Anthony Reed

Chair, Department of English
Professor of English and Norman L. & Roselea J. Goldberg Professor of Fine Arts

My work sits at the intersection of Black Studies and literary studies. Throughout my books and articles I’ve been developing an approach to Black poetics: the interactions between the modifier Black—with all that it contains, mobilizes, and shifts—and historically specific practices of living and relating. This approach, rooted in the historical study of how literature produces its effects, attempts to slip the poles of oppression and resistance in order to ask different questions about Black culture and Black life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

My first book, Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014), won the 2014 William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the Modern Language Association for an outstanding scholarly study of African American literature or culture. There, rather than arguing that experimental poetics resist or otherwise respond to conditions of Black exclusion or degradation, I sought to analyze the ways Black writers were reinscribing and deviating from existing traditions to invent new ways of thinking. With extensive analyses of N. H. Pritchard, m. nourbeSe philip, Kamau Brathwaite, Claudia Rankine, Douglas Kearney, Harryette Mullen, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Nathaniel Mackey, Freedom Time argues that Black experimental writing encourage new ways of relating to and knowing one another, new ways of thinking and practicing freedom following the formal end of segregation and colonization.

Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production (Duke UP, 2021), my second book, looks at Black abstraction from a different angle. The book grounds the abstract music practices of the so-called jazz avant-garde in specific historical conjunctures (the Black Arts era and its aftermath), paying special attention to the independent institutions that have been central to making Black art. This intervenes in Black sound studies by historicizing prevailing notions of sound—as unruly, as extra-discursive metacommentary on anti-Black discourses, as expression of freedom and illicit desire. It is all of those things, but it is not transhistorically the same in all contexts. Soundworks  intervenes in debates around Black music through extensive discussions of the relationship between composition and improvisation. It also extends some of Freedom Time’s arguments by arguing that political poetry is more than simple political slogans. It participates in a rich tradition of self-definition and self-determination against a backdrop of imposed meanings. h era generates a concept of sound based on material realities and political exigencies. In addition to engaging printed accounts of sound by Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison and others, Soundworks analyzes recorded collaborations between poets and musicians (Charles Mingus and Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka and the New York Arts Quartet, Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor, Jeanne Lee, and Jayne Cortez and the Firespitters) in the Long Black Arts era (1958-1974). The poets and musicians I study don’t just perform according to prevailing ideas of sound, but actively shape notions of black sound to advance political and philosophical ends.

The guiding presumption of both books is that one does not study Black art to understand Black life, but instead studies Black life to understand Black art. My current book, tentatively entitled Cartographies of Invention: Studies in Black Poiesis, builds on work by Lauren Berlant, Hortense Spillers, Richard Iton and other to theorize the affective infrastructures of the Black everyday. Everydayness offers an alternative lens to the oppression-resistance poles and makes the study of Black life a study of the stories people tell about what they do in song, film, and poetry throughout the diaspora. Assaults on Black self-determination and sovereignty in the US following the Black Power era and throughout the decolonizing world provide the historical backdrop, as does what Stuart Hall called “the long march of the Neo-liberal Revolution.” I propose the everyday as a scale below the antagonisms of oppression and resistance where we might engage Black life in June Jordan’s sense: "Given the pain inflicted, the humiliation, the murder - even the savage slaughtering - of those we love, and of love itself/our capacities for tenderness, how shall we, nevertheless, live as human beings?" Rather than account for Blackness and Black people as somehow appositional to the West, I start from the assumption that Black people have built and maintained both capacities and infrastructures of love and care and that studying these are central to a study of the everyday.