Aida Levy-Hussen

My research integrates 20th and 21st century African American literary studies with psychoanalytic theory, trauma and memory studies, theories of race and racialization, and feminist and queer theory, to examine how a range of histories, social forces, feelings, and desires inhabit and drive the stories we tell about race and racism. My first book, How to Read African American Literature: Post-Civil Rights Fiction and the Task of Interpretation (NYU, 2016) shows how a modified psychoanalytic approach can help us to rethink a number of ideas central to the field of black literary studies: about how contemporary black fiction and its criticism register the imprint of history; about shifting cultural and political understandings of race; and about the inconstant, often idiosyncratic circuitries of memory. Similarly, my co-edited collection, The Psychic Hold of Slavery: Legacies in American Expressive Culture (Rutgers, 2016) convenes a cross-disciplinary conversation about the immaterial attachments and desires that undergird a rich contemporary discourse on the American slave past. I am currently working on a second monograph, provisionally called Race Traitors, which tracks and interrogates various figures of racial "treason" (e.g., passing, "selling out," "loving the oppressor") that recur in modern and contemporary African American literature.