10:15 - 12:00 | Panel 1

“Racializing Capital: The Dream of Formality and the Origins of Ethnic Literature”

Mark Chiang (University of Illinois at Chicago)

This paper posits that racial capitalism is not coextensive with the racial economy, and that the disparity between them can be indexed in the difference between money and capital. The emerging body of work on racial capitalism has enlarged our comprehension of the myriad ways in which the formal economy of advanced capitalism remains thoroughly rooted in an intertwined with the informal economy. At the same time, recent work on money has led to a reconceptualization of what money is and how it functions. In contrast to the totalizing perspectives of capital, money offers a vision of racial capitalism from below, at the level of our most immediate relations and interactions. The paper will explore definitional questions of capitalism through a discussion of two cultural texts that delineate one borderline of the US economy: Chang-rae Lee’s novel, Native Speaker (1995), and Steve James’ documentary film, Abacus: Small Enough to Jail (2016). What the novel and the film both dramatize are situations where entities that facilitate economic transactions across the border between the formal and informal economies become subject to legal sanction. At the same time, Lee’s novel offers an origin story of ethnic literature that runs counter to Bourdieu’s account of the genesis of the autonomous literary field. While the border between the formal and informal economy is a crucial locus for the operations of racial capitalism, it also poses questions about the materiality of money and the abstraction of capital, processes that, between them, constitute a signal locus of struggles over the racial economy.

“Bright Nothing: Black Feminist After-Futures in Contemporary American Literature”

Erica Edwards (Yale University)

This paper considers how Black feminist writers shatter the shiny surfaces of racial capitalism. In a historical context in which Black women writers and their books were pivots upon which multicultural reading education and American book publishing turned toward the future, Black feminist writers construct narrative worlds in which, as Kara Keeling describes, Black futures exist “after the future.” Black feminist after-futures, given in texts such as Toni Cade Bambara’s 1980 The Salt Eaters, Gloria Naylor’s 1985 novel Linden Hills, and Alexis Gumbs’ 2016 Spill, serve as grounds for theorizing the late capitalist market situation of Black women writers and for giving black (literary) success over to the grotesque. In these texts, the shattering of shine breaks the very promises of progress that hold forth Black success as the basis of an enlightened future. Considering this breaking helps us to understand the complex relation between the literary economy and insurgent knowledge, and to grasp contemporary American literature as the scene of racial capitalism’s crucial re-elaborations.

2:00 - 3:45 | Panel 2

“Critique or Relocation? Latinx Literature and Gentrification”

Mary Pat Brady (Cornell University)

This talk traces the long line of Latinx writers who have engaged with the racialization of property and belonging beginning with late 19th-century Puerto Rican activist Luisa Capetillo’s vision of a property-less future, continuing through to Ron Arias’s and Helena Viramontes’s critiques of imminent domain law used to build sports stadiums and freeways in mid-century Los Angeles, to the plethora of recent novels protesting the gentrification of Brooklyn and Washington Heights. What theoretical tools do these writers offer about how to undo or fight gentrification and to what extent do they offer a vision of belonging that undermines the efforts of other Latinx writers who demand the abolition of citizenship as a structure of captivity?

“How #BLM Became a Story: Black Fiction in the Age of Platform Capitalism”

Richard Jean So (McGill University)

New online writing platforms, like Wattpad, are massively popular (100 million registered users upload 300,000 stories per day), and with their focus on user-generated content and open access, promise to democratize contemporary cultural production. This talk explores how such platforms represent and accommodate Blackness, specifically examining the rise of a new genre category of writing: the #BLM story, over the past five years. Using a mixture of critical and computational methods, and drawing from critical race theory and platform studies, I ask: What textual features define this story, how do such features evolve over time, and how does this story differ from previous iterations of racial protest literature? Also, are such stories able to thrive on such platforms—what is their relationship to platform capitalism?

4:00 - 5:45 | Panel 3

“Writing New People: Race, Institutionalization, and Market Value”

Rolland Murray (Brown University)

This paper considers the literary representation of a historically distinct formation of racial identity produced through the dynamic overlays among the liberal academy and the capitalist marketplace. Taking the fiction of Danzy Senna as a key focal point, the piece explores her critical anatomy of this paradigm of black selfhood by interpreting her work in relation to the growth of ethnic theme dorms in American universities during the 1980s and the broader centralization of African American identity and culture in the capitalist marketplace. In so doing, this piece puts in place a framework for interpreting related dynamics in the work of writers like Mat Johnson, Paul Beatty, and Colson Whitehead.

“From Black Expos to Book Deals”

Kinohi Nishikawa (Princeton University)

In this paper, I examine a critical moment in U.S. publishing history when mainstream, New York-based houses began signing grassroots, self-published Black authors to book deals. Although Black and other minority writers had become professional authors in the white-dominated industry long before the 1990s, this was the pivotal decade when mainstream publishers actively sought out writers who had not passed through some gatekeeping function. Instead, the goal was to find literary talent that may have had a strong following among Black readers but remained unknown to the industry at large. The paper draws on the case of writer and publisher Omar Tyree, who went from selling books at small-business expos to signing a book deal with Simon & Schuster, to illuminate the effects of commercial incorporation on Black literary and cultural politics.