![]() Reading as both an outsider-since I am not an African Americanist-and as a colleague-since I care deeply about many of duCille’s key terms- I want to respond to each of these aims, with an eye to the discipline of African-American studies as both a synecdoche and a model for American literary studies at large. ![]() DuCille’s essay seeks to accomplish three things: to repair the neglect after-the-fact of Brown’s remarkable text to consider the ligatures of the text and its reception with a presidential scandale du jour and to meditate on the meaning not only of African-American texts or canons, but of the literary as a category, to an evolving critical praxis. ![]() Even the short draft of Ann duCille’s paper I received some weeks before the conference set me to copious meditation on literary history: where it begins and ends how to justify its interests now what kind of work-intellectual or cultural-we want to claim it can do. ![]()
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