Boredom in Contemporary African American Literature

"I am bored with the topic of Atlantic slavery."
- Mat Johnson, Pym1

"Sometimes it's hard to tell what's more interminable, prejudice and discrimination or the goddamn meetings."
- Paul Beatty, The Sellout2

"...and I'm pretending I haven't heard this one before..."
- Terrance Hayes, "The Avocado"3

This essay turns a curious eye toward a recent development in twenty-first-century African American literature: the invocation of boredom, as a formal structure and narrative theme, to diagnose and comment upon the critical mood of black literary and cultural studies today. I am interested in the logic, timing, and significance of this development. Why boredom now? What can literary representations of boredom express or do?

At first glance, my turn to boredom may seem untimely or even scandalous. After all, as Patricia Meyer Spacks has written, "boredom presents itself as a trivial emotion."4 By contrast, we are living in a time of profound and escalating racial crisis, facing the calamity of mass incarceration, systematic assaults on the legislative gains of the modern Civil Rights movement, a growing racial wealth gap, dilapidated schools, a new generation of racialized surveillance and militarized policing, the seemingly ubiquitous spectacle and threat of anti-black violence, and the energetic resurgence of avowed white supremacy. Registering the urgencies of our "catastrophic present," the most powerful impulses within contemporary criticism have looked to commensurate sensibilities to guide our scholarly discourse — among them, the "grander and more prestigious passions" of trauma, grief, and despair.5 Through their forcefulness and scale, these affective registers corroborate a particular narrative of black suffering and survival, in which a "perpetuity of crisis" joins our current condition to origins in the transatlantic slave trade.6 As Christina Sharpe argues in her influential manifesto In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Black Studies now requires "a method of encountering a past that is not past," by way of the "hard emotional, physical, and intellectual work" of bearing witness and practicing care.7 So why boredom now?

To be clear, this essay is not a call to stop thinking or writing about black vulnerability, anti-black violence, or slavery's enduring legacies. Neither do I mean to diminish or dismiss the substantial body of literature and criticism that performs this work with rigor and good faith. My intention is to take boredom seriously — in the hope of elucidating the creative and critical repertoires through which we represent and know our current crisis. For if the present unfolds as the violent, haunted "afterlife of slavery" (as I believe it does), then it also sustains a hegemony of "official antiracism," in which bureaucratic and incorporative strategies for managing minority difference disavow the prior order of explicit white supremacy, while stealthily maintaining it.8 As numerous critics have shown, today's ostensible race liberalism makes it harder to recognize and oppose racism, and easier to become bored by the rhetoric of doing so.9 "Diversity," Sara Ahmed ruefully reminds us, "has been identified as a management term."10 Bearing such insights in mind, this essay wagers that boredom — a mood characterized by frustration, fatigue, and non-catharsis — may help us to think anew about how discourses of racial meaning have emerged and ossified in the decades since the decline of the modern Civil Rights Movement. In particular, I turn my attention toward the disciplinary shape and momentum of black literary and cultural studies, fifty years after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the institutionalization of Black Studies.

As I elaborate in the following section, I regard the dominant modes of black literary production and scholarship today as faithful extensions of discursive practices and priorities that grounded the institutionalization of Black Studies. The literary genre of the contemporary narrative of slavery — alternatively known as the neo-slave narrative or the historical novel of slavery — has been especially noteworthy in this regard.11 Underwritten by Civil Rights and Black Power activism, progressive shifts in historiographical practices, and a cross-disciplinary oeuvre of critical race studies, this acclaimed genre, more than any other distinctive corpus, has consolidated and expressed the moral, political, and intellectual ambitions of black literary and cultural studies. I take it as a given — more, a premise — that Black Studies conceived on this model has produced valuable and necessary knowledge about the history and persistence of racism. Moreover, it has radically reshaped what we know and how we think about history, epistemology, and the category of the human. Yet the following is also true: the contemporary narrative of slavery and its critical discourses derive considerable authority and seductive power from the belief that they will effect social change by raising the consciousness of their readers.12 Decades after the invention of such insurgent art and scholarship, justice and liberation remain frustratingly deferred. For a growing number of black writers and African Americanist critics working within or in close proximity to the university, the present marks a tipping point. Repeated statements of knowledge that fail to have political ramifications come to feel rote; the "value forms and belief structures" through which we constituted our professional subjectivity struggle to sustain the ardor of our original faith.13

Boredom, according to Spacks, "can usefully be understood as faith's opposite," so it is not surprising that this mood has appeared with increasing frequency as African American literature's diagnostic figure for our literary and critical moment.14 In novels like Percival Everett's Erasure (2001), Mat Johnson's Pym (2011) and Loving Day (2015), Paul Beatty's The Sellout (2015), and Danzy Senna's New People (2017), boredom, variously construed, names a strategy of self-reflexive representation through which authors track and comment on the "distance traveled" from black literary and cultural studies' "inaugural moment to the languages, affects, and debates that comprise its contemporary form."15 Although boredom often appears as a minor, personal emotion, in these texts, it figures an extensive critique of the discursive habits of black literary and cultural studies, as well as current institutional structures of minority inclusion. By doing so, boredom at once poses and addresses a series of timely and existential questions: What interpretations of the present do the feelings and forms of boredom bring into view? How does boredom render valid moral-intellectual projects as rote, predictable? How does boredom obstruct our capacity for "aesthetic or critical response"? How might it "prompt us to look for new strategies of...engagement"?16

