Not So Systematically

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I welcome Jeffrey Lawrence's "Mobilizing Literature: Social Movements and Post-1945 US Literary Studies" as an important, timely provocation that urges us to continue placing the approaches, methodologies, and interpretative frameworks of race and ethnic studies at the forefront of US literary studies. A central premise of his argument is, in his words, that "the collective mobilizations of the past sixty years [...] have decisively shifted the contours of the post-1945 US literary field." One would be hard-pressed to counter this proposition. Indeed, I would go further to assert that social movements have not only transformed the contours of US literary production—its margins, boundaries, and demarcations—but have also reshaped the very core of the US literary field. The fact that Lawrence's polemic is framed around a "US" literary sphere, instead of an "American" one, is itself a product of the pressures yielded by progressive social movements, which have brought to the fore US culture's hemispheric coordinates, multilingual heritages, and role in forging transnational visions and solidarities. Much like postcolonial studies, bolstered by anticolonial global movements, has revealed the interdependent relation between the formation of "English" as a cultural discipline and the expansion of empire, literary race and ethnic studies—impelled by the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 70s—has dismantled teleological ideas of "American" literature as a cohesive and cumulative national epic, forcing us to reckon with the multiples ways US literatures have been imbricated in US hegemony across the American hemisphere and the globe.

How then to assess Lawrence's more provocative, central claim that the "materialist and institutionalist frameworks that have dominated post-1945 US literary studies in recent years have systematically overlooked the role of social movements" (emphasis mine)? First, it is important to note that Lawrence's argument comes with a significant caveat: the acknowledgment, as he puts it, that "[t]o be sure, ethnic and Black studies have long analyzed the dynamic relation between social movements and literary production." Nonetheless, he contends that what "we continue to lack, however, is an account of how successive social movements with different constituencies and competing ideological viewpoints shaped the evolution of the post-1945 US literary field as a whole." As I see it, the peril in this line of argument is it can potentially hold only insofar as we implicitly view Black, Latinx, Native, Asian American, queer, and multilingual scholarship (which is both the result and often an arm of social movements) as an addendum or stratum within what remains, as a whole and in its a core, an (urban-based, white, male, middle-class) Anglo-American sphere. Rather than confining post-45 literary studies to two dominant interpretive paradigms and treating literary race and ethnic studies as an exceptional or marginal framework, we should recognize it as a third, key mode of reading and organizing postwar US literatures—one that complicates and complements the "cultural-materialist" and "institutionalist" approaches—lest we make its robust critical body of work seem subordinate. It is from this vantage point, that we can appreciate Lawrence's invitation to apply the social activism focus of literary race and ethnic studies to "different constituencies," including literary spaces and protest movements that were, at least in their inception, white-dominated (i.e. n+1, Occupy, and MeToo).

Lawrence's compelling and diverse examples illustrate that movement-based readings are less about introducing a new approach and more about reinforcing and extending foundational and current lines of inquiry within literary race and ethnic studies. His astute analysis of Oscar Zeta Acosta's Revolt and Alice Walker's Meridians, for instance, aligns with other race and ethnic studies scholarship that examines the formal aesthetic strategies of politically committed and minoritized writers, as well as the cultural ties, political schisms, and ideological cross-pollination among distinct liberation movements. Similarly, his insightful reading of Octavia Butler resonates with the growing scholarly interest in how writers of color use speculative fiction as a tool to engage with and critique political issues, often drawing upon the histories and legacies of real-world social justice struggles. Lastly, his well-synthesized, longitudinal analysis of n+1 reveals the journal's shift toward greater editorial diversity and more overt activist stances, responding not only to the 2008 economic crisis but also to the demands of the Occupy and BLM movements. Here, nonetheless, we also observe some potential shortcomings of his approach, particularly in the failure to account for the significant socioeconomic pressures exerted by a constellated digital ecosystem, which has wrestled away the traditional gatekeeping power once held by prestigious, New York City-based, print literary journals like n+1. To the extent that recent social movements like Occupy, BLM, United We Dream, MeToo, and StopLine3 have created or decisively influenced the direction of new and alternative digital and print platforms that amplify marginalized voices and explicitly situate themselves at the juncture of literature and activism (i.e. Latinx Spaces, Bad Form, Apogee Journal, Huizache, ROAR, The Hopper), the shift Lawrence identifies in n+1 (and which can also be observed in other established, historically white mainstream venues, from The Paris Review to the content of The Poetry Foundation website) also responds to imbricated changes in literary hierarchies, racial structures, and the new modes of circulation of capital and culture.

In this regard, I would further assert that literary race and ethnic studies not only centrally features the movement-based readings Lawrence advocates, but also necessarily incorporates cultural-materialist and institutionalist frameworks. Said otherwise, the interdisciplinary history and approaches of literary race and ethnic studies suggest the impossibility of establishing discrete lines of demarcation between cultural-materialist, institutionalist, and social movement-based analyses, especially for constructing the broad, cross-spectrum literary histories Lawrence calls for. In Latinx studies, for instance, where I situate myself, literature emerged as a key front of the 1960s and '70s civil rights struggles. Writers and activists fought for the institutionalization of race and ethnic studies programs, academic centers, and independent publishing ventures (from the short-lived Editorial Pocho-Che and Tonatiuh-Quinto Sol to the still strong Bilingual Review Press, Third World Press, and Arte Público Press). The resulting increased visibility and professionalization of Latinx literature cannot be disentangled from "the program era"; many of the earliest Latinx writers to achieve national recognition and mass-market appeal were trained in creative writing programs (i.e. Sandra Cisneros, Oscar Hijuelos, Junot Díaz), even as they challenge these institutional pathways from within (i.e. Díaz, "MFA vs POC"; Acevedo "Ode to a Rat"). Moreover, ensuing national institutional projects like Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage have dislodged monolingual, Anglo-American literary origins stories, recovering and reshaping a past that informs present-day narratives. This is all to say that, much as "Latinx" becomes an increasingly commodified label in the conglomerated literary marketplace, independent, multimodal, multilingual, and politically engaged voices, literary projects, and publishing ventures continue to proliferate. American Dirt hits the shelves, but not without a whirlwind of global backlash, emboldening new collectives like "Latinx in Publishing" and online campaigns like #publishingsowhite. Whereas some writers exist in an uneasy relationship to the identity politics inherent in "Latinx" and "American" labels (i.e., Luiselli, Limón, Díaz, Salas Rivera), others embrace them to highlight the intersections of postwar repression, revolution, migration and neoliberal economic policies (i.e., Alarcón, Tóbar, Herrera, Olivarez)—all of them, within their own historical and socio-geographic location, reflecting and responding to the structures of late capitalism while carrying forth the critical legacies of the movimientos, continuing to voice, in many languages, mediums and forms, ¡Presente!

Cristina Pérez Jiménez is Associate Professor of English at Manhattan University. She is the co-editor of a bilingual scholarly edition of Guillermo Cotto-Thorner's Manhattan Tropics/Trópico en Manhattan (Arte Público, 2019), winner of a 2020 International Latino Book Award. Her scholarship has appeared  in Latino Studies, Revista Hispánica Moderna, Post45, Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, CENTRO: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Diálogo: An Interdisciplinary Studies Journal, and American Quarterly. Her current book project, entitled Here to Stay: The Making of Latinx New York, explores the emergence of a distinctive New York Latinx cultural identity during the sociopolitical conjuncture of the 1930s and 1940s.

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