Please join the English Department and Critical Contemporary Studies for a Critical Crossings Lecture by Kinohi Nishikawa

Scholars usually rely on a handful of categories to recount a literary history: period, aesthetic movement, authorship. As deployed over decades of academic institutionalization, these categories have proven useful for reconstructing scenes of literary creation as the key to understanding our literary past. This talk explains how twentieth-century African American literature recommends new categories for literary history, ones less invested in idealized notions of inspiration or creation. For most of the century, authors, editors, and publishers struggled mightily over the question of exactly who the audience for black writing was. As the material interface between a work and its audience, book design became an important point of contestation in these struggles. By attending to this highly visible yet not always noticed interface, the talk considers how twentieth-century book design negotiated between readers and markets, actual and imagined communities, to constitute a new literary tradition.

Kinohi Nishikawa is Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies at Princeton University. His writing on African American print and popular culture has appeared in PMLA, Book History, and African American Review. Kinohi’s first book, Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.

Additional support generously provided by: the Clements Library; LSA; and the Departments of Afroamerican and African Studies, American Culture, Anthropology, and History of Art