James Braxton Peterson
At the intersection of race, literature and theory are a set of matrices that coordinate the complex interactive relationships between race, society, citizenship, and the role of literature in the depiction of our world. In order to best delineate the development of these race‐literature‐theory matrices, the scope of this discussion should be delimited.
Race, for the most part here, refers to socially constructed phenomena associated with the experiences of Africans in America: Colored folks, Negroes, Afro‐Americans, and eventually African Americans. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t comparable theoretical matrices to connect the experiences of Native Americans, Latino Americans, and Asian Americans, through a body of literature to the requisite theoretical implications of those experiences in this nation; there are (see Chapter 24, “Ethnic Studies”). But the course briefly and only partially charted here is that of the theoretical souls of Black folks; a sometimes‐bitter journey occasionally buoyed by complicated critical battles over the nature of theory, the hegemony of language and the limitations of racial representation.
These phenomena occur both in literature and in literary criticism. It should go without saying, then, that the ‘literature’ referred to and discussed here is for the most part African American literature including, of course, poetry, epics, drama, novels, short stories, lyrics, and autobiographies, among other genres. Finally theory, or for simplicity’s sake, literary criticism is “the practice of describing, interpreting, and evaluating literature”—in this case the critical enterprise of identifying generative principles of literature, often in order to situate those principles within theoretical models (theories) that inform and facilitate the reading of the literature in question (Morner and Rausch 1991: 121). If the aforementioned description of theory/literary criticism comes across as tautological then I have succeeded in my first task—introducing readers to a nearly inherent conflict of interest in the critical discourses of Black letters. If we indeed are the race for theory—as Barbara Christian suggests—then any time we take “pen in hand” aren’t we already engaged in the theoretical project (Baker 1991: 41)?
In “Theoretical Returns,” a searing critical essay published in 1991 and enmeshed in a remarkable battle between Black literary scholars and critics over the roles of language, race, and racial authenticity in the goals of Black literary criticism, Houston Baker makes a powerful case for the theoretical potency of autobiographical narratives written by enslaved Africans. According to Baker: “Afro‐American intellectual history … is keenly theoretical because it pays compulsory attention both to metalevels of cultural negotiation and to autobiographical inscription … The trajectory of this process is from what might be called the workings of a distinctively syncretic spirit to autobiographical inscriptions of spirit work” (Baker 1991: 422). Baker is referencing (and theorizing) the works of Phillis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass. If there is such a thing as racial literary theory or literary theories of race then Baker provides here a platform upon which the most enduring tensions of these methodologies might be worked out and worked through. The trajectory in question is the movement from “syncretic spirit” to “autobiographical inscription,” from orality and/or spirituality to inscription or writing.
Much has been made—by Gates and others—of the “trope of the talking book,” a theory designed to explicate the enslaved African’s initial encounter with European literacy (Gates 1988: 127ff). The book “talks” to the European but not to the enslaved and hence marks the point of departure along the road of alienation and intellectual dissonance for the enslaved African in America. The trope of the talking book applies to various scenes of this encounter in traditional narratives written by enslaved Africans—including the narrative of Olaudah Equiano, one of the most widely read and canonized works of the genre. However, Harryette Mullen (1996) takes critical issue with the ways in which Gates’s trope tends to emphasize the orality of the African American tradition—including the trope of the talking book, the speakerly text, and the critical intervention of Black vernacular expressivity that he defines as Signifying. According to Mullen, “any theory of African‐American literature that privileges a speech based poetics, or the trope of orality, to the exclusion of more writerly texts will cost us some impoverishment of the tradition” (Mullen 1996: 670–1). For Mullen, the spiritual power of inscription can be unlocked in the spirit workings and writings of African Americans and various folk practices where “the voice may be unshackled’ from meaningful words” (1996: 672). This notion of the Black text as “spirit‐script” harkens back to Baker’s “autobiographical inscription,” and may close the loop on one of the more enduring “battles” in Black literary criticism—the question of whether or not to foreground orality in theories of African American literature.
