ABSTRACT
The philosophy of literature, like the rest of academic philosophy, is just beginning to establish its relationship to critical race theory. For this reason, there is no established body of questions, debates, texts, or figures that standardly trained practitioners of these specialties would agree to locate at the intersection of the two fields. A useful term of art and an important methodological principle have already made appearances here, but still require some elaboration. The term of art is 'enterprise', which will appear in what follows as a gesture at the complex webs of practices, institutions, beliefs, traditions, and more that the terms 'race' and 'literature' implicate. The philosophical links between race and literature will be easier to locate if we use racial formation theory to specify the wider connections between race and the aesthetic. Race and literature become linked quite early on, just when they both begin to take their modern forms.
