Worrying the Line: Reading Racial Enclosure in African American Literature

This article proposes an interpretation of the term “racial enclosure,” and examines its conceptual relevance for the field of African American literature and for Black Studies, more broadly. Enclosure’s definitions and applications proliferate—it is at once a spatial and geographic form, a historical and legal process, and an epistemic system of individuation and taxonomy. I ask how we might work with a historically grounded concept of enclosure that does not reduce it to, nor dismiss entirely, its abstract and symbolic applications. I suggest that it is precisely the relationship between its historical and material valences and its abstract and conceptual valences, that makes “racial enclosure” an urgent formulation for scholars of black life, history, and culture.