Gates goes on to say that “black literature is verbal art like other verbal arts. ‘Blackness’ is not a material object, an absolute, or an event, but a trope; it does not have an essence as such but is defined by a network of relations that form a particular aesthetic unity” (Gates 1989: 40). It is interesting to consider the critical‐aesthetic unity that emerges from a compilation of the impressive scholars/theorists who have directly engaged the project of Black literary theory. If Gates’s assertion regarding the verbal artistry of literature fails to encompass the fullest range of Black literary expression, then both Houston Baker’s sense of inscription and Harryette Mullen’s theory of “spirit‐script” expand the Black literary theoretical project in ways that work across the scriptocentric divide. This theoretical fluidity matches Gates’s impulse in positing the figurative (fluid) nature of Blackness itself. This is an important assertion in the long history of Black literary theory given the early anxiety about Black identity and the customarily fixed and often essentialist descriptions of Blackness proffered during the Black Arts Movement of the 1970s.
Many Black artists and writers wrestled with the complexity of Black identity well before the robust debates of the late twentieth century. In “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Langston Hughes outlines the consequences of the internalization of white supremacy by Black artists. He opens the essay with an anecdote about a Black poet who prefers to be known as a poet—not a Black poet. For Hughes, this frame of reference—where Blackness is diametrically opposed to humanity—reflects the internalization of inferiority and thereby refracts the potential for Black artistry to stand/exist on its own terms. The “racial mountain” is a backdrop to Black literary production from its inception. One reason why Baker and others establish theoretical tools for engaging African American autobiography is because of the totalizing force of Hughes’s racial mountain in the lives of the enslaved. The internalization of white supremacy by Black folks is a psycho‐social disease that has its roots in transatlantic slavery but still has great potential to manifest its symptoms—even in the twenty‐first century. According to Gates, “it is obvious that the creation of formal literature could be no mean matter in the life of the slave, since the sheer literacy of writing was the very commodity that separated animal from human being, slave from citizen, object from subject” (Gates 1989: 24–5). With the intensity of these existential stakes the creation of a distinct African American literary tradition is a narrative of endurance, the search for empowerment/liberation and sustained artistic struggle. Hughes’ racial mountain still haunts the creative writing, artistry and the literary criticism of African American texts but certainly the mountain cannot loom as large in the twenty‐first century as it did at the dawn of the twentieth.
Chinua Achebe’s critically acclaimed novel, Things Fall Apart, has been framed/theorized within the canon of Western literature as a prominent rejoinder to Joseph Conrad’s depiction of “darkest” Africa in Heart of Darkness. Literary critics generally agree that Achebe’s most famous novel revises Conrad’s shadowy, brutish depiction of indigenous Africans into a more complex, cultured and holistic account of Africa via tribal Nigeria. Note well here that Achebe’s novel is in conversation with European literature in other seminal ways. The novel takes its title from a well‐known William Butler Yeats poem, “The Second Coming.” The (narrative and thematic) structure of the novel is deeply influenced by the form/structure of classic Greek tragedy. Achebe’s title signifies on the Yeats poem and Conrad’s classically racist depiction of African people. The tragedy of Things Fall Apart is not orchestrated by some angry god, or an ironic twist of fate. The tragedy of Things Fall Apart is orchestrated by the white supremacy of imperialist missionaries and by the misogyny of Nigerian culture. Thus even as Achebe theoretically engages Greek form, the Yeats poem, and the Conrad novel, the center, if you will, of Things Fall Apart still holds.
The protagonist Okonkwo tragic flaws aren’t solely the result of colonial encroachment. His tribe’s cultural traditions are not all dark madness, or shamanistic prescience or primitive magic. The novel still maintains its literary credibility beyond its (original) theoretical engagements. Moreover, Achebe’s original take on tragic narrative is mediated through classical Greek texts as well as modernist texts by Conrad and Yeats (that supply a paratext and a title). In some important ways, Things Fall Apart carries forward the argument by Mullen against Gates, who wants to derive black literary art from its oral roots in African culture.
