Disciplining Black Literary Study

Abstract This review essay offers an account of how two recent volumes challenge and revitalize the contemporary practice of Black literary study. Issuing from beyond the disciplinary bounds of Black literary study, Lisa Biggs’s The Healing Stage: Black Women, Incarceration, and the Art of Transformation and the edited collection, Intersecting Aesthetics: Literary Adaptations and Cinematic Representations of Blackness offer generative models for renewal. By foregrounding how Black expressive cultures develop under constraint, the volumes engage in both critique and repair elegantly negotiating (rather than reductively collapsing) the field’s persistent oppositions between formalism and politics, critique and care, and scholarly method and sociological insight. Their attention to neglected arenas, the literary and performance cultures fostered in carceral institutions and the understudied domain of Black adaptation across literature and film respectively, demonstrates how sustained attention to form, context, and audience can expand the boundaries of Black literary inquiry.