“What Do We Think We’re Doing Anyway”: On Activism and Post-45 Literature

In 1989, black feminist literary critic Barbara Christian published an essay called "But What Do We Think We're Doing Anyway: The State of Black Feminist Criticism(s) or My Version of a Little Bit of History." The essay opens with Christian's account of the landmark publication of the August 1974 issue of Black World, which featured Zora Neale Hurston on the cover as well as essays about Hurston by June Jordan and Mary Helen Washington. For Christian, the publication of this issue, along with Alice Walker's landmark essay on Hurston, "In Search of Our Mother's Gardens," published only months before in Ms., point to the clear relationship between black literature, postwar social movements, and the emerging field of black feminist literary criticism. She writes:

Christian offers a set of beautiful historical formulations: that social movements are contexts that shift and enable imaginations; that social movements of the 1960s and 1970s in particular enabled literature, in this case black women's writing, its publication, and its circulation, as well the questions that critics might learn to ask about literature; and that these same movements challenged people's very ideas about what literature was and the aesthetic and political judgments they might make about it, inside and outside the university.

The literary and cultural history Christian offers is specific to black feminist literature and criticism, but it also holds true more broadly: the analytical approaches that came to be practiced in the university in the 1980s by a range of critics, as well as the literary and cultural objects they read, were shaped by the social movements of the sixties, seventies, and eighties, because these social movements gave the world "questions we might not have asked before." This includes critics like Frederic Jameson, whose turn to theorizing postmodernism was driven by his recognition that global capitalism had undergone some dizzying and disorienting shifts in its attempts to contain the energies and demands of the 1960s movements. Answering in this new neoliberal era the old New Left call to "name that system" in order to "change it," Jameson proposed the "project of cognitive mapping" as a step towards imagining a "new radical cultural politics" and new forms of leftist internationalism and socialist mobilizations.2

When Christian wrote her "little bit of history" in 1989, she was motivated by a fear that the social movement history of her present was already being forgotten. "Like many of us who lived through the literary activism of the sixties, we of the eighties may forget that which just recently preceded us and may therefore misconstrue the period in which we are acting."3 I thought of Christian's caution when I was asked to respond to Jeffrey Lawrence's recent ELH essay "Mobilizing Literature" for this cluster.4 There Lawrence posits social movements as a context and framework through which we might read post-45 literature, arguing that both the cultural materialist reading practices proposed by Jameson and the institutionalist turn Lawrence attributes to the Post-45 research collective have elided the role social movements have played in shaping post-45 literature. For Lawrence, social movements are "a key variable that has gone missing" in our understanding of this literary and cultural field.5

On the one hand, I deeply sympathize with Lawrence's desire to center social movements as contexts for post-45 US literary production and analysis (I even wrote a book about it).6 And I sometimes share his frustration with the institutional and sociological turn in post-45 American literary studies, which, in its admirable quest to make concrete the material conditions that shape writers and the work they produce, can make literature seem referential to the institutional conditions of its making at the expense of a wider world. On the other hand, the idea that social movements have "gone missing" or heretofore played an unknown role in how we understand post-45 literature—that we need to discover Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Alice Walker, or Oscar Zeta Acosta as writers shaped by and concerned with social movements—strikes me as equally symptomatic of the forgetting that Christian was worried about. Such claims are only possible if one brackets entire fields in which the relationship between culture and social movements has been a central scholarly concern—American studies, cultural studies, ethnic studies, Asian American studies, Latinx studies, Black studies, feminist studies, indigenous studies, queer and trans studies, postcolonial studies. These fields have long situated such writers in relation to social movements, apprehended "the interpretive value of approaching the Chicano and Black liberation movements through a comparative lens," accounted for "the transnational dimensions of social movements after WWII," and explored how social movement aesthetics have shaped and been shaped by institutions (the university, the state, the non-profit).7 The story of the institutionalization of radical postwar social movement ideas and aesthetics has in fact been one of the key stories that American studies and American literary studies scholars have worked to tell in the years since Postmodernism, as these fields have shifted to replace the generality of "late capitalism" with the specificity of "neoliberalism." Here I am thinking especially of the work of Lisa Duggan, Jodi Melamed, Roderick Ferguson, Grace Hong, and Erica Edwards, who have offered beautiful and influential elaborations of how movements' complex aesthetics and ideas, captured in their literature, have undergone what Hong describes as selective affirmation and disavowal as they moved into the university.8

