Andy Hines - Böcker

A timely reconsideration of the history of the profession, Outside Literary Studies investigates how midcentury Black writers built a critical practice tuned to the struggle against racism and colonialism.  This striking contribution to Black literary studies examines the practices of Black writers in the mid-twentieth century to revise our understanding of the institutionalization of literary studies in America. Andy Hines uncovers a vibrant history of interpretive resistance to university-based New Criticism by Black writers of the American left. These include well-known figures such as Langston Hughes and Lorraine Hansberry as well as still underappreciated writers like Melvin B. Tolson and Doxey Wilkerson. In their critical practice, these and other Black writers levied their critique from “outside” venues: behind the closed doors of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, in the classroom at a communist labor school under FBI surveillance, and in a host of journals. From these vantages, Black writers not only called out the racist assumptions of the New Criticism, but also defined Black literary and interpretive practices to support communist and other radical world-making efforts in the mid-twentieth century. Hines’s book thus offers a number of urgent contributions to literary studies: it spotlights a canon of Black literary texts that belong to an important era of anti-racist struggle, and it fills in the pre-history of the rise of Black studies and of ongoing Black dissent against the neoliberal university.

A timely reconsideration of the history of the profession, Outside Literary Studies investigates how midcentury Black writers built a critical practice tuned to the struggle against racism and colonialism.  This striking contribution to Black literary studies examines the practices of Black writers in the mid-twentieth century to revise our understanding of the institutionalization of literary studies in America. Andy Hines uncovers a vibrant history of interpretive resistance to university-based New Criticism by Black writers of the American left. These include well-known figures such as Langston Hughes and Lorraine Hansberry as well as still underappreciated writers like Melvin B. Tolson and Doxey Wilkerson. In their critical practice, these and other Black writers levied their critique from “outside” venues: behind the closed doors of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, in the classroom at a communist labor school under FBI surveillance, and in a host of journals. From these vantages, Black writers not only called out the racist assumptions of the New Criticism, but also defined Black literary and interpretive practices to support communist and other radical world-making efforts in the mid-twentieth century. Hines’s book thus offers a number of urgent contributions to literary studies: it spotlights a canon of Black literary texts that belong to an important era of anti-racist struggle, and it fills in the pre-history of the rise of Black studies and of ongoing Black dissent against the neoliberal university.

How American universities operate as social and economic engines that shape society beyond their traditional educational roles.University Keywords gathers, contextualizes, and develops original understandings of 27 key terms that define the study and operation of the American university today. Editor Andy Hines and the book's contributors invite readers to rethink the university beyond its public image as a space of learning and understand how it also operates as a real estate powerhouse, a hedge fund, a debt machine, and even a crisis-producing entity embedded in the broader American economy.Through essays written by over thirty contributors from a variety of disciplines, this book examines the university's intersecting functions, from its financial entanglements to its often-contradictory roles in society. Contributors illustrate how universities simultaneously link and separate communities—faculty, students, nurses, janitors, and the surrounding public—through administrative processes that promote a sense of isolation and division, even within shared spaces. By defining and expanding the terms that drive public and scholarly conversations about postsecondary education, University Keywords situates what appear to be auxiliary aspects of colleges and universities as directly impacting and at times displacing the central academic mission of these institutions.In its role as a crucible for societal hierarchies and economic interests, the university both drives and reflects major shifts in social structure, labor practices, and economic power. The book's exploration of key terms like "debt," "police," and "union" offers readers a new framework for understanding the university's transformation into an instrument of capital accumulation, as well as its ongoing relevance in the fight for a world where education, labor, and social justice converge.