In the sections that follow, I describe how boredom works as a critical lens onto contemporary black literature and Black Studies scholarship in the humanities. The first section lays the foundation for my central case study by presenting a genealogical sketch of the contemporary narrative of slavery, before and alongside black literary and cultural studies' ascent. My goal is to outline the salient representational norms and discursive habits that underlie twenty-first century African American literary emplotments of boredom. The second, final section turns to Johnson's Pym as an exemplar and guide for understanding how boredom operates in contemporary African American fiction. An academic novel written by an author who himself straddles the novelist-professor divide, Pym stages both its constitutive devotion to, and its growing fatigue with, the affective and representational norms that govern black literary and cultural studies. I follow and interpret the novel's plot as a familiar campus setting gives way to a literal and metafictional voyage. On this voyage, the protagonist's search for racial origins leads to his enslavement and fugitive escape; the seeming inevitability of the slavery plot, in turn, corresponds to a protracted exploration of boredom and a recursive, halting quest to represent and know the racial present differently. 

I.

Most scholars of contemporary African American literature locate the moving target of the present within the "post-Civil Rights period" — an interval of roughly fifty years that began with the demise of formal, legal segregation, and includes the subsequent, anti-triumphalist apprehension of the limits and vulnerabilities of de jure reform. The dominant literary form that gives expression to this period is the contemporary narrative of slavery. In its earliest iterations, beginning in the mid-1960s, the contemporary narrative of slavery was classifiable as a literature of historical recovery. Galvanized by "transformations in African-American racial consciousness in the wake of the Civil Rights movement" and "the concomitant rise of New Left social history, with its focus on history written 'from the bottom up,'" novelists such as Margaret Walker, Ernest J. Gaines, Barbara Chase-Riboud, and Sherley Anne Williams sought to reclaim for African Americans narrative authority over the slave past.17 Walker, who is widely credited as the inaugural author of this literary phenomenon, has described her "main objective" in precisely this spirit: "I wanted to tell the story my grandmother had told me, and to set the record straight where Black people are concerned in terms of the Civil War, of slavery, segregation and Reconstruction."18 For Walker, as for many writers working in the genre, "setting the record straight" entails archival and emotional labor, and operates on the faith that "history's lies can be corrected and its omissions, restored."19 Working in the genre is also a strategy for claiming continuity with the past by finding precedent and inspiration for modern political struggles in histories of abolitionism, resistance, and fugitive escape.

But what began as a genre of empowerment and self-discovery was quickly infiltrated by disillusionment with the political present and unresolved grief over the ancestral past. Madhu Dubey traces to the mid-1970s a second, now dominant mode of the contemporary narrative of slavery, in which plots are designed to provoke "skepticism about racial progress" and to "dispute the idea that the Civil Rights movement marked the completion of a long struggle against racial inequality launched in the era of slavery."20 Early examples of such novels include Gayl Jones's Corregidora (1975), Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979), David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident (1981), and Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987). Characterized by historically recursive plots, formal and thematic preoccupations with trauma, and frequent invocations of ghosts, secrets, and heritable scars, these haunted and haunting texts do not so much renounce the desire of the prior, recovery-driven and generally more optimistic literature, as linger with their failure to consummate that desire. By staging their protagonists' vulnerability to the past, these contemporary narratives of slavery articulate a distinct conception of history: one that finds the meaning of racial injury in its origins, and recourse to slavery's trauma in vigilant practices of remembrance and grief.

Morrison's Beloved­ — her epic, interiorizing novel about a fugitive woman who murders her child to prevent her from being remanded to slavery — is unanimously acknowledged as the archetype of this historical vision, and indeed, as the exemplary contemporary narrative of slavery. Winner of numerous literary awards, including the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the work gave new energy to an already prodigious historical turn in African American literature and secured the contemporary narrative of slavery's prestige.21 Beloved is neither the first contemporary narrative of slavery nor the originator of its signature tropes, but it is the book that codified the genre's governing norms, sparked its subsequent, unabated proliferation, and, as Stephen Best argues, shaped "the way a generation of scholars conceived of its ethical relationship to the past."22 We may connect Beloved's tremendous influence to its moral urgency, the beauty and depth of its prose, and its formal intricacy. The book's influence should also be connected to Morrison's expression of a resonant cultural desire to restore dignity to public memories of the enslaved and craft "a bridge of restitution or healing, between the authorial present and the ancestral past."23 But there is a more prosaic consideration as well. In accounting for the endurance and scale of Beloved's influence, we should also note the timing of the novel's publication, which coincided fortuitously with the rising institutional stature of black literary and cultural studies.

