Crowd Control
The Racial Ordering of Literary Reward
Juliana Spahr author Stephanie Young author Claire Grossman author
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Columbia University Press
Publishing:29th Sep '26
£28.00
This title is due to be published on 29th September, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
From the race riots of 1919 to the Black Lives Matter movement, anxieties about Black uprising have influenced literary funding and prestige in the United States. Across many decades, grants and prizes have shaped the broader ecosystem of US literature, working in tandem to reroute Black militancy and define literary excellence as white. Even as the field diversified in the twenty-first century, prestige institutions raised barriers to entry and imposed new constraints on writers of color.
Crowd Control tells the story of how efforts to contain Black resistance led to the invention of American literary excellence. It brings together archival research and comprehensive data on literary prize demographics with readings of works by Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, William Styron, Claudia Rankine, and others to offer a material account of how US literature has imagined—and managed—protest. Because literature was thought to mollify, redirect, or cast public doubt on militant resistance, moments of mass protest consistently have been followed by targeted support for Black writers. Tracing the evolution of the institutions that reward writers across more than a century, this book unveils the hidden connection between literary funding and social control.
Crowd Control offers a brilliant diagnostic of the hypocrisies, ambivalences, and evasions of literary culture. This is impressive scholarship—a fresh, fascinating account of how literary institutions capture and convert potentially radical energies, as well as of how writers themselves struggle toward an impossible autonomy. -- Christopher Kempf, author of Craft Class: The Writing Workshop in American Culture
Crowd Control shows how literary philanthropy, cultural policy, and the circuits of literary prestige have combined to sustain patterns of racial exclusion and subjugation for more than a century. This is a bracing work of institutional critique, aimed at the very heart of the American literary field. -- James English, author of The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value
1919, 1968, 2012. Crowd Control advances a bold argument for periodizing the terms of support and containment of Black writing in America. The result of Grossman, Spahr, and Young’s collaborative research is a history of Black literary breakthroughs whose accrued esteem over the past century has been underwritten by what white readers will countenance. Revelatory and motivating for any reader who would want it to be otherwise. -- Kinohi Nishikawa, author of Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground
Crowd Control brilliantly lays bare some fundamental dynamics of US literary history, showing us how even its most exuberantly well-meaning and celebratory moments have also been profoundly politically racialized ones. Rigorously documented and compellingly written, its refusal of easy liberal sentiment provides us with something far more valuable: real clarity about the ways our culture cunningly refuses calls for radical change. -- Mark McGurl, Stanford University
What does literature have to do with the work of the state? In Crowd Control, Grossman, Spahr, and Young tell the overdetermined story of the grant and the prize and their power in US letters and beyond. Crunching data and tracking quiet influence, they deliver us a new, essential history of the undeniable racialized political aims of literary infrastructures. -- Hannah Zeavin, University of California, Berkeley
ISBN: 9780231222181
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
304 pages