Many teachers of literature still retain the ivory-tower illusion that in their professional area they are exempt and immune from the conditionings of social thought and opinion as well as from the problems and controversies of the market place. They may completely fail to recognize the indirect reflection of all these in their critical perspectives and in their standards of literary judgment, or, even more apparently, in their tradition-set boundaries of content inclusion and exclusion. But even the briefest consideration of the amount and kind of attention given to the creative literature of a minority group like the American Negro will provide us with an acid test of the widespread presence and the curtailing influences of such limiting traditions. They are, moreover, only the more effective and hard to reconstruct for being not deliberate or overtly hostile but merely traditional and uncritically conceded. Such cultural bias and snobbism is primarily responsible for the far too prevalent tendency to ignore Negro and other minority expression in literature and, also, for the equally unjustifiable tendency to treat it condescendingly when it is considered. We need, therefore, seriously to reconsider our general practice in this regard and, in addition to giving minority literature a place in the curriculum, critically to reconstruct our current teaching approaches to such materials.
Any approach that is fair and constructive must achieve two sound pedagogical objectives: it must avoid and eliminate the double standard of critical values and judgment in the consideration of a minority-group literature, and it must hold as its ultimate aim the integrated consideration of the minority literature with the main stem of the literature of the majority. Such aims and their specifications seem to call for the sociocultural approach as the proper and progressive one for the presentation of minority-group literature and creative expression.
The literature of and about a minority group may be regarded from three approaches: as a reflection of the minority mind; as an index of the majority attitude toward the minority; and as a social mirror reflecting the interactions of the majority-minority relationships, with their ever changing alignments. The last approach seems to me the right one, since it involves the integrated treatment of which I have already spoken. It is more than a combination of the two previously mentioned approaches, since, in addition to introducing common denominators of social and cultural values, it also establishes an objective criterion of literary judgment. An instance of the application of an objective criterion would be the inclusion of the work of Negro poets and writers in general anthologies of American literature instead of only in specialized, though not altogether improper, anthologies of “American Negro literature.” A tendency in this direction has begun to make considerable headway of late. An instance of the recognition of common cultural denominators would be the critical interpretation of Negro creative expression, not merely as minority self-expression, which it is in part, but more organically as an important segment of representative regional or national literature and art. This critical viewpoint has also dawned, but has not yet matured in contemporary literary criticism. This view by no means outlaws specialized separate treatment but puts it in its proper place as supplementary rather than as primary and basic. Happily, both sound canons of criticism and sound norms of democracy combine to indicate and vindicate such a position. Progressive pedagogy must and will adopt it.
It happens that the literature by and about the Negro is the largest and most continuous body of minority literature we have in America. The bulk of Negro self-expression is larger than any but specialized students know.1 It runs back to early colonial times, and, from then on, if we note the folk literature and the slave narratives, it is historically continuous. But we must add to this the vast literature of both direct and indirect allusion, which the historical preoccupation of white writers with one or another aspect of the Negro’s life or of his problem has made into a bulky segment of our national literature. Even after much of this literature about the Negro has been winnowed of its polemical tares and its genre chaff, there remains an enormous part of it which is of literary as well as of period importance, and which has emanated from the great creative names on our national literary roll.
Proper critical perspective on this material and its values and insights is an integral part of our task of literary history and criticism. It is, also, if properly handled, an exceptional lead-in to the study of period attitudes and values, and so promises to yield dividends of interpretative importance in return for the gains of integration which the sociocultural approach has instituted. For example, what better or surer critical guide thread could we have for the study of local color and regionalism in southern fiction than the critical analysis of the treatment of the Negro character in that fiction? Or what more diagnostic single factor for the development of nativism in American drama than the increasing emphasis on the Negro problem and the Negro character? Such critical contributions and potentialities really present a challenge and an opportunity to modern-minded literary scholarship rather than merely a neglected task or supernumerary duty.
