What has it meant to produce knowledge and to teach at the intersection of English literature and Black Studies? This dissertation asks after the history and function of Black literary studies as it emerged as an academic discipline in the late 20th century U.S. academy. I propose that Black literary studies' institutional knowledge project is best understood as an endeavor to reflexively theorize the conditions of its own institutionalization. To this end, I illustrate the tremendous promise represented by this endeavor as well as its significant liabilities. This introduction supplies theoretical and contextual exegesis and frames the methodological critique which grounds "A Darker Form of Discipline," and which animates the broader experiment in interpretive method staged across my four chapters. This experiment attempts to reinvigorate Black literary studies' reflexive sensitivity to institutional knowledge production. Grounded in a disciplinary critique that defamiliarizes the subject/object relation of the critic and the literary text--arguing that Black literary studies' discipline formation relied on the mutualistic, co-creation of criticism and literary tradition--my interpretive method turns to the literary text as a collaborator and an informant on the institutional conditions of Black literary studies' discipline formation. In this way, I work toward a critical practice that can shed light upon its practitioners--helping us to assess the conditions under which we work, and to judge the type of work we actually do. My historical frame ranges from the first departmentalization of Black Studies in 1969 through to the conclusion of the 1990's "canon wars," the resolution of which marked the Black literary archive's tacit incorporation into English departments' orthodoxical research and pedagogy. Black literary studies transformed within this thirty year period: having begun as one of Black Studies' founding curricular staples, by the late 1970s it migrated into new institutional homes through its sub-disciplinary expression as literary criticism. Specifically, I focus on the formation of Black feminist criticism and Afro-American criticism. The former was announced in Barbara Smith's 1977 essay "Towards a Black Feminist Criticism" and housed in departments of Women's Studies, which had successfully grounded their disciplinary endeavors in feminist criticism's own sub-disciplinary expression of literary studies. The latter was announced in Robert Stepto's and Dexter Fisher's 1979 teaching volume "Afro-American Literature: The Reconstruction of Instruction," which defined itself against the perceived deficits of Black Studies' literary curriculum, petitioning English departments to platform their critical and pedagogical rejoinder. I focus this introduction upon Barbara Smith's and Robert Stepto's founding gestures in order to assess the fraught convergence of interests grouped under these disciplinary formations--integrating a review of Black Studies' and literary studies' institutional histories into my discussion of Black feminist and Afro-American criticisms' emergence. I assess that fraught convergence through the compromise between administrative conservatism and student radicalism, effecting the historic first founding of Black, Women's, and Ethnic Studies in 1969. Transpiring first at San Francisco State College as a result of the Third World Student Strike, the next several years would witness further strikes and campus occupations as students demanded "a relevant education" and "an education for liberation." These demands indict the standing curriculum, stressing the roles that culturally irresponsive pedagogy plays in suppressing dissent and abridging freedom. In considering the compromise which realized these new "interdisciplines," I am interested in how these indictments were redirected into recuperations of the university's socially reproductive authority. Supplementation to the standing curriculum diverted course away from that curriculum's wholesale replacement, and so that the extension of the university's authority into new terrains of study ultimately averted the risk of that authority's abolition. In this way, the interdisciplines were founded to synthesize epistemic authority and the protest to it, with activists and administrators each assessing the compromise as their best chance at institutional futurity. Designating interests that converge even as they cross, this compromise left the interdisciplines bidirectionally "compromised" as their original condition of being. I propose that Black literary studies emerges from this synthesis as a uniquely powerful tool for narratively habituating the post-1969 university to its new, constitutive contradictions. Through my discussion of Black Studies' and literary studies' respective institutional histories, I indicate how each introduces a condition of crisis for the other, and through Black literary studies' synthesis, also provides the terms for crisis's remediation. I locate both promise and liability in this narrative resource, which is double-edged precisely because it works both ways. Particularly through the endeavors of Black feminist criticism, we can observe these discursive technologies manifesting suppressed, subaltern social and historical consciousnesses through the university's idiom of authorized truth--effectively narrating Black women's creative and intellectual endeavors into cultural and historical reality. Yet in my critical attention to Afro-American criticism--and particularly, the disfavorable contrast it invites with Black Studies' literary curriculum--we can also note institutional power's own collaborative investment in this narrative incorporation. In this way, my specialized focus on the disciplinary emergence of Black literary studies facilitates engagement with a broader set of concerns. Working between the macrohistorical scale of racial modernity, and the synchronic scale of post-integration U.S. social politics, "A Darker Form of Discipline" is concerned with how these two snakes eat one another's tails: how the racial imagination of history gets routed through the late 20th century reordering of American higher education, and how higher education's re-narration of history is itself an expression of late-stage racial modernity. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. 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