Notwithstanding the affirmation of Black and coloured identities in the recent protests following the killing of George Floyd, there has been a shift away from identity politics in some academic disciplines and discourses. In several departments of literary studies, for example, the tendency is underlined in works by critics and thinkers who do not see the literary as a mere function of the socio-political and historical.
They invest themselves in returning to questions which have been sidelined by ideological criticism, questions such as ‘What is the value of literary studies?’, ‘What good has the theoretical turn done for literary studies?’, and ‘How does the literary force us to reimagine not only socio-political identities but also politics and ethics in general?’ (Bissell, 2002; Elliott and Attridge, 2011; McDonald, 2015) Their enquiries can be broadly categorized into two groups—those which affirm the singular and evential nature of the literary and those which espouse a move towards postcritique. (Attridge, 2004 and 2015; Anker and Felski, 2017; Felski, 2015 and 2020)
