Kenneth Warren

My scholarship and teaching focus on American and African American literature from the late nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth century. I am particularly interested in the way that debates about literary form and genre articulate with discussions of political and social change. My single-authored books, which include What Was African American Literature? (Harvard 2010), So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism (Chicago, 2003), and Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism (Chicago, 1993), explore how American literature by black and white writers helped consolidate, and subsequently responded to, Jim Crow America. Indeed, in What Was African American Literature? I argue that idea of an African American literature gained conceptual coherence only in response to the Jim Crow regime. The argument of that book derives from my study of Ralph Ellison, So Black and Blue, which raises the uncomfortable possibility that our desire to value the work of twentieth-century American authors—even those authors who, like Ellison, set out to challenge the nation's racial status quo—might, paradoxically, tend to underwrite our commitment to a social order that naturalizes forms of inequality.

I also am coeditor of two books, Renewing Black Intellectual History: The Material and Ideological Foundations of African America Thought (Paradigm 2010) and Jim Crow, Literature, and the Legacy of Sutton E. Griggs (Georgia 2013). Articles by me have also appeared in Boston Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Jacobin.

The various courses I teach have reflected my interest in genre, the politics of race, and the relation of culture to politics. "The American Novel and the Death of Jim Crow" (ENG 258/458) asks students to consider the role played by some of the major novels of the late 1940s and the 1950s in undermining the nation's commitment to racial segregation. My course in "American Literary Realism" (Eng. 267) compares and contrasts the way that novelists, philosophers, and scientists address the problem of representing accurately the world we inhabit.