Racial Historicism

This essay contends that the current critical turn toward premodern race and toward centering race within all period fields in literary studies risks reproducing the very racecraft it seeks to confront. If the current practice of literary historicism involves a wide effort to extend the lineages of racial oppression in order to expand the possibilities for literary criticism to claim to resist those forms of oppression in the contemporary scene, it also marks an unfortunate return to theorizations of race as an eternal phenomenon instead of a historically discrete and mutable ideological formation. Surveying recent work in what the author terms the panracial turn, the essay argues that we are seeing not only a disciplinary return to metaphysical race but also a racial metaphysics: history working the way race does, through physiognomy, DNA, and bloodlines. In closing, the essay suggests briefly that recent work in Black studies offers the beginnings of an alternative to this racial historicism paradigm.