Additional evidence of the African‐centered‐European syncretism of Things Fall Apart might be discovered in the 1998 Roots album of the same name. The Roots are an African American rap group hailing from Philadelphia who now also happen to be the Tonight Show band. The Roots’s Things Fall Apart is brimming with poetry, music, and lyrics that decry the corporate colonization of Hip Hop culture. This, then, might be another insight into how race, literature, and theory must engage each other in the African American literary project. The expectation that a Black text (critical or creative) be both syncretic and autonomous is the often (un)seen and (un)spoken tension in the discourses related to Black literary theories.
In Du Bois’ 1926 essay, “Criteria for Negro Art,” readers are treated to some sense of the socio‐political stakes of that moment with respect to any sustained effort to engage in discourses related to art/art production as well as any sustained effort to produce art itself. In 1926 America, the forces of white supremacy were still so violently entrenched that Du Bois spent a fair amount of time in his opening salvo attempting to justify why this topic—an outlining of criteria for Black art—could take up precious time in a convening of radicals for the expressed purpose of developing astute and direct ways to dismantle the infrastructure of white supremacy in America. But for Du Bois, establishing these criteria is as important as the organizing efforts against the evil forces of racism and white supremacy. The speech/essay has often been cited by African American scholars for its insights into the complicated balancing act required of Black art—that it be both politically radical and aesthetically beautiful. For some thinkers and critics, this edict was especially true for writers.
One of the more striking criteria for Black artists according to Du Bois, was his charge that they aspire to be the moral compass—the ethical and aesthetic leaders of this nation. In a series of rhetorical questions, Du Bois challenges his audience to consider their own behavior if/when they attained access to full (first‐class citizenship) in the United States. He inquires whether they would purchase the fanciest/flashiest cars; would they engage in conspicuous consumption and in so doing turn away from the natural and often ornate beauty of the world around them? Du Bois’ call here is for a certain kind of class‐consciousness—a middle‐class consciousness that belies the class demographics of his audience.
Consider the timeframe of the essay, “Criteria for Negro Art” (1926) and the comparable but wholly distinct essay—“The Characteristics of Negro Expression”—penned by his contemporary, Zora Neale Hurston, in 1934. One of the characteristics outlined by Hurston—the “will to adorn”—seems to work directly against Du Bois’ challenge for Black folks to be measured in their material consumption. And yet, both of these elemental theories of Black artistry maintain into the twenty‐first century. Part of this apparent antithesis stems from the possibility that Du Bois and Hurston have very different subjects/audiences in mind. Du Bois is speaking directly to his northern radical friends, activists who have access to upward economic mobility that many African Americans, particularly those in the south simply do not have. Hurston is speaking of (and in some subtle ways speaking to) those Black folk of the south for whom all the “Characteristics of Negro Expression” will resonate.
The fact that two apparently contradictory essays—two distinct and oft conflicting theories for Black artistry—can and did coexist in the early–mid twentieth century proves the culturally potent complexity of Black identity in America. The Black experience in America produced the context out of which Black folks could assume a mantle of American citizenship distinct from, and in some ways more aspirational than, their white American counterparts. For Du Bois, the criteria for “Negro Art” required an embrace of American identity only accessible to Black folks. “We black folk here may help for we have within us as a race new stirrings; stirrings of the beginnings of a new appreciation of joy, of a new desire to create, of a new will to be” (Du Bois 1926: 19). This “new will to be” thematically informs Black theoretical developments and the production of Black/African American literature well beyond Du Bois’ formative essay on “Negro Art.”
