The Answer is Paracritical: Caribbean Literature and The Limits of Critique

Jay Rajiva

doi:10.3390/h8030126

Abstract

I argue that both Rita Felski’s postcritical model (as articulated in The Limits of Critique) and its academic reception are made possible only by ignoring or erasing African-American and Afro-Caribbean modes of engagement with art that predate and complicate the critical-postcritical binary. To counteract the vanguardism of this trend in literary studies, I pair Caribbean philosopher-poet Edouard Glissant’s meditation on the origins of Creole speech as an indirect language of “detour” with Nathaniel Mackey’s theorizing of black art as “paracritical”—a mode that assimilates performance and critique, language and metalanguage, and that sits adjacent to (and not against or behind) traditionally academic discourses of engaging with literature. If Glissant provides the cultural and philosophical frame for an Afro-Caribbean way of reading literature, Mackey supplies the artistic metaphor par excellence of the paracritical hinge, voiced in the idioms of jazz and blues. Finally, I examine how Glissant and Mackey’s ideas find formal and aesthetic expression in Trinidadian-Canadian author Dionne Brand’s 2005 novel What We All Long For, paying attention to the reader response engendered by the adjacencies of violence, empowerment, possibility, and desire in the novel. In order to analyze What We All Long For, we must promote the liveliness and vivacity of the reading experience and put the text under ethical scrutiny, evincing the paracritical faculty that Afro-Caribbean art demands: commingling the twin pleasures of reading and interpretation, establishing a counter-hegemonic model of literary engagement that implicates the reader without stripping away reading’s pleasure.

Highlights

In The Limits of Critique (2015), Rita Felski argues for a return to the pleasurable moods of readerly engagement, contra the paranoid, tired, and joyless state of critique she describes as the prevailing mode of literary criticism
The rise of the hermeneutics of suspicion, the obsession with critique at a clinical distance, detachment calcifying into ethical paralysis: in crystallizing these academic trends, Felski exhorts the reader to appreciate what literature makes possible, situating “ourselves in front of the text” instead of “looking behind the text—for its hidden causes, determining conditions, and noxious motives” (p. 12)
Felski herself frames the postcritical turn as a defense of the humanities, offering “a positive vision for humanistic thought in the face of growing skepticism about its value” (Felski 2015, p. 186). Her critics tend to perform their ideological opposition to her position through the vehicle of critique: pointing out weaknesses in her model (Best 2017, p. 338), or questioning the advisability of turning literary criticism into little more than “fandom”, through the mechanics of “corporate restructuring” (Robbins 2017, p. 372)

Summary

Introduction

In The Limits of Critique (2015), Rita Felski argues for a return to the pleasurable moods of readerly engagement, contra the paranoid, tired, and joyless state of critique she describes as the prevailing mode of literary criticism. In the article that follows, I argue that both Felski’s postcritical model and its academic reception are made possible only by ignoring African-American and Afro-Caribbean modes of engagement with art that predate and complicate the critical-postcritical binary. To counteract the vanguardism of this trend in literary studies, I pair Caribbean philosopher-poet Edouard Glissant’s meditation on the origins of Creole speech as an indirect language of ‘detour’ with Nathaniel Mackey’s theorizing of black art as ‘paracritical’—a mode that assimilates performance and critique, language, and metalanguage—and that sits adjacent to (and not against or behind) traditionally academic discourses of engaging with literature. In order to analyze What We All Long For, we must promote the liveliness and vivacity of the reading experience and put the text under formal scrutiny, evincing the paracritical faculty that Afro-Caribbean art demands: commingling the twin pleasures of reading and interpretation, establishing a counter-hegemonic model of literary engagement that implicates the reader without stripping away reading’s pleasure

Detour and Caribbean Speech

Paracritical “Blue”

Reading for the Blue Notes