Recognition Redefined: Using Literary Texts to Get Recognition

Recognition Redefined investigates the complexities of literary and social recognition with the aim of putting a fresh, cross-disciplinary spin on reader identification and social acknowledgment. Engaging with contemporary Danish and Anglophone works on racialization, illness and gender, I argue in favor of a close relation between aesthetic appeals to recognition and the political dimensions of literary texts. Moreover, I propose a framework bent on experience and relations, as opposed to identity and status, for articulating new fruitful understandings of how literary texts call for aesthetic and social recognition. Based on this, I argue that literary texts can make readers get what social acknowledgment is all about – and thereby help us redefine a key concept in the social sciences.

The first analytical chapter engages with literary depictions of racialization and recognition. Taking up Ta-Nehisi Coates’s memoir Between the World and Me and Yahya Hassan’s poetry collection Yahya Hassan, I flesh out different ways in which minority writers call for recognition via aesthetic means. Coates has denied being involved in a struggle for recognition in relation to white people. However, by paying attention to the letter format of Between the World, I claim that his memoir does, in fact, demand recognition for the historic crime committed against black people in the United States from the people who committed it, that is, the white majority. Yahya Hassan, on the other hand, articulates a rather different recognition demand in relation to the injuries of racialization. By deploying a distinct sense of clarity afforded by a capital letter format, engaging with manifesto stylistics and nodding to the combative mood in rap-music, his poetry breaks down binaries and redefines what racialized minorities are supposed to do and say. In so doing, Yahya Hassan calls on readers to recognize his right to splinter racial categories.

In the following chapter, I look into works of literature written by authors facing their own death. Here, I compare the theoretical frameworks of disability studies with that of narrative medicine. The former has put most of its energy into critiques of the very idea of disability, as a social rather than biomedical category, and uses literary analyses to these ends. Narrative medicine, however, can give us a better understanding of literature’s value as a form of consolation, rather than critique, and as a way of confronting existential as well as political issues. On this note, I delve into Paul Kalanithi’s memoir When Breath Becomes Air and Maria Gerhardt’s collection of short prose Transfer window – Stories about the mistakes healthy people make. Focusing on the narrative structure in Kalanithi’s text, I venture that the place for recognition in When Breath Becomes Air is structured around a distinctly temporal logic. As Kalanithi becomes more physically fragile, his outlook on time changes profoundly: paving the way for a social recognition of the fact that far from everyone is able to keep up pace with idealized, normative timelines that underpin society. Gerhardt’s text, I go on to demonstrate, touches on the relation between disability and modes of socialization. The speaker is surrounded by well-meaning friends and good intentions, but rarely feels recognized, because people are not willing to really listen to, or act on, her needs as a terminal cancer patient. For this reason, Transfer Window can help us consider the implications and pain of what I call empty recognition.

The relation between gender and recognition is the focus of the final chapter. Here, I look into literary depictions of motherhood, as this particular theme allows me to engage head-on with key issues in the field of gender studies. Maja Lucas’s collection of short prose Mother – A story about blood and Rachel Cusk’s essayistic memoir A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother serve as my literary examples. Lucas’s text details the minutiae of invisible and emotional labor associated with motherhood and her call for recognition, consequently, is an indirect plea for parenting tasks to be reorganized. Meanwhile, A Life’s Work touches on existential matters: having a baby makes the speaker lose her sense of self and feel conflicted and confused. Along these lines, and by introducing and critiquing the concept of narrative selfhood, I emphasize the gendered downside of recognition accounts that emphasize unity and coherence. Demanding that we experience ourselves as ‘whole’ persons or ‘unified’ selves in order to get recognition is problematic, I claim, given that a lot of people do not have this privilege.

Ultimately, I go on to conclude that literary texts can make us appreciate material and mundane aspects of recognition struggles that tend to be overlooked within political theory. They stress the importance of tangible action in recognition dynamics and highlight the role of redistribution as a broad concept denoting more than just economic structures of support. By downplaying the role of selfhood – and instead emphasizing experiences and relations – they furthermore open up the door for a renewed definition of what it is, exactly, that marginalized people seek recognition for. On these grounds, I stress literature’s distinct value as a social actor capable of enriching political reflection and propose a relational, experience-based, and flexible framework of recognition theory in relation to the politics of identity.