According to Hurston (1934), Black dialect is one of the formative “Characteristics of Negro Expression.” Judging from the extent to which Black dialect informs Black literary theory and the various discourses on/in Black literary criticism, Hurston’s assertion of the centrality of dialect as a mode or characteristic of “Negro expression” is a formative development in the trajectory of race/racial theory in artistic and literary praxis. Hurston argues that “[i]f we are to believe the majority of writers of Negro dialect and the burnt‐work artists, Negro speech is a weird thing” (Hurston 1934: 43). Here she takes aim at white writers who use Black dialect (on the printed page) as yet another way to re‐inscribe racial/racist hierarchies; and “burnt‐work artists” or blackface minstrels who deliberately deform Black dialect in order to re‐inscribe racial and racist hierarchies. This section of Hurston’s widely anthologized essay relies more on her anthropological and sociolinguistic expertise than other sections of this work. She makes several assertions regarding phonetics and the phonological articulations of Black speech. Many of what seem to be “off the cuff” assertions about how Black folks pronounce “I” or the use of “so” as “universally connective” in storytelling, are actual sociolinguistic phenomena that hold up under the scrutiny provided by developments in the fields of linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, and studies in language variation. It’s worth briefly noting here that the language or jargon of linguistics, especially inasmuch as that jargon applies to structuralism came under fire in one of the most prominent “battles” over Black literary theory between Joyce Joyce, Henry Louis Gates, and Houston A. Baker, Jr.
The use or misuse of Black dialect on the printed page continues to be a significant aspect of racial representation in literature that is still relatively under‐studied and under‐theorized. There is not (and has never been) a standard system of orthography for representing Black speech in American literature. The absence of a system or any orthographic rules for representing dialect in American literature means that arbitrary decisions by authors/writers and publishers often determine how this critical aspect of Black identity is projected onto the printed page. What sociolinguists/language variationists now regularly refer to as African American English (AAE) has itself gone through as many name changes and ideological developments as the terms of self‐identification for Black folks themselves (colored → Negro → Black → Afro‐American → Black → African American).
What was initially Black English Vernacular, has been Black Vernacular English, Ebonics, and African American Vernacular English. The changing nomenclature of African American English—like its actual group‐identity counterpart—suggest an enormous complexity in the very fabric of Black speech and within the ways we might discuss and write about Black speech. Hurston knows these nuances early on in the formative moments of what was African American literature and literary practice. Her critique of those writers who estrange (and deform) Black dialect in performances and on the printed page unmasks one of the more subtle sustainable attacks against Black intellect/intelligence. The limitations of these representations are inherent to standard orthographic systems (Peterson 2004: 2015). That is, standard English orthography only allows you to approximate what Black speech might sound like through signs/letters/diacritics. Thus in many respects, writers must deform standard English orthography in order to represent Black vernacular speech on the printed page. Even if this could be done to Hurston’s satisfaction, the orthographic appearance of Black language still might be diminished in the face of standardization. One theory that helps to escape the yoke of these orthographic limitations is to consider those writers who deliberately rely less on orthography in order to linguistically convey Black identity and the soundings of Black speech on the printed page (Peterson 2004: 2015).
The limitations of the printed page in terms of rendering the most complex and often times the most aesthetically satisfying Black verbal artistry form a backdrop for the development of the most well‐known, and now the most conventional, theory of Black literature—that of Henry Louis Gates, best outlined and detailed in his 1988 work, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro‐American Criticism. By capitalizing the “s” in Signifying in order to distinguish it from its standard English counterpart, Gates literally and figuratively capitalizes off of what he comes to define as the centerpiece of Black literary theory and criticism. Through a theoretical pairing of Esu‐Elegbara (the Yoruba trickster‐god) and the Signifying Monkey of African American folklore, Gates exposes the arbitrary nature of signified meaning and the multiple ways in which Black vernacular culture (especially speech) exploits and manipulates meaning. The trickster merely takes advantage of the extraordinary potential for language to vary across various cultural and situational contexts. The multiplicity of meaning in language is a resource for the disenfranchised Black folk who have deployed linguistic code‐switching as a means for their very survival. In short, everybody may signify, but Black folks Signify better, at least in part because their very existence in the world, especially in this nation, depend on it. The Signifying Monkey, in terms of its intellectual scope, theoretical ambition, and critical reception is one of the most important contributions to the body of work squarely focused on the intersections of race, literature, and theory. It is its own matrix at these intersections. Its concepts: the trickster figure, the trope of the talking book, the speakerly text, and so on, endure and invite additional criticism and various theoretical challenges that in turn produce more work and more ways of reading Black texts. These critical responses cannot be overstated given the fact that they have given rise to some of the most valuable theoretical directions of the early twenty‐first century among Black writers and critics.
