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From the race riots of 1919 to the Black Lives Matter movement, anxieties about Black uprising have influenced literary funding and prestige in the United States. Across many decades, grants and prizes have shaped the broader ecosystem of US literature, working in tandem to reroute Black militancy and define literary excellence as white. Even as the field diversified in the twenty-first century, prestige institutions raised barriers to entry and imposed new constraints on writers of color.
Crowd Control tells the story of how efforts to contain Black resistance led to the invention of American literary excellence. It brings together archival research and comprehensive data on literary prize demographics with readings of works by Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, William Styron, Claudia Rankine, and others to offer a material account of how US literature has imagined—and managed—protest. Because literature was thought to mollify, redirect, or cast public doubt on militant resistance, moments of mass protest consistently have been followed by targeted support for Black writers. Tracing the evolution of the institutions that reward writers across more than a century, this book unveils the hidden connection between literary funding and social control.
— Christopher Kempf, author of Craft Class: The Writing Workshop in American Culture
Crowd Control shows how literary philanthropy, cultural policy, and the circuits of literary prestige have combined to sustain patterns of racial exclusion and subjugation for more than a century. Grossman, Spahr, and Young highlight the insidious effects of some of our highest honors and most liberal good intentions. This is a bracing work of institutional critique, aimed at the very heart of the American literary field.
— James English, author of The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value
Crowd Control brilliantly lays bare some fundamental dynamics of U.S. literary history, showing us how even its most exuberantly well-meaning and celebratory moments have also been profoundly politically racialized ones. Rigorously documented and compellingly written, its refusal of easy liberal sentiment provides us with something far more valuable: real clarity about the ways our culture cunningly refuses calls for radical change.
— Mark McGurl, Stanford University
What does literature have to do with the work of the state? In Crowd Control, Grossman, Spahr, and Young tell the overdetermined story of the grant and the prize and their power in US letters and beyond. Crunching data and tracking quiet influence, they deliver us a new, essential history of the undeniable racialized political aims of literary infrastructures.
— Hannah Zeavin, UC Berkeley
Claire Grossman is an assistant professor of English at Occidental College. She has written for Cultural Critique and (with Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young) American Literary History, The Cambridge Companion to the Essay, and Public Books.
Juliana Spahr is Frederick A. Rice Professor at Mills College at Northeastern University. Her most recent book of poems is Ars Poeticas (2025) and her most recent book of scholarship is Du Bois’s Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment (2018).
Stephanie Young directs the creative writing program at Mills College at Northeastern University and is a member of the Krupskaya Books editorial collective. Her books of poetry and prose include Pet Sounds (2019), which received a Lambda Literary Award.