Khan on Civil Rights Lawyering and the Reconstruction of Law and Literature

Almas Khan, Civil Rights Lawyering and the Reconstruction of Law and Literature, at 29 European Journal of English Studies 1 (2025). Here is the abstract.

Interrogating the place of race in law and literature has newfound urgency in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 decision striking race-based affirmative action in university admissions and a renewal of the “canon wars” in U.S. politics and academia. Amidst this turbulence, legal scholars have published landmark articles unmasking the racist intellectual history of several doctrinal fields. Their critiques inform this essay, which charts a counter-genealogy of law and literature’s growth as a field grounded not mainly in academic work but civil rights praxis. The essay first summarises the traditional narrative of law and literature’s emergence as an interdiscipline, close reading canonical texts that craft a genealogy of elite white men building the field. Next, the essay presents a narrative of the field centralising the work of civil rights lawyers from Reconstruction to the civil rights era. Turning to this alternative archive highlights Black lawyers’ role in constructing the field, including through theorising about interdisciplinarity and re-forming literary genres to promote racial justice. The essay ultimately encourages law and literature scholars to consider how an exclusionary intellectual history of the field has shaped their research and how a more inclusive intellectual history can revitalise the interdiscipline.

Here is a link to the abstract and the notes.