And yet, even as Gates was preparing this groundbreaking manuscript for publication; as chapters or excerpts of the Signifying Monkey were being published and presented at conferences, Barbara Christian was crafting a masterpiece of her own. ‘The Race for Theory” (1987) is a manifesto designed to question and possibly undermine the popularity of traditional Western theory’s embrace (or consumption) of African American literary practice and criticism. Christian depicts this shift as an encroachment upon theory made by philosophers and those who align their critical intellectual work more with philosophy than with literature. Christian claims: “I have become convinced that there has been a takeover in the literary world by Western philosophers from the old literary elite, the neutral humanists” (Christian 1987: 281). She argues that the “race for theory” has one “primary thrust:” to create a theory or theoretical model that captures a particular literary phenomenon and fixes or contains it indefinitely based upon the philosophical ruminations of the theory’s author/creator.
Christian theorizes a willingness for her audience to read between the lines here—to interpret the “thrust” in the “race for theory as an extension of masculinist enterprises enhanced in response to the threatening emergence of non‐traditional, non‐white male, heterosexual narratives in the American literary canon. She expects that her readers will glean the significance of her word choices—“subordinated,” “fixing”—these terms are meant to call into to question the reproduction of the tools of enslavement in the discourses of the “race for theory.” According to Christian, this race is blotting out other modes of professional development and of literary achievement—a claim that rings all the more true with the benefit of hindsight.
Christian only briefly acknowledges that her turn of phrase, “the race for theory,” has, of course its own double entendre—it is this relentless, fast‐paced push toward theory for theory’s sake and professional advancement, but it has another—arguably deeper and more suggestive meaning as well. She claims that “people of color have always theorized—but in forms quite different from the Western form of abstract logic … My folk, in other words, have always been a race for theory” (Christian 1987: 281). And it is this meaning—that Black folks are a face for theory—that begins to chart a course forward in terms of the Black lit‐theory project beyond autobiographical inscription and Signifying. The idea that the Black body theorizes itself and the world in which Black humanity must always already make a claim for its own existence seems to strike at the core of the operational value of the intersections of race, literature, and theory. Again, Christian spends more time in this critical essay detailing the limitations of the race for theory—how and why it restricts the intellectual capacity of literary studies at the very moment where the canon is being ripped open to become slightly more inclusive of Black writers, women writers, gay and lesbian writers, and so on. Yet the enduring potency of her argument is almost as equally situated in the phrase’s “other” meaning.
Given the critical battle between Joyce (1987), Gates (1987), Baker (1987), and Awkward (1988), Christian’s suggestion that Black folks are for theory becomes a sort of pragmatic/practical fact. That is, even though Awkward (1988) accurately surmises from Christian’s article that “the esteemed black feminist critic is ... against theory,” her article along with Joyce’s (1987) set up a debate about theory that ultimately enhances and empowers the Black literary theory project. Christian, Joyce, Gates, Baker, and Awkward publish and generate discourses about theory that are now staple features of Black literary theory itself. For all of its personal attacks, outrage, and histrionic dialogical interplay, this series of articles produce (and reproduce) a vital theory that questions the vitality of theory in Black literary criticism. That theory requires theorists of Black literature to develop, as a part of their central calculus when crafting generative approaches to the reading of the Black texts, some modicum of compassion for the encoded experiences of Black life, especially across gender, but also with the skepticism of a white patriarchal professional apparatus in mind. No Black literary theorist beyond the “race for theory” battle can take for granted that the Western philosophical tradition alone can parse the complexities of Black literary life nor can she/he assume that a theory grounded beyond the hieroglyphic signifiers (and signification) of Black identity can easily be imposed upon that Black identity in literature or culture. To paraphrase Toni Morrison, the “race for theory” battle is not a battle to pass on.
