Studies in American Fiction

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...