It is no criticism to note that Rita Felski's provocative, Frank, and spirited book The Limits of Critique is itself a work of critique, and a rhetorically powerful and persuasive one at that. While the hermeneutics of suspicion comes under considerable analytic pressure in the book, Felski does not hesitate to read for hidden meanings, tease out internal contradictions, or cast a skeptical eye on skepticism. Rather, she effectively engages in critique, without apology or embarrassment.

If Reading were used exclusively to designate human engagement with symbolic codes, then it would be relatively easy to dismiss distant reading as an oxymoron—unless it were referring to mystical scrying from dizzying heights or deciphering printed matter from across a room. Debates about what constitutes human reading are as varied as the many hermeneutic traditions and pedagogical or cognitive approaches on which they draw (Bruns). But reading has been used to describe many mechanical processes and sorting techniques. Punch-card rods, slotted light triggers, Jacquard looms, and many other devices were reading encoded information long before the standard MARC (machine-readable cataloguing) records became ubiquitous in library systems in the 1970s. Outmoded mechanical reading devices have a seductive, steampunk fascination. Many mimicked human actions and behaviors. In addition, these older technologies were embedded in human social systems and exchanges whose processes the machines' operators could partly read. The machines' actions were encoded and decoded by individuals' cognitive intelligence even if the machines functioned automatically.

The ensuing remarks on Homi Bhabha's collection of essays The Location of Culture are framed by the following questions: Under what discursive conditions does a text arrive? How do conditions beyond the text determine its reception and circulation? And why is Bhabha routinely associated more with ambivalence, interstice, and liminality than with the ways in which they illuminate problems of race, the archive, history, or the affective bodily subject of history? To focus these ruminations, I will discuss the intervention, impact, and afterlife of The Location of Culture through the concept of hybridity, arguably one of the greatest hits of postcolonial studies and one closely associated with the work of Bhabha. Informed by Mikhail Bakhtin's propositions about hybridity in linguistic utterance; by Sigmund Freud's theories of ambivalence; by Walter Benjamin's discussions of history, event, and language; by Jacques Lacan's discourses on ego, language, and subjectivity; by Michel Foucault's investigations of history, knowledge, and power; and by Jacques Derrida's theories of différance, Bhabha's formulations have gained currency well beyond the humanities. Appropriations of hybridity in globalization discourse, however, often do not honor Bhabha's poststructural politics or its rooting in a complex history of ideas even as the critics of hybridity fail to recognize its inception in archival moments and particular enunciative contexts. Bhabha's work not only poses questions to history in a mode characteristic of deconstruction, it also commences in history in a clearly postcolonial modality. I want to review missed appointments with pressing questions of history and race in the global reception of Bhabha's concept of hybridity, an approach that constitutes an implicit plea for the recognition and reanimation of these questions in contemporary uses of the term hybridity in the discourse of globalization.

In The Limits of Critique, Rita Felski Uses Paul Ricouer's phrase “hermeneutics of suspicion” to frame and reappraise “a diverse range of practices that are often grouped under the rubric of critique: symptomatic reading, ideology critique, Foucauldian historicism, various techniques of scanning texts for signs of transgression or resistance” (2–3). Throughout the book, she argues that literary criticism has overvalued this approach, in part because of its many affordances and pleasures. Without rejecting critique altogether, Felski concludes that “it is one way of reading and thinking among others: finite, limited, and fallible” (192).

Reading Franco Moretti's Graphs, Maps, Trees as a late-stage graduate student in 2008 was invigorating. Here was an approach to literary history free from the pieties of close reading, committed to empiricism, seeking to fulfill, with its “materialist conception of form,” the promise of the sociology of literature (92). And, at the time, it seemed natural that the way to follow the path laid out by Moretti in Graphs and in the essays he had published over the previous decade was to go to my computer, polish my rusty programming skills, and start making graphs. Yet reconsidering Moretti's Distant Reading now, one is struck by how nondigital the book is. In fact, the meaning of distant reading has undergone a rapid semantic transformation. In “Conjectures on World Literature,” originally published in 2000, Moretti introduces the phrase to describe “a patchwork of other people's research, without a single direct textual reading” (Distant Reading 48). Today, however, distant reading typically refers to computational studies of text. Introducing a 2016 cluster of essays called “Text Analysis at Scale,” Matthew K. Gold and Lauren Klein employ the term to speak of “using digital tools to ‘read’ large swaths of text” (Introduction); in his contribution to the cluster, Ted Underwood embraces “distant reading” as a name for applying machine-learning techniques to unstructured text. Discussions of distant reading have become discussions of computation with text, even if no section of Distant Reading features the elaborate computations found in the Stanford Literary Lab pamphlets to which Moretti has contributed.