At the time of the publication of Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark (1992), not much was settled in terms of the race‐for‐theory debates, but Morrison won the Nobel Prize for literature the following year, establishing herself as one of the greatest living writers in the world. That she was the first Black woman to earn a Nobel Prize was not without some controversy, but it afforded her some relief from those who could (or would) not ultimately recognize her literary genius. If the Nobel committee—this bastion of white male aesthetic judgment—confirmed it then there must be some legitimacy to Black critical claims of Morrison’s ascension in the annals of American literary greatness. Playing in the Dark makes nearly as powerful a contribution to Black literary criticism as Morrison’s winning of the Nobel Prize in literature does for collective Black pride. Given its brevity—some 91 pages in manuscript form—it accomplishes an astounding achievement: an actual paradigmatic shift in the focalization of criticism in American literary studies.
Morrison refers to her theorizing in Playing in the Dark as an “informal study” of American Africanism. Like Edward Said’s term “Orientalism,” Africanism “is an investigation into the ways in which a nonwhite. Africanlike (or Africanist) presence or persona was constructed in the United States, and the imaginative uses this fabricated presence served” (Morrison 1992: 6). She quickly clarifies that her use of the term “Africanism” is not an attempt to elide the cultural and linguistic complexities of Black folks on the continent of Africa but rather her attempt to capture how Blackness has been constructed in the collective imagination (literary and otherwise) of white America. Morrison adeptly reverses the narrative grounding of American literature penned by white Americans that features minor African American characters. She brings these characters to the fore (i.e. she foregrounds backgrounded black characters in American literature written by whites) in order to expose some of the structural and/or critical limitations of the works/texts in question. She exposes the lie of the diminished Black humanity depicted in traditional American literature. “It is important to see how inextricable Africanism is or ought to be from the deliberations of literary criticism and the wanton elaborate strategies undertaken to erase its presence from view” (Morrison 1992: 9). And all the while she presses an (as of yet), unanswered question in American literary criticism—what are the effects or “impact” of racism on those who perpetuate it (Morrison 1992: 11). This marks a shift in focalization for the writer, critic, and literary subject of American literature, a turn toward thinking and rethinking how to see—and who sees—the backgrounded Black figure in American literature. This shift matters because it destabilizes the traditional claims made about the depiction of Blackness in American letters and forces a new way of reading—American Africanism—into the complicated developments of Black literary theory.
For much of the twentieth century, among Black writers and those engaged in the Black literary theoretical project, the biological bases of race were either assumed (in the works of writers/poets like Wheatley, Douglass, or Sutton E. Griggs) or idealistically challenged (in Jean Toomer’s Cane or Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man). The “race for theory” scholarly combatants must have been emboldened by specific developments in the fields of DNA/scientific research and certain corollary developments in the fields of legal studies and critical race theory. In the 1980s the scientific data (and ideology) for the biological basis for rigid racial distinctions (Caucasoid, Negroid, Mongoloid, etc.) was unraveling. And by the early 1990s some of this important research was being referenced in American legal scholarship. One such article, “The Social Construction of Race …” published in the Harvard Civil Rights C. L. Law review in 1994 is worth quoting at length here:
There are no genetic characteristics possessed by all Blacks but not by non‐Blacks; similarly, there is no gene or cluster of genes common to all Whites but not to non‐Whites. One's race is not determined by a single gene or gene cluster, as is, for example, sickle cell anemia. Nor are races marked by important differences in gene frequencies, the rates of appearance of certain gene types. The data compiled by various scientists demonstrates, contrary to popular opinion, that intra‐group differences exceed inter‐group differences. That is, greater genetic variation exists within populations typically labeled Black and White than between these populations. This finding refutes the supposition that racial divisions reflect fundamental genetic differences.
