• A Is for African:The "Black Man" and Demonic Ground of The Scarlet Letter
• Seth Cosimini (bio)

Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter was published in a time of U.S. crisis in 1850; this essay, a study of the novel, arrives in another moment of crisis in the country, one that has demanded that literary scholars attempt to define a disciplinary identity and purpose within ongoing global and academic crises.¹ Following a summer of national and international uprisings, English departments across the country spent the 2020–21 academic year issuing statements of commitments to antiracism, vows to combat structural anti-Blackness, and promises to create diversity taskforces and subcommittees. A year into the COVID-19 pandemic, English departments also issued statements expressing solidarity with Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders against Sinophobic hate crimes across the nation. Widespread demands by Indigenous activists for "Land Back" have also compelled English departments to think hard about what it means to "decolonize" syllabuses, departments, and universities, an especially confounding problem for those committed to Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang's statement that "decolonization is not a metaphor" at universities in the U.S. settler states that were created by dispossessing Indigenous peoples of their land.² Such racial terror calls on literary scholars to consider what the place is of the study of literature and the English department within the history of material struggle. The new wave of statements voicing a commitment to antiracism suggest that the answer is not only not generally agreed on but also that the discipline is at a moment of crisis (of identity and futurity) for having not yet adequately answered the question.

Although Maurice Lee's 2016 forum "The End of the Canon?" might suggest material limitations to the strategy of multicultural canon expansion in addition to what [End Page 129] scholars like Ronald Judy help us identify as its ideological limitations, the question of how U.S. literary critics, especially those who study the literary history of the U.S. settler colony, might approach their scholarship within these intersecting crises remains dynamically open.³ In such a moment, it seems appropriate to return to Toni Morrison's 1988 speech "Unspeakable Things Unspoken" in which she proposes an "examination and re-interpretation of the American canon" to search "for the ways in which the presence of Afro-Americans has shaped the choices, the language, the structure—the meaning of so much American literature. A search, in other words, for the ghost in the machine."⁴ Evaluating the progress made since Morrison first issued her call for this examination, Sharon P. Holland contends that despite the twinning of African American studies and American literature, a shift wherein the "study of African American literature and culture becomes the rubric for the study of American literature—never took place."⁵ This essay forwards a methodological shift that foregrounds the concerns of Black American writers and that enables the development of analyses of literary history that contextualize our current moment of material, institutional, and epistemological crises.

A defining work of the U.S. literary canon and a study of the nation's colonial origins, The Scarlet Letter is a uniquely generative text for such a project. The meaning of Hester's A has long been a source of critical question—"Atlantic," "alchemy," "abolition," "Abenaki," "Anglo-Saxon," among others, have been proposed and used to advance a variety of interpretations of Hawthorne's romance.⁶ Following Morrison's study of the "Africanist presence" in American literature, this article takes this critical tradition in a new direction by positing that the scarlet A on Hester's chest stands for "African."⁷ In doing so, it seeks to both acknowledge and move beyond the ways African peoples and the category of Blackness have been materially and ideologically positioned in the Americas as a dangerous, violent, mysterious force: a position used to justify an anti-Black political, legal, economic, and social culture of extreme disciplinary terrorist violence and surveillance in service of supporting white supremacy.⁸ Reading the A as African focuses critical attention on how Hawthorne's text represents the cultural and material genesis of the United States in Puritan theocratic society as...

• A代表非洲人： 《红字》中的“黑人”和恶魔之地
• 赛斯·科西米尼 (bio)

霍桑的《红字》出版于 1850 年美国危机时期；这篇文章是对小说的研究，是在该国另一个危机时刻到来的，它要求文学学者试图在持续的全球和学术危机中定义学科身份和目的。¹在经历了一个夏天的国内和国际起义之后，全国各地的英语部门在 2020-21 学年发布了反对种族主义的承诺声明，誓言打击结构性反黑人，并承诺创建多元化工作组和小组委员会。在 COVID-19 大流行一年后，英语部门也发表声明，表示声援亚裔美国人和太平洋岛民反对全国范围内的仇华仇恨犯罪。土著活动家对“土地回归”的广泛要求也迫使英语部门认真思考“非殖民化”教学大纲、部门和大学意味着什么，对于那些致力于 Eve Tuck 和 K. Wayne Yang 的声明的人来说，这是一个特别令人困惑的问题： “非殖民化不是比喻”²这种种族恐怖要求文学学者思考文学研究和英语系在物质斗争史上的地位。表达对反种族主义承诺的新一波声明表明，答案不仅没有得到普遍同意，而且该学科正处于危机时刻（身份和未来），因为尚未充分回答这个问题。

虽然 Maurice Lee 的 2016 年论坛“佳能的终结？” 除了[End Page 129]罗纳德·朱迪 (Ronald Judy) 等学者帮助我们将美国文学批评家，尤其是那些研究美国文学史的人如何确定其意识形态局限的问题之外，这可能暗示多元文化经典扩张策略的物质限制定居者殖民地，可能会在这些交叉的危机中接近他们的学术，仍然动态开放。³在这样的时刻，回到托尼·莫里森 1988 年的演讲“Unspeakable Things Unspoken”似乎是合适的，她在演讲中提出了“对美国经典的审查和重新解释”，以寻找“非裔美国人的存在方式”。塑造了许多美国文学的选择、语言、结构——意义。换句话说，就是寻找机器中的幽灵。” ⁴评估自莫里森首次呼吁进行这项考试以来取得的进展，Sharon P. Holland 认为，尽管非裔美国人研究和美国文学结对，但“非裔美国文学和文化研究成为研究的主题”的转变美国文学——从未发生过。”这篇文章提出了一种方法论的转变，它突出了美国黑人作家的担忧，并促进了文学史分析的发展，将我们当前的物质、制度和认识论危机置于语境中。

作为美国文学经典的定义性作品和对国家殖民起源的研究，《红字》是此类项目的独特生成文本。长期以来，海丝特A的含义一直是批判性问题的来源——“大西洋”、“炼金术”、“废除”、“阿贝纳基”、“盎格鲁撒克逊”等，已被提出并用于推进各种解释霍桑的浪漫史。⁶继莫里森对美国文学中“非洲人的存在”的研究之后，本文假设海丝特胸前的猩红色A代表“非洲人”，从而将这一批判传统带入了一个新的方向。⁷在这样做的过程中，它试图承认并超越非洲人民和黑人类别在物质和意识形态上在美洲被定位为危险、暴力、神秘力量的方式：一种用来证明反黑人政治、为支持白人至上主义服务的极端纪律恐怖主义暴力和监视的法律、经济和社会文化。⁸以非洲人的身份阅读A将批判性注意力集中在霍桑的文本如何代表美国在清教徒神权社会中的文化和物质起源...