Forty years ago, Edward Said wrote, “The history of thought, to say nothing of political movements, is extravagantly illustrative of how the dictum ‘solidarity before criticism’ means the end of criticism. I take criticism so seriously as to believe that, even in the very midst of a battle in which one is unmistakably on one side against another, there should be criticism, because there must be critical consciousness if there are to be issues, problems, values, even lives to be fought for.” Does this hold now? How can and should we, today, articulate and justify the politics of humanistic literary practice?

It is very easy these days to peg humanistic scholarly practice to recognizable solidarity practice. In fact, it’s not only easy, and it’s not only incentivized, but it’s hard to imagine an alternative. Does solidarity necessarily imply identity politics? Is it possible in the current epistemological climate, and is there a reason, to articulate a politics of literary criticism outside the gravitational pull of identity politics and recognizable solidarity struggles? Does thinking through identity necessarily involve embracing what has often been maligned as identity politics? How can we imagine solidarity beyond the allure of biopolitics and the metaphysical arithmetic of necropolitics? Is it time to elaborate a 21st-century version of, or rejoinder to, Said’s claim that criticism must precede solidarity?

Abstracts and short bios.