To be sure, African American literature had been written and studied well before the late twentieth-century, but it was long regarded as a niche interest, garnering limited scholarly attention and infrequent recognition as an established and significant aesthetic tradition. A spectacular wave of campus activism in the 1960s and '70s — most concentrated between 1966 and 1973, and intensified by the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968 — paved the way for black literary and cultural studies' new institutional fate. Through a series of highly visible protests, black students, faculty, and their supporters issued demands for "new courses, faculty appointments, and the creation of instructional units."24 Both the interdisciplinary field of Black Studies and closely linked disciplinary formations in English, history, sociology, and so on, "grew directly out of the mandates of the Black Studies movement."25

If the '60s and '70s were decades of disruption and "fiery reform," then the '80s were a decade of institutionalization, ushering in a new "focus on legitimacy." 26 Burdened on one side by the entrenched racism of academe, and on the other by demands for accountability to its founding social movements and institutional sponsors, an elite and administratively effective generation of African American literary scholars devised several strategies to establish a "canon and professional critical vocabulary to distinguish African American literature as an object of knowledge."27 One such strategy was literary historical excavation: an archival project that contested the received canon's racial homogeneity, and located modern black writing within a tradition of its own. Another was a series of highly visible manifestos and intra-field debates about the texts, ideologies, and methods that should anchor the discipline. A third strategy was deliberate and extensive engagement with a contemporaneous body of critical race studies, concentrated in legal studies and united by its aim of moving the subject of race from the periphery to the center of scholarly thought.28 Blackness, on this view, is not only the possession and concern of a marginalized minority, but also the fantasy of a debased other against which the very notion of American democracy has been forged and upheld.29 Morrison again played a prominent role in this cross-disciplinary interface, now as a literary and social theorist.30

The year of Beloved's publication, 1987, was a particularly important year for black literary scholarship's state-of-the field debates. In this year, the English Institute hosted its important session on "Slavery and the Literary Imagination," subsequently published as a volume edited by Deborah E. McDowell and Arnold Rampersad; New Literary History printed a contentious forum on the motives and methodologies that best serve the project of black literary criticism; Cornel West wrote "Minority Discourse and the Pitfalls of Canon Formation," a field genealogy that placed Black Studies in the context of recent geopolitical history; Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s Figures in Black offered a formidable overview of the African American literary tradition from the eighteenth century to the present; and Hortense J. Spillers published "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe," a paradigm-shifting inquiry into the ideological, psychic, and linguistic legacies of slavery.31 Beloved's prominent co-occurrence with this formative wave of scholarship positioned it as a logical test case for emergent theorizations of the field. In addition, its critical appeal was amplified by its apparent corroboration of several premises that fortified the institutional legitimization of black literary and cultural studies.

For one thing, the novel's overwhelming critical success promised to inoculate not only its author, but the very field that claimed her, against racist allegations of aesthetic inferiority and intellectual illegitimacy.32 Serious, complex, and "almost unanimously praised as a masterpiece," Beloved was a "specifically African American text"33 that could shore up meritocratic arguments for taking black literature and criticism seriously. Moreover, through its capacious, historicizing view and its immersive engagement with "the nuances of African American language, music, everyday life, and cultural history,"34 Beloved affirmed Black Studies' constitutive assertions of a rich, autonomous, and enduring cultural tradition. Finally, Beloved's critical appeal for the era of institutionalization was enhanced by interpretations of the novel as a direct agent of social change. In spite of the novel's profound ambivalence about the restorative capacities of traumatic memory, such interpretations were advanced by popular and scholarly reviews, by Morrison's own paratextual reflections on her ambitions and agency, and by prizes, such as the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and the Frederic G. Melcher Book Award, which praised Beloved for its political and humanitarian import.35 Taken together, this reception corroborated an ideal of black literature as an intellectual enterprise with unique — if ambiguously defined — claims to social relevance and accountability.

If, before Beloved, the contemporary narrative of slavery was regarded as an emergent narrative form that had yet to amass proportionate critical attention, then, in the thirty years since its publication, the genre has come to dominate African American book sales, prize nominations, and scholarly discourses.36 An abbreviated list of relevant literary titles in this tradition would include: J. California Cooper's Family (1991), Caryl Phillips's Crossing the River (1993), Fred D'Aguiar's Feeding the Ghosts (1997), Charles Johnson's Middle Passage (1998), Phyllis Alesia Perry's Stigmata (1998), Carolivia Herron's Thereafter Johnnie (2001), Edward P. Jones's The Known World (2004), Toni Morrison's A Mercy (2008), M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong! (2008), Marlon James's The Book of Night Women (2009), James McBride's The Good Lord Bird (2013), Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing (2016), and Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad (2017). Four of these texts — by Johnson, Jones, McBride, and Whitehead — have won the National Book Award; and two — by Jones and Whitehead — have won the Pulitzer Prize. Moreover, this veritable explosion of new literature on slavery has been steadily outpaced by prolific scholarship on a range of relevant subjects: on the history and form of the genre such as Ashraf Rushdy's Neo-Slave Narratives (1999) and Remembering Generations (2001), Caroline Rody's The Daughter's Return (2001), and Arlene Keizer's Black Subjects (2004); on representations of slavery in the broader culture such as Lisa Woolfork's Embodying American Slavery in Contemporary Culture (2008), Christina Sharpe's Monstrous Intimacies (2010), and Kimberly Juanita Brown's The Repeating Body (2015); and on slavery's enduring psychic, cultural, linguistic and economic legacies such as Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic (1993), Ian Baucom's Specters of the Atlantic (2005), and M. Jacqui Alexander's Pedagogies of Crossing (2006).