Caroline Levine's Forms is a study of form as much as a sociology of forms—a tracking of the many ways that they relate to one another or are conjoined in creative works. While offering an extended meditation on the formal categories of whole, rhythm, hierarchy, and network as they are manifest in such works, the book organizes this meditation under the separate category of collision. Other terms are substituted for it—overlap, encounter, interaction—but the metaphoric intent remains the same. If the book seeks to sharpen our understanding of four major forms as universal elements of texts and social experience, its other interest is in honing our awareness of the complex ways these forms collide within and through narrative. his interest spurs Levine to look to sociological theory for examples of how to think about this complexity, a tradition that dates back at least to the time when György Lukács was writing under the influence of Georg Simmel, around 1910. Here I will show how her conversation with sociology follows yet another familiar path: the literary critic's borrowing of conclusions or concepts from sociologists while eschewing the methods and theoretical models through which these conclusions or concepts are arrived at and understood. In particular, I consider the consequences of drawing on sociological thinking to make general claims about complex relations while excluding some of the methods by which generalizability is established and problematized in the social sciences. This exclusion marks a fundamental disciplinary divide that sociologically inclined literary critics continue, sometimes out of habit, sometimes out of perceived necessity, to preserve.

At the MLA'S annual convention in 2015, a roundtable i had organized, remembering The Location of Culture: circulations, Interventions, and Futurity, gathered scholars from across literary periods and fields to reflect on the legacies of Homi Bhabha's seminal work. As new disciplinary shifts in literary studies witness the reinvention of postcolonial literatures as global anglophone literatures, one of the questions that roundtable asked was, Whither postcoloniality? Returning to The Location of Culture—one of the most influential texts in the fields of postcolonial studies and critical theory—can perhaps illuminate how postcolonial critique resonates anew for the literature of our world after empire.

What kind of action is literary criticism? In literary criticism: a concise political history, Joseph North tells us up front: it's political action. His history “is explicitly motivated by present concerns: one has something like a goal, and something like a plan for reaching it,” and his goal is to persuade “readers on the radical left” that there is something at stake for them in “an extended discussion of matters literary, aesthetic, and methodological” (viii, ix, x). Or, rather, his goal is to persuade both readers on the left and “readers within and around academic literary studies” that their interests align: that the “materialist account of the aesthetic” at the root of close reading is “properly understood as part of a longer history of resistance to the economic, political, and cultural systems that prevent us from cultivating deeper modes of life” (x).

In her scholarship and her editorship of the journal New Literary History, Rita Felski has played a central role in recent debates about reading methods in literary studies. Literary critics engaged in endless discussions about how to read may strike an odd note, since reading is the one thing everyone assumes we know how to do. But in the face of the defunding of the humanities, critics have been rethinking the epistemological and ethical grounds of the field and proposing new and often unfamiliar approaches. In her latest book, The Limits of Critique, Felski addresses this “legitimation crisis” by turning her attention to critique, that systematic and skeptical form of inquiry that, she argues, dominates the contemporary practice of literary criticism (5). Critique, associated since Immanuel Kant with the questioning of religious and other forms of dogma, has in her view become a new dogma, an obligatory “style of thinking” in the profession (2). Focusing on critique as “mood and method” (1), Felski follows Paul Ricoeur in considering the attitude of suspicion—detached, wary, vigilant—as the guarantee of scholarly rigor and the last refuge of oppositional thought. Felski has little patience with such high-flown claims. Her focus is on the limits of critique: she sees it as one approach among others, reminding her readers that suspicion is a professional habitus with established links to law, expertise, and bureaucracy. She does not wish to bury critique; rather, she wishes to “redescribe” it, to “offer a fresh slant on a familiar practice in the hope of getting a clearer sense of how and why critics read” (2). If the effect of this reframing is to deflate critique, Felski's ultimate goal in The Limits of Critique is to widen “the affective range of criticism”: “Why are we so hyperarticulate about our adversaries and so excruciatingly tongue-tied about our loves?” (13), she asks, and sets out to imagine a more generous criticism.

I've had Nina Simone's “sinnerman” on repeat for months. The propulsive force of Simone's 1965 live version of this gospel song drives its ten-minute ferocity straight into the contemporary American zeitgeist. As she tells her audience in the lead-up to a lesser-known performance of the song, recorded in 1961, Simone learned “Sinnerman” when she was a “little bitty girl in revival meetings. It happened when my mother and lots more like her tried to save souls.” The song's judgment-day tale of redemption's refusal is told doubly, both by the sinner—“I cried rock / don't you see I need you, rock”—and by those from whom the sinner begs, if not forgiveness, then simply some measure of mercy from the divine justice to come: “Oh sinnerman, where you gonna run to?” The break in the middle of the 1965 recording strips the song down to Simone's handclaps on the second and fourth beats. All that remains is the tenuous intensity of the time neither of redemption nor of damnation but merely of “accompaniment” in the in-between (Tomlinson and Lipsitz). Called forth from that time, in all of Simone's live recordings, and missing from those of Les Baxter or the Weavers just a few years earlier, comes the insurgent cry for “Power!” over and over, to the point of near exhaustion.