(Haney‐Lopez 1994: 12).
As a tool for Black critical thought, these findings and their celebration in legal studies—with requisite nods to policy changes and the policy formations that must assuredly be impacted by this new data—mark watershed moments in the developments of Black literary theory. Writers had long since engaged in the deconstruction of biological definitions of race. George Schuyler’s Black No More (1931) treats these themes in a satirical speculative mode, exploring the consequences when the protagonist, Max Disher and most of the Black population try out an experimental medical procedure to become white. Gates and many others also engaged in a range of theoretical projects aimed directly at examining the deconstruction of race in literature. This research and these publications in venerable legal studies journals strengthened the positions of the Black theoretical subject—making the writing and crafting of new directions in Black literary theory somehow more plausible given the erasure of traditional racial (and racialized) moorings in human genetics. Conceptualizations of Blackness were now poised and positioned to take on more theoretical imaginings since the yoke of biological inferiority was now and forever removed. If only what is known in the academy and what is known in theory could be as pervasively accepted by everyday American citizens.
It should come as no surprise that a significant amount of new energy directed toward advancing the Black lit‐theory project is aimed at theories of citizenship and race. Work by Salamishah Tillet (2012), Ivy Wilson (2011), Erica Edwards (2012), continue to push Black theory’s envelope with respect to long‐standing questions of race, artistry, and citizenship—especially in contemporary contexts of symbolic political achievements, Black exceptionalism, and new modes of artistic production.
Amid these brilliant new thought leaders of the Black American lit‐theory project Kenneth Warren delivered a series of talks—“What Was African American Literature”—in the W. E. B. Du Bois Lecture series hosted at Harvard University. It is fitting that the scholar‐activist who toiled for so much of his life so that African American literature might thrive among the world’s greatest art forms finds his name as the brand for a lecture series where great contemporary scholars might pronounce the end of the literature to which Du Bois’ life and work were so diligently and eloquently committed. But Warren’s theory is, of course, more complicated than it initially appears on its surface.
According to Kenneth Warren, “African American literature itself constitutes a representational and rhetorical strategy within the domain of a literary practice responsive to conditions that, by and large, no longer obtain” (Warren 2011: 9). Warren marks the rise and historical moment of African American literature as a very late nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century phenomenon that is at least partially contained by the diminished legal status and racially segregated condition of Black folks in America—with special attention paid to those Jim Crow policies of segregation, the battles against disenfranchisement, and ongoing struggles for equality and citizenship in the United States. Warren’s argument is compelling—particularly as a means of reading most—if not all—of what he would deem to be African American literature. No literary text or critic mentioned herein could be left out of Warren’s theoretical scope. And his prolepsis closes off other approaches at dismantling his theoretical premise. “African American literature as a distinct entity would seem to be at an end, and that the turn to diasporic, transatlantic, global, and other frames indicates a dim awareness that the boundary creating this distinctiveness has eroded” (Warren 2011: 8).
Some critics and theorists might take issue with a sense of African American literature as absolutely distinct from its Black diasporic counterparts given the admixture of Black African identities merged in the cauldron of transatlantic slavery, but this is not the place to engage in a new battle for what is, or was, African American literature. It should be sufficient to say that the expansive theoretical developments and maneuvers in the fields of Black literary criticism have become so vast, so wide and so divided, that a thing that would have been discursive anathema—the notion that African American literature has an “end”—could in the contemporary moment and in a particular context just become the next theoretical means to a further end.