Third Reading Group: "Hope/Pessimism"
King's College London
Virginia Woolf Building (Room 3.01)
26 June 2015, 1.00pm-5.00pm
Readings: Sutton E. Griggs, Imperium in Imperio (1899)
>Nancy Bentley, “Introduction” to “In The Spirit of the Thing: Critique as Enchantment,” J19 1:1 (Spring 2013) pp.147-53
> Anne Cheng, “Introduction” to Second Skin (Oxford: OUP, 2011)
> Fred Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness,” South Atlantic Quarterly 112:4 (Fall 2013) pp.737-780
> Robyn Wiegman, “The Ends of New Americanism,” New Literary History 42:3 (Summer 2011) p.385-407
Recent theories of reading have considered whether we are now at a moment that is post-critique. Which is to say, where scholarship of the past thirty years has deployed what Paul Ricoeur memorably termed “the hermeneutics of suspicion,” critical theory today instead is attempting to sound a more politically positive note. As such, a number of new reading modes have emerged over the past four or five years that have sought to create methodologies that might frame such a position, including surface reading, reparative reading, enchanted critique, and more nebulous critical utopianisms. This move has not only generated a new theoretical canon, with thinkers like Jacques Rancière and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick taking the place of those like Frederic Jameson, but also a more capacious sense of what constitutes the specifically literary object of study, expanding it to include diverse genres, marginalised material cultures, and much more besides.
Nonetheless, a particularly intellectually compelling divergence from this increasingly dominant mode has emerged in African American studies, a development that is even more interesting for its simultaneity. Evolving coterminously with these calls for enchantment, what has been termed “Afro-Pessimism” has sought to rephrase African American studies in a less triumphalist mode. For scholars of the nineteenth century, such a move is of particular importance. Given the systemic nature of the crimes committed in the name of racial difference throughout the nineteenth century, the study of race and slavery surely might be something like the ne plus ultra for the new hermeneutics of hope. It would seem impossible, naive, and critically irresponsible to endorse enchanted reading methods when confronted with the wretched historical fact of such a large-scale oppression. Moreover, given the recent events in the United States that confound the notion of it being “post-racial” nation, such a critique of hope might extend into our own political present.
But perhaps not. This reading group will explore the contrasts and overlaps between these two critical strands by reading Sutton Griggs's utopian novel Imperium in Imperio (1899) under the rubric of “Hope/Pessimism.” This self-published text by an author whose critical stock is on the rise curiously embodies some of the intellectual discontinuities described above. It is a book that is simultaneously radically utopian while also fatalistically defeated. Telling the story of an all-black nation within Texas, it in many way pre-empts some of the debates and fissures within the critical field, by exploring the dialectic between historical change and oppression. We will therefore use this text to think through the theoretical issues, in the hope that the text might provide a precise locus for them. More generally speaking, we will also consider Griggs’s own often immensely uneven oeuvre within the African American and nineteenth-century canon, a debate contextualised by the current project to release a critical edition of his collected works edited by Kenneth Warren. The primary reading will be framed by four articles that set out some of the key terms in the two critical fields and which make reference, sometimes extensive, sometimes passing, to the nineteenth-century world of which Griggs’s novel was a part.
King's College London
Virginia Woolf Building (Room 3.01)
26 June 2015, 1.00pm-5.00pm
Readings: Sutton E. Griggs, Imperium in Imperio (1899)
>Nancy Bentley, “Introduction” to “In The Spirit of the Thing: Critique as Enchantment,” J19 1:1 (Spring 2013) pp.147-53
> Anne Cheng, “Introduction” to Second Skin (Oxford: OUP, 2011)
> Fred Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness,” South Atlantic Quarterly 112:4 (Fall 2013) pp.737-780
> Robyn Wiegman, “The Ends of New Americanism,” New Literary History 42:3 (Summer 2011) p.385-407
Recent theories of reading have considered whether we are now at a moment that is post-critique. Which is to say, where scholarship of the past thirty years has deployed what Paul Ricoeur memorably termed “the hermeneutics of suspicion,” critical theory today instead is attempting to sound a more politically positive note. As such, a number of new reading modes have emerged over the past four or five years that have sought to create methodologies that might frame such a position, including surface reading, reparative reading, enchanted critique, and more nebulous critical utopianisms. This move has not only generated a new theoretical canon, with thinkers like Jacques Rancière and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick taking the place of those like Frederic Jameson, but also a more capacious sense of what constitutes the specifically literary object of study, expanding it to include diverse genres, marginalised material cultures, and much more besides.
Nonetheless, a particularly intellectually compelling divergence from this increasingly dominant mode has emerged in African American studies, a development that is even more interesting for its simultaneity. Evolving coterminously with these calls for enchantment, what has been termed “Afro-Pessimism” has sought to rephrase African American studies in a less triumphalist mode. For scholars of the nineteenth century, such a move is of particular importance. Given the systemic nature of the crimes committed in the name of racial difference throughout the nineteenth century, the study of race and slavery surely might be something like the ne plus ultra for the new hermeneutics of hope. It would seem impossible, naive, and critically irresponsible to endorse enchanted reading methods when confronted with the wretched historical fact of such a large-scale oppression. Moreover, given the recent events in the United States that confound the notion of it being “post-racial” nation, such a critique of hope might extend into our own political present.
But perhaps not. This reading group will explore the contrasts and overlaps between these two critical strands by reading Sutton Griggs's utopian novel Imperium in Imperio (1899) under the rubric of “Hope/Pessimism.” This self-published text by an author whose critical stock is on the rise curiously embodies some of the intellectual discontinuities described above. It is a book that is simultaneously radically utopian while also fatalistically defeated. Telling the story of an all-black nation within Texas, it in many way pre-empts some of the debates and fissures within the critical field, by exploring the dialectic between historical change and oppression. We will therefore use this text to think through the theoretical issues, in the hope that the text might provide a precise locus for them. More generally speaking, we will also consider Griggs’s own often immensely uneven oeuvre within the African American and nineteenth-century canon, a debate contextualised by the current project to release a critical edition of his collected works edited by Kenneth Warren. The primary reading will be framed by four articles that set out some of the key terms in the two critical fields and which make reference, sometimes extensive, sometimes passing, to the nineteenth-century world of which Griggs’s novel was a part.
