The Social Imperative

In Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (2017), Joseph North defends close reading, arguing compellingly that its waning constitutes the depoliticization of literary study, a regrettable move from interventionist criticism to historicist scholarship. According to North, “race critique” was part of a “storm” of challenges to midcentury critical norms that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s and collectively represented a false sense of literary study’s “political” potential (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 56). Thus the many American critics “ignored or marginalized because of their subject position” (viii) remain curiously beyond the scope of a project restoring close reading’s radical politics; an old chasm between “race critique” and “literary criticism” persists. Into this chasm step two welcome books by Paula M. L. Moya and Lesley Larkin.Moya’s The Social Imperative, also invested in close reading, strikes a balance between “believing that literary criticism has the ultimate power to interpret and change the world, and believing that it has none at all” (5). Rather than dismissing “race critique” as outside of close reading, Moya describes the shared histories and practices of racial perception and literary reading. The book proceeds through a “socioformal” method (10) that affirms the relationship between literary criticism and the scientific method. Moya begins by reframing what has often been represented as the universal experience of reading, drawing on a concept from social psychology: the idea that schemas (organizations of past experiences and reactions) shape different people’s encounters with the same experience or shape different readers’ encounters with the same text. Over the course of the book’s five main chapters, she offers close readings of works by Toni Morrison, Helena María Viramontes, Manuel Muñoz, Junot Díaz, and Audre Lorde. To bring the concept of schema from psychology into literary analysis, Moya offers examples of how readers bring schemas to books and how literature “embeds” schemas through form and structure (21).Moya’s method illustrates her claim that contemporary African American and Latina/o literature rewards close reading within a social context. Psychological studies show that interracial friendship can alter “racial schemas.” Moya suggests that literature can likewise promote “racial literacy” (6), or understanding among people of different races, because of its heteroglossia, capacity for emotional and intellectual engagement, and “dialogic potential” (51). For instance, Moya explains, Morrison’s Sula (1973) not only thematizes but enacts the transformative work of friendship. Moya performs the potential of dialogical reading by showing how the postmodern novelist Junot Díaz derives his thinking from the well-known but little-read woman of color feminist, Audre Lorde. Against those who might argue that Díaz is postracial and Lorde too essentialist, Moya makes the provocative claim that “Díaz is Lorde’s political, spiritual, and emotional man child” (130). By establishing this relationship, Moya restores sociality and emotion to the realm of close reading, even as the discipline of literary study has attempted to contrast such features with a rarefied “universal” aesthetic. It is surprising that a book so focused on close reading neglects the genre with which those methods have been most closely identified: poetry. (Larkin’s book similarly focuses on narrative.) But, refreshingly, Moya attends not only to novels but to short stories and essays for their “dialogic potential.”If The Social Imperative restores the link between social and aesthetic reading practices, Larkin’s Race and the Literary Encounter reminds us of its long history. Like Moya, Larkin calls for and practices literary criticism engaged with multiple contexts of a literary text’s meaning, production, and reception. African American literature theorizes readerly reception and is “specially poised to contribute theoretically to the study of reader ethics” (21), she writes, because of its long-standing awareness of a double audience. Larkin’s study of literary encounters does not originate with race critique of the 1960s and 1970s but, after drawing a connection to “scenes of reading” (5) in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slave narratives, turns to the early twentieth century. This periodization of black literary criticism is a welcome innovation. Beginning with the multiple contexts for reading race in and around James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), Larkin traces a century of black writing that theorizes reading as a racialized interpretive practice.While Larkin, like Moya, is interested in the dialogical possibilities of reading, the interracial interpretive relationships she features tend to be more fraught with racial violence. She describes, for example, the audience of white gawkers for whom a young Zora Neale Hurston performs in Hurston’s autobiographical essay, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” and the white supremacist audience for the battle royal in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). Larkin draws reviews and essays by white critics into conversation with scenes of white reading in black texts, questioning the fictions of “race-free” universalism that often accompanied midcentury white reading practices such as the New Criticism. But she clarifies that she is not interested in centering white readership. The white gawkers watch young Hurston, Larkin reminds us, but Hurston, too, watches and interprets white performance. Thus Larkin emphasizes “African American literature as an ethical agent” (18), a force of counterinterpretation that comes to the fore most powerfully in her final two chapters, one on Sapphire’s Push (1996) and Percival Everett’s Erasure (2001) and the other on Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place (1988).In her introduction, Moya acknowledges a historical gap between science and cultural studies and brings the insights of twenty-first-century social psychology to bear on the literary study of racial difference and racism. We would do well to note that social science has resonated for black writers, who have refuted race science but engaged in social scientific study, since the beginning of the twentieth century. As Larkin remarks, the methods of twentieth-century sociologists like Robert Park, who critiqued white racism but nonetheless maintained “a troubling division between white persons and black culture” (100), haunted black literature of the period. The relationship between black literature and social science is not purely an oppositional one, nor were black narratives always unwitting objects of sociological study: W. E. B. Du Bois, who defined, wrote, and read the double consciousness underlying so many of Larkin’s observations about audience, is one of the preeminent sociologists of the twentieth century (or the preeminent sociologist of the twentieth century, in Aldon Morris’s excellent critical biography). Hurston was a practicing anthropologist and student of Franz Boas, who was at least partially responsible for the discipline’s shift from a biological to a cultural understanding of racial difference. Twentieth-century black literary epistemology was shaped by and was part of the science of the social.Tellingly, Moya and Larkin conclude their books with reflections on pedagogy. Larkin’s epilogue turns to identifications and failures of empathy she has encountered while teaching Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970) in a predominantly white classroom. Morrison’s A Mercy (2008) and “Recitatif” offer Larkin a model for historicizing not literary texts but our students’ and our own reading practices. Moya, whose final chapter also focuses on A Mercy, perhaps maintains greater optimism in literature’s social imperative: to teach all readers “another way to be human and free” through multicultural literature (165). By highlighting reading as a dialogical relationship within social and textual matrices, both writers invite us to inquire into the history of entanglement between the slippery social construct of race and the discipline of reading

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