive of, intersubjectivity, and argues that the aesthetic dimension of interpretation is essential to understanding the ethical and political role of pain.

Mainstream narratives of the graphic novel’s development describe the form’s “coming of age,” its maturation from pulp infancy to literary adulthood. In Arresting Development, Christopher Pizzino questions these established narratives, arguing that the medium’s history of censorship and marginalization endures in the minds of its present-day readers and, crucially, its authors. Comics and their writers remain burdened by the stigma of literary illegitimacy and the struggles for status that marked their earlier history.

Many graphic novelists are intensely aware of both the medium’s troubled past and their own tenuous status in contemporary culture. Arresting Development presents case studies of four key works—Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Charles Burns’s Black Hole, and Gilbert Hernandez’s Love and Rockets—exploring how their authors engage the problem of comics’ cultural standing. Pizzino illuminates the separation of high and low culture, art and pulp, and sophisticated appreciation and vulgar consumption as continual influences that determine the limits of literature, the status of readers, and the value of the very act of reading.

Art and Answerability contains three of Mikhail Bakhtin's early essays from the years following the Russian Revolution, when Bakhtin and other intellectuals eagerly participated in the debates, lectures, demonstrations, and manifesto writing of the period. Because they predate works that have already been translated, these essays—"Art and Answerability," "Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity," and "The Problem of Content, Material, and Form in Verbal Art"—are essential to a comprehensive understanding of Bakhtin's later works. A superb introduction by Michael Holquist sets out the major themes and concerns of the three essays and identifies their place in the canon of Bakhtin's work and in intellectual history. The introduction, together with Vadim Liapunov's scholarly gloss, makes these essays accessible to students as well as scholars.