Without adequate space for a substantive account of the Negro in American literature, we must now proceed, all too briefly, to some indications of main trends and of critical criteria for their proper treatment and study. The long historical gamut from early times to the present can be broken down most profitably into four phases of expression rather than into strict historical periods: the folk literature; the semiliterary polemical literature of slavery and of social problem analysis; the formal literature of Negro self-expression; and the formal literature of the Negro theme and subject matter, the latter shared by both the white and the Negro writer. Such classification escapes, it will be noted, the cricitism which, with warrant, assails the arbitrary separation of authors into racial categories. Yet it does take into account the very legitimate interest in deliberate racial self-expression and spokesmanship, where and as it occurs.
Fortunately, on this point, the folk material presents no difficulties. It is properly distinctive and racially characteristic, even when expressing itself in borrowed cultural molds, as, for example, the spiritual. For the peasant personality gave it that distinctive racial character naïvely and obviously. Increasing attention and value are being given to the Negro folk materials—the literary side of the spirituals as folk poetry; the secular ballads, older and contemporary; and the folklore, both saga type and anecdotal. These materials are trickling out from the specialized folklore studies into the folk literature anthologies like the Sandburg and the Botkin anthologies and thus are beginning to have the general currency they deserve. Indeed, such radical revaluation of the Negro’s folk contributions has occurred that there is little ground left for complaint either on the score of sympathetic interpretation or of separate and condescending treatment. For all grades of school instruction these materials are now available, for the most part, in acceptably sound interpretations. The regrettable omission of the excellent folk section from the revised edition of the Modern Library Anthology of American Negro Literature is partly compensated for by the special taste and competence of the folk section of The Negro Caravan.
As to the polemical literature, especially of slavery and antislavery, several reversals of taste and interest have left it seriously and unwarrantably neglected in our day. We do not similarly neglect periods of English and other continental literatures, where the main current of literary expression was just as polemical and where the best practitioners of the sermon, the oration, the editorial, and the polemical essay were, as with this period also, the leading stylists of their time. This happens to be true of a goodly amount of this polemical literature of the Negro, especially of the best antislavery advocates, both Negro and white Lowell, Sumner, Wendell Phillips, Lloyd Garrison, and Lincoln are, on the one side, not artistically negligible names; and neither are their Negro collaborators and counterparts (public knowledge to the contrary): Mc. Cune Smith, Redmond, Ringgold Ward, Highland Garnett, Alexander Crummell, Frederick Douglass, Booker Washington, of whom only the latter two have come as yet to any general recognition. An annotated general anthology of slavery and anti-slavery literature, culling particularly from the buried treasures of some of the slave narratives, would reveal worthwhile literary as well as important social documentary materials. Nor would I, for one, neglect the best of the proslavery materials; its inclusion would serve only to base the period ideology adequately and to set it in proper perspective. And even as recent a volume as B. A. Botkin’s anthology of slave narratives, belatedly collected under the W.P.A. Writers’ Project, Lay My Burden Down, would furnish much spice of folk history to the slave-narrative section. Until such a compilation is available, Dr. Carter Woodson’s The Negro Mind, previously cited, must provide the most accessible source material.
It is with respect to the Negro’s effort at creative self-expression that the greatest critical caution and reorientation become necessary. We must steer a by-no-means-easy course safely between the extreme of sentimental overestimation and the other extreme of unfair comparison and belittlement. Basic for this is the recognition that only a generation or two back of the Negro’s gradually acquired maturity went the parallel spiral of our own national emergence from colonial provincialism and all that provincialism implies. Indeed, at one or two points, early Negro colonial literary expression, with personalities like Phyllis Wheatley, Lemuel Haynes, Nathaniel Paul, was almost at par with the general standard of the times, as any fair comparison, especially with Freneau and Ann Bradstreet, will prove. But admittedly much of the earlier formal literary work by Negroes was not artistically good. It was imitative in spirit and doubly handicapped by sentimental rhetoric and by minority protest and propaganda. The work of such periods should be objectively presented on this basis, as a promise rather than as an achievement.
But gradually, as the cultural condition of the Negro matured, our creative artists realized that their best effectiveness was as artists instead of as propagandists, as experimental innovators rather than as traditionalists, as forthright group spokesmen rather than as special pleaders. Of course, such a development could not come suddenly or completely, and yet it is remarkable how relatively early it did set in, partly in work like that of Charles Chestnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, and then, quite markedly, in the work of the first generation of “New Negro” poets and writers who, with Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Rudolf Fisher, Zora Hurston, came on the scene just after World War I in the 1920’s and the early 1930’s. From this point on, Negro poetry and, more gradually, Negro literary expression in the prose forms of drama, fiction, the short story, and criticism disengaged itself from any need for a double standard of judgment, and should be presented on that basis.