Without question, Morrison's genius was key to consolidating and advancing the vision of black literary and cultural studies that quickly became hegemonic. But the institutionalization of black literary and cultural studies played an essential role in this process as well. For, as genius unlocks and inspires the talents of others, the formation of a discipline compels the assembly of cohesive archives, the development and codification of legible protocols, and the nurturing of shared investments in critical vocabularies, scholarly methods, and foundational values and beliefs. In a phrase, institutionalization demands the repetition of norms. I hasten to clarify that "repetition" and "norms" are not code for disparagement. I use them not to imply a lack of creativity in literature and scholarship, but to describe the prerequisite to intelligibility and the process of citationality through which new disciplines take shape. Since the 1980s, the study of African American literature and culture has been formalized by the self-constituting and self-affirming repetition of emergent aesthetic and scholarly conventions in journals and books and at conferences and symposia. Such repetition has fueled the production of new knowledge, challenged and transformed traditional disciplines, and contributed to meaningful shifts in received wisdom about academe's rightful archives, functions, and constituencies.

But we should not count institutionalization as an uncomplicated win for early Black Studies proponents. After all, institutionalization is inescapably a practice of small-c conservatism: its constitutive repetitions are performed in the service of collecting and regulating knowledge. No radical impulse can be institutionalized without substantive concessions to reformist compromise. In recent years, numerous studies have shown how, in the case of Black Studies, the conservatism that inheres in processes of formalizing knowledge was strategically appropriated by "mainstream universities and philanthropic organizations," which sought to conciliate and redirect disruptive, activist energies. Rolland Murray deftly describes a field history in which intentional funding practices — by 1990, tallying up to tens of millions of dollars from the Ford Foundation alone — disproportionately sponsored liberal scholarship that, in its mode of address if not in its explicit content, solicited and confirmed the legitimizing authority of the academy and its corporate donors.37

Staging the history of black literary and cultural studies' institutionalization as both triumph and surrender, I mean to gesture, on one level, to a record of compromise. At the same time, this compromise must also be seen as a symptom of the field's own desires to assimilate to the university. As Roderick Ferguson helps us to see, the formation of minority discourses is best understood as "disruptive and recuperative" of the university's hegemonic authority: such discourses disrupt hegemony by forcing "new modes of interpretation and new institutional visions within the American academy," yet tacitly concede to power in their appeals for "affirmation, recognition, and legitimacy."38

What interests me in the present article is not the adjudication of black literary and cultural studies' radicalism or co-option, but the calcification of certain disciplinary norms that have come to unite much of today's literature and humanistic scholarship on slavery. According to these norms, the guiding themes for black literature and African Americanist study include the traumatic resonance of Middle Passage as a site of rupture and origin, the desire for historical return and repair, and the ethics and mechanics of intergenerational memory. Critics work from the conviction that the exploration of these themes will enrich and expand the horizons of academic study, and even help redress slavery's foundational violence. As Morrison once explained in response to a question about "why [she] and other [contemporary] Afro-American novelists made [a] decisive turn to history": "It's got to be because we are responsible."39

Robyn Wiegman provides guidance for thinking about the disciplinary life of such "responsibility" in Object Lessons (2012), arguing persuasively that the aspiration to social efficacy differentiates minority discourses and other "identity knowledges" in kind from the habits and norms of less explicitly politicized disciplines. Her point is not only that contemporary, identity-based epistemologies "are animated by powerful political desires." Her point is also that such knowledge formations seek self-realization "as a living habit of — and for — social justice."40 Another way to say this would be that "identity knowledges" are predicated on, and repeat as their foundational disciplinary norm, an investment in an extra-academic telos. An avowed "political destination" endows the field with moral seriousness and urgency, but also burdens it with exorbitant expectations about creative and critical agency.41

Reading the contemporary discourse on slavery through the lens of Wiegman's formulation highlights its roots in and current connection to social activism; its political and psychological objective of "setting the record straight" (per Walker); and its cultivation of moral-political vigilance as an essential feature of its epistemological intervention.42 But crucially, the contemporary narrative of slavery and the scholarship that surrounds it also exemplify Wiegman's concern that identity knowledges ask too much of scholarly (and creative) practices, and that in doing so, they are bound to disappoint us. My assertion, to be clear, is not that black literary and cultural studies has fooled itself into untenable optimism. My claim is less intuitive, and to my mind, much more fascinating: today's African American literature and scholarship on slavery recognizes and avows — indeed, thematizes and re-inscribes — the disappointment of its founding desire.

