On Belonging and Not Belonging: Translation, Migration, Displacement by Mary Jacobus (review)

Abstract

of institutions, the withering of permanent faculty positions, and the crushing debt brought upon students” (173). In this respect, Hines stays true to the understanding of race as a set of material institutional practices, an understanding developed by the authors and educators in Outside Literary Studies. The Black left critiques of the university that Hines identifies in different economic and administrative moments nonetheless resonate with crises in adjunctification, student debt, and administrative bloat, which Hines argues must necessarily be understood as both a function of political economy and “assumptions about the appropriate subjects and objects of knowledge” (175). If anything, recent attacks on tenure and the shuttering of humanities and social science departments across the US suggest that Hines’s call for organizing, not just arguing methodology, is even more critical now than the book’s epilogue lays out. Hines’s contributions to theorizing the politics of New Criticism and the literary expressions of racial liberalism should prove useful to scholars of midcentury literature in general, while his theory of tactical criticism and exploration of African American poetic modernism’s politics offer meaningful contributions to African American literary studies and poetics. The book is an active intervention in expanding the meaning of how—and where—literary study might be practiced. Outside Literary Studies should certainly make its way into academic debates in disciplinary history, literary theory, and African American literature, but I share Hines’s hope that it might have a life outside the university as well.