Although some Negro writers at this stage preferred to turn to general themes, a surprising amount of the work still clung to racial or group self-expression as a main artistic objective. However, along with this, now went an ever clearer realization that it was possible and necessary to convert Negro materials into universally expressive art. The gains in objectivity and in common denominator human values can be clearly observed in the work of the late thirties and of the present decade: Sterling Brown, Margaret Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, as younger poets; Arna Bontemps, Saunders Redding, Richard Wright, Chester Himes, Ann Petry, among others, as novelists and playwrights, exhibit these traits in progressive degree. Even a chronological consideration of these writers reveals the main outlines of the development, but, of course, critical documentation is needed also, and is no longer lacking in the critical literature of this special field.
The consideration of the Negro poet and writer is no sooner broadened out to a consideration of his treatment of the Negro theme than it becomes an integrated body of criticism in which the work of the white writer on the same themes becomes important and relevant. Indeed, in some cases, as with Eugene O’Neill and Paul Green in Negro drama, and with Stribling, Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, Lillian Smith, and many others in Negro fiction, the white exponents of the literature of the Negro seem to have been the pioneers of new viewpoints and of more penetrating insights. No critical account of the field in the last two decades could possibly separate this literature into two racially separate strands. Many of these white artists have sensed the artistic values of the Negro materials as well as the vital relationship between their careful exploration and our having a fully representative native American art.
Ironically enough, there has resulted a preferential and almost disproportionate consideration of these Negro materials, especially in the newer schools of regional southern fiction. Nativism, regionalism, realism—Marxist and otherwise—and the drive for cultural democracy have all, in turn, given cumulative prominence to Negro subject matter and impetus to untraditional revaluations of it. This is so radically different from the older artistic attention paid to Negro themes that it amounts to an artistic revolution. Instead of saying, as was said for so long, that we should recognize the Negro because he has been neglected and needs recognition, recent American literature,—and for that matter, American art generally—has come forward, at least in its more creative talents, with a very new and democratic formula: We will recognize Negro materials because they are intrinsically interesting and because the national culture needs them in the picture to be truly representative. There is even a dawning recognition of an important corollary of this: This development needs the Negro artist also as a collaborator for intimate and most authentic revelation.
If I am not mistaken, an adequate critical frame of reference thus becomes available for resetting the literary history of the Negro correctly in the panorama of our national literary history. This provides also a satisfactory set of objective criteria for its proper evaluation and effective integration with the majority branch of the national culture. Without some such general frame and perspective, details of this considerable body of literature by and about the Negro can have only isolated and very partial effect as “exceptional” performances of singly gifted individuals, unrelated to the maturing of a minority group consciousness or to an expanding majority conscience and understanding; that is to say, without any vital relationship to the cultural forces at work in the society which has produced this art and its basic values.
Not that all this social philosophy has to be intruded into the class materials; but it should be unobtrusively there, just the same, in the critical perspective of those who prepare the materials and of those who, as teachers, must understand the underlying trends of the development. Similarly, as other articles will doubtless show, there is no fixed minority character, but a succession of interpretations, both from within and from without, intimately conditioned by the attitudes and outlooks of the period and the time. “Uncle Tom,” properly dated, for example, is a stereotype of sentimental, humanitarian sympathy and appeal; “Uncle Tom,” undated, is atypical enough to be both a falsification and a group libel. Self-pity and rhetorical protest and appeal reflected in their historical phase of development an awakening race consciousness and representative self-expression; but in the context of the New Negro today they are misrepresentative and group-repudiated. Objective self-criticism at one stage of minority-group life is psychologically disloyal; at a later stage of accommodation, salutary and obligatory. These are added reasons why only social-historical interpretation is safe and sane, especially in relation to minority-group materials. Majority-group materials are treated that way; minority materials require at least as much—sometimes, one is tempted to think, even a trifle more.