Disciplinary Aesthetics tracks the ways that black authors have borrowed from and contended with disparate disciplinary methodologies in response to multiculturalist imperatives to manage, archive, and represent racial difference from the mid-twentieth century onward. I account for how disparate authors’ preoccupations with taste, veracity, legibility, and authenticity have colored these encounters with the academic disciplines, providing a complex portrait of the aesthetic entanglements that might cause us to see the career of multiculturalism as less predictable, systematic, and linear than has been argued in recent scholarship. To pursue these questions, I sit with four different aesthetic encounters withdisciplinarity, beginning with James Baldwin’s attacks on the protest novel. In this first chapter, I connect Baldwin’s antipathy for the genre’s embeddedness in sociological representation with the polemics over taste that were taking shape among the New York intellectual magazines in the late 1940s and 1950s. In my readings of “Stranger in the Village” (1953), “Of Princes and Powers” (1951), and “Many Thousands Gone” (1955)—alongside Baldwin’s correspondences with Notes of a Native Son editor Sol Stein—I show how intimately bound up Baldwin’s early writing was with domestic Cold War priorities even as he wrote from abroad. I argue that like the New York intellectuals, Baldwin understood literary production as integral to the nation’s survival; that he saw literary representations of race as key to comprehending racial difference and racial inequality. In chapter two, I situate slave narrative fiction in a slavery studies field that was dominated by social-scientific empiricism in its first-wave iteration, and then by literary experimentation during its second wave. I anchor the chapter by discussing two novels that are representative of this shift: whereas Ernest Gaines models his novel The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971) on Federal Writers Project’s interviews with former slaves, Toni Morrison’s Beloved(1987) deploys “rememory” to introduce an imaginative historicism through which she theorizes black female subjectivity in innovative ways. I argue that Morrison’s maneuver is consonant with black feminist criticism’s departure from social-scientific emphases on empiricism, patriarchal power, and national teleology, and I show how this black feminist intervention generated new approaches to temporality and subjectivity in the field of slavery studies. In my third chapter, I link August Wilson’s Century Cycle to the uptake of black vernacular speech among black cultural custodians such as Houston Baker Jr. and Henry Louis Gates Jr. in the last two decades of the twentieth century. Attending to August Wilson’s correspondences with Lloyd Richards—artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theatre and a dean of the Yale School of Drama—I show the degrees to which Wilson’s aesthetic commitments synched up with institutional interests in showcasing black expressive cultures. My final chapter asks how Percival Everett negotiates the problem of raced reading in his 2001 novel Erasure. I contrast the interludes in which the novel’s protagonist, Monk, meditates on aesthetic autonomy to the novel’s televised representations of racial difference.