Identity is at once the most central and the most unhappy word in contemporary discourse. Debates continue to rage within literary studies in the academy and in the public sphere at large about when, how, and to what extent, the discourse of identity, and sometimes its associated identity politics, should apply when we engage questions around the formation of literary judgment, the ethics of reading and writing, and the material, institutional, and economic basis for cultural production and its critical assessment. In my talk I will begin by setting out what I see as some of the central arguments and what’s at stake when we are making them. I then proceed to argue through readings that will draw on selections from Proust and from African American musical traditions, that truly meaningful emancipation at this historical juncture involves an expansion of aesthetic sensibility and not merely political and economic transformations, as desirable as these may also be.
About the Speaker
Jesse McCarthy is Associate Professor of English and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He is the author of The Blue Period: Black Writing in the Early Cold War, the essay collection Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?, and a novel, The Fugitivities. He is also editor of The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois for The Norton Library and co-editor of the African American poetry anthology Minor Notes Vol. 1. His articles and reviews have appeared in Novel, Transposition, and African American Review, as well as The Point, The Nation, and The New York Times.