Take, for example, Beloved's famous refrain, "this is not a story to pass on," which articulates, in its closing pages, the novel's quiet retreat from its narrative engine of zealous, historical desire.43 Following the protagonist's narrow escape from a near-murderous ghost from her past, the refrain issues an injunction against remembering too much ("don't pass this on") even as its double entendre carries the stubborn trace of faith in the value of historical memory ("don't pass on this"). This twinned figure of historical desire and its frustration carries the message of a broader archive as well — recall that beginning in the 1970s and certainly since Beloved, the majority of contemporary narratives of slavery have rejected triumphalist endings, culminating instead in deep uncertainty about the promise of historical return. A similar frustration pervades the leading literary and cultural studies scholarship on slavery, especially in the twenty-first century, when the historical turn, as Saidiya Hartman has poignantly written, knows itself from the start as a scholarly gesture "predicated on impossibility ... and intent on achieving an impossible goal" of retrieving and redressing the slave past.44

The question upon us now is this: if the contemporary narrative of slavery and the scholarship that surrounds it cannot fulfill the desire that summons them into being, then what becomes of our sincere and professionally nurtured attachments to the genre? Pym's provocative notion is that the decades-long repetition and deferral of the contemporary narrative of slavery's extra-literary desire has yielded an unnerving situation in which we feel bored with a knowledge project, in spite of our personal, ethical, and professional commitment to it.

II.

An expert on the slave narrative with a rogue passion for Edgar Allan Poe, Pym's hero, Chris Jaynes, is an out-of-work professor hired to "purvey the minority perspective" at a liberal arts college in upstate New York, but subsequently denied tenure there (13). His research chimes with, but also makes strange, post-Civil Rights black literary discourse as I have outlined it: concerned with the legacy of the slave past, Chris looks to an antebellum archive to discover and redress "the very fossil record" of "modern racial thought" (8). The work of literary historical excavation and analysis, he contends, is not esoteric but essential: "It's about finding the answer to why we have failed to truly become a postracial society. It's about finding a cure!" (14).

Although he is initially devastated by the news of tenure denial, Chris forestalls despair when he comes upon an archival discovery. A nineteenth-century "Negro Servant's Memoir" confirms the facticity of Edgar Allan Poe's only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, and reveals that Dirk Peters, traveling companion to the titular Pym, was both African American and real. If this is so, Chris surmises, then the racially symbolic landscapes of Poe's novel must also exist: Tsalal, Poe's island of murderous savages whose blackness is so complete that it extends even to their teeth, and Tekeli-li, the neighboring land, whose representative figure is "the perfect whiteness of the snow."45 Taking liberties with interpretation, Chris imagines Tsalal to be "the great undiscovered African Diasporan homeland" populated by "a group of our people" who "achieve[d] victory over slavery in all its forms, escaping completely from the progression of Westernization and colonization to form a society outside of time and history" (39). Eager to corroborate his literary historical discovery and passionate in his belief that not just history but racial redemption is at stake, Chris enlists a ragtag crew of family, friends, and strangers to journey to the Antarctic site of Poe's seafaring adventure.

Poe's antebellum Narrative serves as Pym's most explicit source text and narrative guide, but Johnson's novel is equally indebted to the late twentieth-century writing of Morrison — her novels that imaginatively reanimate the slave past and her critical explorations of racial representation in literature. In particular, Morrison's best-selling polemic, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), anticipates Pym's narrative trajectory and its protagonist's guiding scholarly claims with its identification of Poe as an architect of American racial symbolism, its insistence on whiteness as an object of study and site for political intervention, and its extravagant promise to make African Americanist literary criticism an "intellectual adventure" as exciting as "the original charting of the New World."46 In effect, Chris's repetition of Poe's Antarctic voyage is more accurately a repetition of Morrison's critical repetition of Poe. Through this embedded citationality, Pym produces an expansive meta-literary discourse that convenes the critical consciousness of 21^st-century academe with African Americanist literature and scholarship of the 1980s and '90s, and a historical canon of American racial thought.

Upon arrival in Antarctica, Chris's two aims — to deconstruct the "pathology" of whiteness and find salvation in a blackness uncontaminated by history — merge with an experiential education in slavery's meanings and effects. Following a series of poor choices and unlucky events, the crew is stranded in Antarctica, cut off from the rest of the world, and forced into the employ of an exotic community of "snow honkies" (8, 108). Stunned by his own enslavement, Chris, like so many protagonists of contemporary narratives of slavery before him, must learn first-hand that slavery's legacy is neither escapable nor fully accessible through academic knowledge. In a succinct and humorous reflection that tropes a familiar epiphany of the genre, Chris remarks: "Turns out [...] that my thorough and exhaustive scholarship into the slave narratives of the African Diaspora in no way prepared me to actually become a fucking slave!" (160).

