Intradisciplinary Exchange in English: Gates, Fishkin, and Jim

What happens when a prominent scholar of African American literary studies invites a leading scholar of American literary studies, specifically Mark Twain studies, to contribute to a biographical series about figures of African descent? That’s what occurred when Henry Louis Gates, Jr. invited Shelley Fisher Fishkin to contribute to Black Lives, a series designed to produce “brief, authoritative biographies of individuals of African descent who profoundly shaped history.”

Fishkin's Jim: The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn's Comrade (2025) takes us beyond familiar conversations about interdisciplinary work and raises the issue of intellectual boundaries and the dynamics of intradisciplinary exchange.

While it is accurate and necessary to state that African American literature is American literature, or that African American literary studies is American literary studies, it sometimes behooves us to think of those areas as overlapping yet distinct creative domains. Doing so makes it possible to examine their points of convergence in more precise and critically productive ways.

The Gates–Fishkin–Black Lives connection here is a compelling case of intradisciplinary exchange. Keep in mind that Gates and Fishkin have been teaching and publishing in their respective areas for well over four decades at this point. So Jim, published under the auspices of Black Lives, represents a convergence of long-standing scholarly trajectories as well as a deliberate crossing of subfields within English.

What this example ultimately invites us to consider is how we might more intentionally cultivate intradisciplinary exchange within English itself. We might ask what is gained, and what becomes newly visible, when scholars move across subfields with purpose and clarity. In that sense, Jim offers a testament to the power of productive crossings within a disciplines. 

Related:

• Canonical Fictional Figures in Circulation: The Yale University Press Black Lives Series

• Performing Jim: Black Actors and the Afterlives of a Literary Figure