The Minoritarian Turn in Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies

Abstract

Three recent publications in nineteenth-century American literary studies are compelling examples of the field’s turn toward “minoritarian” criticism, a mode of inquiry that draws on a variety of “minor” movements in scholarship such as queer studies and critical race and ethnic studies. The collection of essays in Unsettled States exemplify the minoritarian impulse to treat literary and archival texts as theoretical objects coeval with the authority of contemporary scholarship and cultural theory. One of the contributors to Unsettled States, Kyla Wazana Tompkins, also authored Racial Indigestion, a foundational text in recent food studies that authoritatively traces the erotic politics of the mouth over the long nineteenth century. In The Delectable Negro, the late Vincent Woodward provocatively addresses the ways bodies of enslaved African Americans were cannibalized, metaphorically and literally, by parasitic slave masters. All three texts stake out new practices, objects, and methods for the field, and suggest vital new directions for future scholarship.