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Document Type

Article

Author Biography

Claire Marie Class is an assistant teaching professor at the University of Tampa. Her work appears in MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States and Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers.

Abstract

Inspired by an exchange between antilynching reformers Ida B. Wells and Jane Addams, this article uncovers a debate about reading methods—and the utility of reading suspiciously for marginalized groups—that occurred over a century ago. Responding to an opinion piece Addams wrote for The Independent in 1901, Wells delineates the limits of sympathetic approaches to the lynching crisis. Reading both Addams and Southern lynchers suspiciously and supplementing her readings with a new sociological tool, crime statistics, Wells demonstrates that lynchings of Black men were economically motivated. She develops her suspicious reading specifically to disrupt the bigoted sociology of race that fueled prolynching propaganda. However, she also sought better possibilities for the young social science discipline, advancing a sociology that analyzes the roots of Black oppression. Critics like Rita Felski have condemned the ubiquity of suspicious reading, which they associate with a distanced critical posture. At the same time, critics like Caroline Levine and Autumn Womack are leaning toward sociological methods. Unlike the adversarial mode typically associated with suspicious reading, Wells models an urgent suspicious reading that is deeply invested and, in her own words, “dynamitic.” For Wells, dynamitic reading helpfully intervenes against both the purported scientific objectivity of fin-de-siècle sociology and the indiscriminate affection of Addams, herself a sociological practitioner. It can also counter the inertness of now routinized critical practices. Wells provides us with a newly useful hermeneutics of suspicion. Moreover, she helps us to historicize and unpack the long relationship between sociology and literary studies.

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