Pym references and reprises post-Civil Rights black literary discourse's most familiar premises, feelings, and desires. It shows us contemporary subjects being remanded to slavery. We learn of the traumas of the past and the disappointments of the present. We witness the voicing and frustration of so many of the field's foundational desires: to speak back to an inherited corpus of racist writing, to make scholarship commensurable with an agenda for reparative social justice, and to redress or redeem historical injuries. In these and other ways, the novel primes the reader to anticipate for Chris a painful yet necessary encounter with his past. But Pym also departs from the conventions of the field, beginning with early and conspicuous authorial choices, such as the novel's satirical tone and its fantastic, Antarctic landscape. The reader might be tempted to dismiss these moves as mere idiosyncrasies, but then midway through the novel, Johnson makes it impossible to read Pym as just another iteration of a familiar racial discourse. As Chris confronts his own enslavement, he makes this startling confession: "I am bored with the topic of Atlantic slavery" (159).

Appearing in a short digression from the novel's major action, the assertion of boredom cuts against the premise of the preceding narrative and betrays Chris's often earnest and urgent descriptions of his scholarly purpose. If Chris is bored, and presumably has been bored for a while, what on earth motivated him to travel to Antarctica? For the experienced reader of contemporary African American literature, Chris's boredom also unsettles our disciplinary expectations for the proper affective register of historical return. Consider, by contrast, Morrison's description of Beloved's intended emotional effect: "I wanted the reader to be kidnapped, thrown ruthlessly into an alien environment as the first step into a shared experience with the book's population."47 By invoking and then pivoting away from the presumption of traumatic intensity, Pym turns a self-conscious eye on the script provided by the contemporary discourse on slavery and casts the genre in a new light.

Put another way, Chris's revelation that he is "bored with the topic of Atlantic slavery" works to differentiate his scholarly perspective from Morrison's field-defining point of view. Whereas Morrison was a pioneer of the historical turn in African American literature and criticism — one who could describe her work of imagining the slave past as "formidable and pathless"48 — Chris writes more than a quarter of a century later, at a time when "so many have come to the topic of slavery because they think the subject matter will give them gravitas, or prizes, or because they find comfort in its familiarity" (159). So even as Chris repeats Morrison's arguments, often with reverential fidelity, boredom belies his intense identification with the literary icon and lays bare the field's susceptibility to "[becoming] disciplinary instead of interventionist, [mimicking] radicality instead of teaching us how to become radically undone."49 In spite of himself, Chris indicts both his fictional research program and the novel itself, locating them both within an intellectual discourse on slavery that began as a revisionist challenge to received knowledge, but has become widely accepted — at least in academia and in popular literary and cinematic portrayals.

My argument, to be clear, is not that boredom evinces the resolution or end of slavery's traumatic legacy. It is not that we can "get over" or "move on" from the past, now that the story has been told, and indeed, enshrined by literary and academic discourse. Rather, boredom brings to view a mode of literary and scholarly engagement that confronts us with the limits of its agency — and the limits of our own, as readers, writers, and critics.50 Chris is appalled that so many books can do so little. According to his lament, literature and scholarship degrade the magnitude and horror of the slave past "with their nothingness" (159). By repeating the traumatic narrative to the point of his own boredom, Chris dramatizes the genre's tragic ineffectuality, its inability to compel the radical change it desires. At the same time, his bored repetitions call into question his own professional investment in calcified habits of thought and expression, and beg the question of how else we might respond to the legacies of the slave past.

Chris's confession of boredom marks a turning point in the novel. It is a belated revelation, whose integration into the plot requires the reader to adjust her orientation toward Pym and its literary and critical intertexts. But this is not to say that boredom is unprecedented by page 159. On the contrary, boredom — or perhaps more accurately, boredoms — suffuse the institutional context that Pym takes as its narrative point of departure. Boredom, according to Adam Phillips, is the mood that accompanies waiting. The event that we await when we are bored is the enlivening of our own desire. As bored subjects, we find ourselves in a "state of suspended anticipation in which things are started and nothing begins"; we are possessed by "that most absurd and paradoxical wish, the wish for a desire." The feeling of boredom is a feeling of being stalled, stuck, or entrapped; but in boredom, one is also restless, unquiet, moving in place. "Instead of 'expectancy and stillness' there is dreary agitation .... [One] is like a man who walks as quickly as possible through a gallery" seeking a picture "to hold his attention."51

Following a similar pattern, in the novel's more or less familiar near future, Black Studies has secured an established position in the U.S. academy, although the liberatory optimism that marked the field's inception — the faith that "an academy [...] reborn from the protests and agitation of the sixties and seventies [would] make good on its promise to minorities" — remains unfulfilled.52 A case in point: the college Diversity Committee, whose existence and ineffectuality the novel takes for granted, is said to have "one primary purpose: so the school can say it has a diversity committee" (18). As the only black male faculty member at his unnamed college, Chris's role is to sit on the Diversity Committee, "because if there aren't any minorities on the committee, the committee isn't diverse" (18). But as he explains to his replacement hire — an "eager" and "earnest" black man in whom Chris sees a younger version of himself — "nothing the committee has suggested in thirty years has ever been funded" (17, 18).