In some sense, Lawrence knows this, because his essay hinges on such bracketing moves: "To be fair, both McGurl and Jameson acknowledge that collective mobilizations have helped shape the cultural ecology of the postwar US"; "To be sure, ethnic and Black studies have long analyzed the dynamic relation between social movements and literary production;" "despite excellent scholarship on the literary implications of specific cross-movement influences and interactions."9 If the version of the institutional turn that frustrates Lawrence was in part born of a backlash against ethnic studies and gender and sexuality studies, then Lawrence's bracketing would seem to complete the cycle, attempting to reconstitute the knowledge and reading practices of these fields while setting them aside, in order to heroically claim as his own Christian's insight that in fact birthed so many fields, that movements help writers and scholars "imagine questions we would not have imagined before."10

Engaging with and building on, rather than bracketing, this work might begin to answer some of Lawrence's questions, including how radical social movement aesthetics have often been disciplined into stories of identity through the reading practices of the literary studies classroom, among other sites. It also might raise other questions about the institutionalization of Occupy Wall Street's ideas and tactics: about what movement practices and aesthetics have been selectively affirmed through the process of institutionalization. Lawrence charts a fairly straightforward path for the absorption of Occupy's left economic populism into the literary field, mostly through an account of the names of authors and editors that have made their way into the pages of N+1 post-Occupy and the emergence of a broader network of little magazines.11 But this account of the triumphant transformation of the "sad young literary men" into "Marxist public intellectuals" leaves out the divisions and struggles within the Occupy movement itself: the dissent of indigenous activists who protested the framing of "occupation" as a radical relation to already stolen land, or tensions over the gender and sexual dynamics of the camps.12 How might this process of institutionalization in fact enact the political and aesthetic "representational dilemmas" Lawrence himself provocatively suggests is posed by the 99%?13

Outside the pages of ELH, the relationship between literature, social movements, and cultural institutions continues to be worked out in real time. On October 26, 2023, the Writers Against the War on Gaza announced the formation of their coalition of writers, scholars, and artists organizing and creating in opposition to Israel's still-ongoing genocide in Gaza and occupation of Palestine. Named after the American Writers Against the Vietnam War, a group of mostly poets founded in 1965 that organized poetry protest "read-ins," WAWOG has helped to galvanize the literary world's participation in the academic and cultural boycott of Israel, write and produce the free newspaper New York War Crimes (inspired by the cultural activism of ACT UP), and organize a boycott of PEN America after the organization's complicity in the suppression of writers' expression around Palestine.

The emergence of WAWOG as part of the re-energized Palestine solidarity movement raises important questions about how one might periodize and analyze the literary activism of the present. Despite efforts by journalists to announce the left movements of the 2010s as over and failed, ripe for dissection, we are perhaps still instead in a period of what Juno Richards has called with reference to an earlier period of movement organizing, "the long middle," when tactics and the aesthetic forms that register them are still in play, when the future outcome is still unsettled.14 Echoing Andrea Long Chu, it is thus imperative to ask about our responsibilities as literary critics now, in a time of war, when Palestinian writers and poets are being slaughtered and our colleagues are being fired and arrested for protesting genocidal violence.15 In answering this question, it would behoove us, like WAWOG, to study rather than bracket the movement literary histories we have; to learn and build upon them in solidarity with one another; and even perhaps to act as scholars, as writers, as part of that cultural front in-formation.

---

Patricia Stuelke is Associate Professor of English at Dartmouth College. She is the author of The Ruse of Repair (Duke University Press, 2021), and has published in American Quarterly, differences, Review of International American Studies, Genre, American Literary History, College Literature, American Literature, and elsewhere.

---

References