Koritha Mitchell: A Reading LIst

Hopkins Press Podcast 3.9 Koritha Mitchell

Koritha Mitchell is is a public intellectual, a professor of English, a literary historian, an award-winning author and cultural critic, and as of last year she is also a member of the Hopkins Press Advisory Board. Her work has already had quite an impact both within the academy as well as in the larger public sphere. 

Her article "Identifying White Mediocrity and Know-Your-Place Aggression: A Form of Self-Care", which was published in African American Review in 2018, has impacted both the academy and the mainstream. Thousands of readers are still finding the article each year, making it one of our consistently most-read Hopkins Press Journal articles on Project MUSE.

In our recent Hopkins Press Podcast interview, Mitchell defines her groundbreaking concept of "know-your-place aggression" as "a reaction to the success of people who are not supposed to be successful," and the idea has resonated into recent articles about Junot Diaz in Chronicle of Higher Education and Shedeur Sanders in Esquire, and a 2024 interview with Mitchell published in Public Books brought her work to the attention of numerous new readers. 

Over the years, Mitchell has been a prolific contributor to several of the journals that call Hopkins Press home, including Callaloo, African American Review, American Quarterly, Theatre Journal, and J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. To accompany our podcast interview with Mitchell, we've assembled a reading list of her contributions across the Hopkins Press Journals roster. 

All are free to read through 30 June 2025. 

On "Know-Your-Place Aggression"

Identifying White Mediocrity and Know-Your-Place Aggression: A Form of Self-Care
Koritha Mitchell
African American Review
Volume 51, Number 4, Winter 2018

Love in Action: Noting Similarities between Lynching Then and Anti-LGBT Violence Now
Koritha Mitchell
Callaloo
Volume 36, Number 3, Summer 2013

Articles

Decency's Requirements
Koritha Mitchell
J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists
Volume 11, Number 1, Spring 2023

Dynamic People, Dynamic Archives
Koritha Mitchell
Callaloo
Volume 38, Number 3, Summer 2015

Debate, Mourning, Affirmation
Koritha Mitchell
Callaloo
Volume 37, Number 3, Summer 2014

Black Success Is Never Simple: An Interview with Architect Curtis J. Moody
Koritha Mitchell
Callaloo
Volume 37, Number 2, Spring 2014

No More Shame! Defeating the New Jim Crow with Antilynching Activism’s Best Tools
Koritha Mitchell
American Quarterly
Volume 66, Number 1, March 2014

James Baldwin, Performance Theorist, Sings the Blues for Mister Charlie
Koritha Mitchell
American Quarterly
Volume 64, Number 1, March 2012

Dilemmas of the Black Intellectual: A Round Table of the 2009 CALLALOO CONFERENCE
Fred D'Aguiar, Koritha Mitchell, James Peterson, Francesca Royster, and Dagmawi Woubshet
Callaloo
Volume 33, Number 1, Winter 2010

Generative Challenges: Notes on Artist/Critic Interaction
Koritha Mitchell
Callaloo
Volume 32, Number 2, Spring 2009

Mamie Bradley’s Unbearable Burden: Sexual and Aesthetic Politics in Bebe Moore Campbell’s Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine
Koritha Mitchell
Callaloo
Volume 31, Number 4, Fall 2008

Reviews

The Glorious World of Crowns, Kinks and Curls by Keli Goff (review)
Koritha Mitchell
Theatre Journal
Volume 73, Number 3, September 2021

Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy by Alisha Gaines (review)
Koritha Mitchell
African American Review
Volume 54, Numbers 1-2, Spring/Summer 2021

Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body by Harvey Young (review) 
Koritha Mitchell
African American Review
Volume 45, Numbers 1-2, Spring/Summer 2012

By Hands Unknown (review)
Koritha Mitchell
Theatre Journal
Volume 63, Number 2, May 2011

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