On Chris's view, the University's bureaucracy and consumer-orientation perpetuates this predictable and non-generative cycle, with its subscription to a shallow and insincere politics of racial representation. Chris posits, in other words, that the compromise of institutionalization was ultimately only a win for the institution. As he tells his replacement hire, "You're here so you can assuage their guilt without making them actually change a damn thing" (20). Chris produces a compelling critique of his professional tokenization, yet although his research is stifled by the co-optive interventions of the University, it is equally hemmed in by his own unproductive fidelity to the habits and norms that secured his field's legitimation. Though righteous in disposition, Chris is perennially stalled in his work: he does not publish, he does not get promoted, and he teaches the same class every semester to a room full of "empty chairs" (8). Although Chris is ostensibly committed to research as a historical exposé that "[relates] directly to the way we [live] our daily lives and [perceive] reality itself," every scene that shows him discussing his scholarship features an audience that is absent, dismissive — or, yes, bored (8).

Thus, from the outset of his novel, Johnson represents the contemporary university as a site of boring, ineffectual repetition, where scholarly content is monotonously recycled, endless meetings yield no substantive changes, and the labor of an African Americanist is reduced to the identity of "Professional Negro" (7). We may read the ensuing adventure plot, in which Chris leaves this caricature of our institutional present as a speculative fantasy of how black literary studies might free itself from its present constraints. But crucially, Johnson's fantasy of renewed African Americanist intellectual freedom is limited from the start by the habituated patterns of Chris's interests and investigations. Much as Phillips describes boredom as a "paradoxical ... wish for a desire," Chris's wish for something different — a "rogue intellectual career ... [and] a new life for myself" — is a wish that has yet to realize its shape (35). So, even as Chris leaves the college and professes his desire to transform the extant model of African Americanist study, he is compelled, by habit or personal limitation, to pursue the transformation through the assumptions and critical practices that have already disappointed him: a historical orientation toward unresolved traumas of the slave past, and a belief in the direct political agency of black literary scholarship.

Indeed, Chris's departure from the college does not even signify liberation from the para-academic contexts of Black Studies in the twenty-first century. These, too, are reduplicated in caricature, for although Chris is the voyage's originator and intellectual guide, he is not, strictly speaking, its captain. For this role, he appoints his cousin, Booker Jaynes, "the true leader of our group": a once-heroic veteran of the Civil Rights Movement, whose habitually repeated platitudes fail to command the contemporary scene (143). Through rote grievances and an impulse to march in response to every social wrong, Booker rehearses the moral cause for racial justice into deadened cliché. But, more than a parody of the Civil Rights legacy gone stale, Booker personifies the Civil Rights legacy gone corporate. As "the world's only civil rights activist turned deep-sea diver," he may be the butt of the joke, but he is also a moderately successful, neoliberal entrepreneur — a leader who refashions the ship into a "minority-owned business" and contracts with Coca Cola to make Chris's esoteric quest double as a profitable water bottling campaign (70, 73). In keeping with the phenomenon Murray calls the "incorporation" of black literature and criticism, Booker joins and appropriates Chris's intellectual adventure, promising the former professor resources and freedom for his scholarly inquiry. 53 At the helm of the ship, then — in the partnership between the minoritarian knowledge producer and the freedom fighter turned state-funded capitalist — we find a central irony of Pym's adventure plot: the genre's implicit promise of well-paced, original enticements is replaced with the exhausted wish that this time, the familiar pathways of contemporary black literary and cultural studies will offer something new.

¤

The foregoing discussion attempts to make clear how boredom symptomatizes thwarted agency and becomes an obstacle to the development of interest. Chris becomes bored by the impotence of the scholarly discourses he consumes and reproduces without effect, and his boredom, intensified by the stultifying forces of university bureaucracy, further immobilizes him in his desire and capacity to engage his work differently. Anyone who has truly been bored knows how hard it can be to change course; for Chris, even the wild idea of an Antarctic voyage is dully absorbed into a repetition of the same. Predictably, Chris's problem of being stuck in his boredom produces a parallel problem for Johnson, for if boredom is monotony and the waning of desire (in other words, the retreat of motive), then surely it is inimical to the author's task. The problem confronting both the protagonist and his author, then, lies in whether and how boredom might operate differently — in the service of, rather than an antagonist to, the development of interest. In the idiom of the novel, if boredom commences the voyage, then where can it take us?

Here is how the novel ends: in Pym's culminating scenes, the Antarctic setting goes up in flames, rendering the slaving snow beasts and most of Chris's crew extinct. Chris narrowly outruns the fire, escaping onto the open sea along with his best friend, Garth, and their elderly hostage, Arthur Gordon Pym. As they row their stolen sailboat uncertainly through water and broken ice, the reader is returned again to the metaphoric setting of the bored mind: vast, empty, monotonous, undefined. In this desolate seascape, Chris drones on, rehashing critical clichés and reprising his fantasy of black belonging and diasporic repair. The surviving men sail and sail, and finally approach a familiar bank. Fearing proximity to the island's legendary blackness, Pym dies on the spot, but here is what Chris and Garth see:

Rising up in our pathway was a man ... He was of normal proportions, and he was shaking his hand in the air, waving it, and we, relieved, waved ours back at him ... Whether this was Tsalal or not ... Garth and I could make no judgments. On the shore all I could discern was a collection of brown people, and this, of course, is a planet on which such are the majority (322).

