About
Aida Levy-Hussen's research integrates 20th and 21st century African American literary studies with psychoanalytic theory, trauma and memory studies, theories of race and racialization, and feminist and queer theory, to examine how a range of histories, social forces, feelings, and desires inhabit and drive the stories we tell about race and racism. Levy-Hussen is currently working on a second monograph, provisionally called Race Traitors, which charts and interrogates various figures of racial "treason" (e.g., passing, "selling out," "loving the oppressor") as represented in modern and contemporary African American literature. Aida is particularly interested in how the ostensibly socio-political charge of being a race traitor draws its currency from notions of psychic propriety: to betray the race is to avow "wrong" identifications or attachments. She is the author of How to Read African American Literature: Post-Civil Rights Fiction and the Task of Interpretation (2016) and co-editor of The Psychic Hold of Slavery: Legacies in American Expressive Culture (2016).
Aida Levy-Hussen is an Associate Professor of English Literature and Language.