The chapter titled the “Reading of Bookes” in Francis Meres'S 1598 Palladis Tamia offers two competing prescriptions for the allocation of readerly attention. The first suggests that too-close reading spoils some books: “As the s[c]ent of spices and flowers is more acceptable somewhat off then close to the nose: so there are some things that please, if they be lightly passed over; which being exactly looked into do loose their grace” (266v). The second reverses that logic by way of a fresh analogy: “Those things that live long, doe not soon spring up: so that worke which thou wouldst have alwaies to be read, ought to be throughly laboured in, and seriouslie scanned” (267r). On the face of it, Meres's book—a six-hundred-and-sixty-five-page-long compendium of moral and practical precepts, each cast in the repetitive syntax of the similitude—is evidently the first sort of text. At once dizzingly various and mind-numbingly repetitive, Palladis Tamia is a book to “be lightly passed over”—“scanned” in the modern, not the sixteenth-century, sense of the word. That is certainly the case today, when Palladis Tamia is known primarily for a single chapter, “A Comparative Discourse of Our English Poets, with the Greeke, Latine, and Italiane Poets,” Meres's pioneering survey of English Renaissance writing, and above all for a handful of sentences in that chapter, which offer a rare glimpse into the early career of William Shakespeare. “As the soule of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras: so the sweete wittie soule of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honytongued Shakespeare,” Meres declares. “As Epius Stolo said, that the Muses would speake with Plautus tongue, if they would speak Latin: so I say that the Muses would speak with Shakespeares fine filed phrase, if they would speake English” (281v, 282r).

Literary studies continues to have a penchant for great men. In 2015, for example, 20% of authors listed as subjects in the MLA International Bibliography accounted for just under 60% of all articles or book chapters published that year. Just the top 1% of authors, or 33 in total, accounted for 1,302 works, or 20.8% of the total. Four of these authors were women, and one was not white (W. E. B. Du Bois). Those numbers are even slightly more concentrated than in 1970, when 1% of authors accounted for 15.9% of all articles and book chapters. In that year, only one of the most frequently mentioned authors was a woman (George Eliot), and all were white.

In the wake of 9/11, from an already distant moment of globalization (before we even knew words like anthropocene or Facebook), Arif Dirlik asked if postcolonial critique hadn't failed to take the rapidly evolving new modalities of capitalism into account. By foregrounding the experience of colonialism so insistently, postcolonialism risked cultivating “an exaggerated view of the hold of the past over contemporary realities, and an obliviousness to the reconfiguration of past legacies by contemporary restructurations of power” (“Rethinking Colonialism” 429). What it had achieved, however, was an interrogation of “fundamental contradictions in an earlier discourse on colonialism,” whereby the meaning of colonialism had shifted from the post-1945 Manichaean narrative to something far more ambiguous (431). As a consequence, even anticolonial nationalism, which had largely been shaped by native functionaries of colonial rule, came to be understood as a product of colonialism. Frantz Fanon was among the first to confront this problem (119–99). But when his alternative vision of an organic nationhood developing out of the rural peasantry failed to emerge, the intellectual legacies of anticolonialism were, unsurprisingly, subjected to sustained interrogation. Indeed, Dirlik attributes such a reorientation in post-colonial criticism precisely to the failures of postcolonial regimes (“Rethinking Colonialism” 434).

About six years ago I was having lunch with a colleague who ended our conversation by announcing that she was headed over to a symposium on Lucretius and modernity. “You don't sound too enthusiastic,” I said. “Well,” she sighed, “it's the new good materialism, right?”

Faultfinding is the fault that Rita Felski's The Limits of Critique attributes to literary criticism. Faultfinding is also, of course, what Felski's book spends most of its time doing. Had it not abandoned itself so completely to faultfinding, its central insight might have led it to do more interesting things. (The fact that these more interesting things are already being done by much socially engaged criticism is one obvious weakness of her argument, which puffs itself up by expanding its range of targets so as to take in nearly the whole profession and then, sensing a challenge, steps back in mock horror so as to suggest, “No, of course, I didn't mean that!”) As an example of these alternative, nonfaultfinding versions of critique, the book might have tried to explore the reasons the humanities are as susceptible as they are to the holier-than-thou self-righteousness that Felski both accuses and, however reluctantly, also personifies.