How shall we interpret Pym's elusive ending? Where has boredom led us? What future for black literary and cultural studies beckons from the other side?

On first reading, it may seem tempting to look for a straightforward allegory in the composition of the final scene, one that will act as a prescription for black literary and cultural studies today. One might claim, for instance, that the brown bodies that wave Chris in to land — anonymous, yet vaguely amiable, familiar — break out of Poe's and Morrison's starkly oppositional figuration of racism; their "normal," un-defensive bodies suggest a mundane alternative to the register of trauma, and their unspecified location looks beyond a U.S.-centric model for conceptualizing racial discourse. It would not be difficult to map such critical visions onto growing bodies of recent work in the field and to argue, by extension, that deliverance lies there. But I am moved to follow a different impulse.

I want to consider, instead, the novel's insistent irresolution — its self-conscious choice to linger with the problem of boredom, persistently deferring rather than performing boredom's relief. For although the novel's ending plausibly holds out hope that the friendly stranger will be a harbinger of welcome change, it nevertheless leaves the reader stranded on the precipice of an encounter. Rather than deliver us to an epiphanic new version of Chris (and by extension, of black literary and cultural studies as an institutional knowledge project), Johnson, to the end, keeps his protagonist retracing and reciting the old, exhausted formulations that he has already, through his boredom, disavowed. Like Poe's Narrative before it, Pym's narrative momentum weakens, it sprawls and digresses, and its teleological encounter is ultimately too thin to bear the weight of the narrative that precedes it. Will Chris return to the university setting, and if so, what scholarly course will reignite his passion? Will his renewed critical practices more robustly contest hegemonic strategies for managing diversity? What, in the end, will be Chris's rejoinder to the "toothless diversity committee" or to his cousin's alternately corporatist and faux-revolutionary rhetoric (8)? The novel will not say. It leaves it to us to imagine what the new modes and stakes of racial knowledge will be. To appropriate Chris's own commentary on Poe, Pym may be said to "[start] with action, [explore] the scene, and then [end] unresolved" (231).

I move to interpret this narrative disappointment not as authorial failure, but as an intentional challenge to the reader and critic to endure the discomfort of an open ending. If we accept the premise that boredom — as a symptom and figure of critical disillusionment, political inadequacy, disciplinary habit, and bureaucratizing structure — is indeed a powerful condition of our critical present, then isn't Johnson's narrative irresolution the necessary formal analog to the novel's pervasive critique? Refusing the expectation that fiction must end, Johnson holds an instructive, if uncomfortable, mirror to a widespread critical predicament in the twenty-first century, forcing us to face our own boredom and to sit with the uneasiness it produces.

In our uneasiness, we may take comfort from psychoanalysis, which reassures us that, however displeasing, boredom is not an "incapacity" but an "opportunity" and a necessary precondition for the authentic development of interest. We cannot know in advance which narratives, methods, or scholarly objects will attract and transform us; we cannot know in advance what we are waiting for. "But to begin with," Phillips cautions, we must "hold, and hold to the experience" of boredom, preserving it from "sabotage" in disavowal, rage, or distraction. In the inarticulate stillness of our boredom, Phillips proposes, we are returned to the moment before desire, now legible as a "scene of inquiry." Within this scene, we are compelled to ask, "What are [my] preconditions for desire, for letting [my] feelings develop? What are the situations [I set] — the occasions [I organize] — to make desire possible?"54

Might we understand the narrative gesture of holding to boredom to be one of this ingenious novel's most ingenious accomplishments? Much as Phillips conceives of boredom not as the evacuation of desire but as our return to an original "scene of inquiry," Pym's restless recitations of black literary and cultural studies' formative texts, tropes, and imaginative terrains signals something other or more than the field's weary depletion. With each repetition, Johnson is trying on the old formulations once more, testing their usefulness and fit, looking — like Phillips's man walking quickly through the art gallery — for the familiar thing to hold his attention anew. Retracing the field's origins with detached but unextinguished attention, the novel asks, what are the preconditions for renewing scholarly desire, for letting fresh interests and interpretive paradigms develop? What are the premises we conjure, the scenarios to which we return, to make new possibilities for racial discourse imaginable? The promise Pym holds out, through its thematization and emplotments of boredom, is not on the scale of redemption, freedom, or social justice. Yet, I believe it offers something valuable, in making space for the cultivation of a different kind of attention, patience, and preparedness for encountering our scholarly, political, and moral work anew.

Aida Levy-Hussen is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Michigan. She is the author of How to Read African American Literature: Post-Civil Rights Fiction and the Task of Interpretation (NYU, 2016) and co-editor of The Psychic Hold of Slavery: Legacies in American Expressive Culture (Rutgers, 2016). She is currently working on a study of the Harlem Renaissance in the field imaginary of African American literature.

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