The three decades between 1970 and 2000 constituted the most productive and successful period in African American literary history. Hundreds of African American authors, including many who were but very young children in 1970, began or continued illustrious writing and publishing careers, transforming the face of American literature itself. Prior to 1970, very few African American authors could hope to sell more than a few thousand copies of their books. By the mid-1990s, sales in the hundreds of thousands for individual works, lucrative film options, and author tours marked by jam-packed readings and signings were commonplace for several dozen writers. Their success has both inspired and enabled hundreds of black authors to begin writing and to create some of the most remarkable fiction of the last quarter century and beyond. The rewards have not been merely financial: African American authors also began winning some of the top literary prizes in the United States and in the world, including the Nobel and Pulitzer Prizes; American Book, National Book, PEN/Faulkner, and PEN/Hemingway Awards; and berths on many publications’ “Best of” lists. Book clubs and specialty booksellers, operating either in traditional brick-and-mortar establishments or on the Internet, have proliferated. African American literature is now widely studied at institutions of higher learning worldwide, and key fictional works by contemporary African American authors, particularly Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, John Edgar Wideman, and Gloria Naylor, may be found on the syllabi of courses in American literature, multiethnic literature, women’s studies, sociology, and—naturally—African American studies courses. Before l970, African American fiction was but a footnote in the estimation of most experts on American literature. By 1980, such prize-winning bestsellers as Alex Haley’s Roots (1976) and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1978) had simultaneously appealed to and sparked widespread interest in African American genealogy and history, along with serious scholarly attention. By 1990, African American fiction had captured great fame and controversy through Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1983), Morrison’s Beloved (1987), Ishmael Reed’s Reckless Eyeballing (1985), Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose (1985), and Terry McMillan’s Mama (1987), and African American literary studies became one of the most exciting fields in the academy. By 2000, books by African American authors were routinely selling hundreds of thousands, and occasionally millions of copies, an African American had finally won the Nobel Prize in literature (Toni Morrison, 1993), and African American literary studies had become an institution with many stalwart defenders. For today’s enlightened student of American literature, African American literature is virtually impossible to ignore.
Not all developments for African American fiction have been so positive. Since Phillis Wheatley published her groundbreaking Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral in 1773, critical assessments of African American literature’s artistic merits have never been wholly positive, and they have frequently been quite hostile to the direction and purpose of the majority of authors. Two hundred years after Wheatley’s first book, African American authors wishing to portray black lives both realistically and sympathetically in works inspired by the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s often met with withering hostility from a critical establishment skeptical of the heightened political consciousness of the early 1970s. As more African American critics have found their independent voices and had their say within recent decades, whether in mainstream publications or from the halls of academia, this situation has changed for the better. Today, however, it is still all too rare for anyone outside of a small but growing group of recent black authors to receive the types of close, careful scholarly examinations their works deserve. Equally troubling is the fact that many of the best authors of the 1970s, including John A. Williams, John Oliver Killens, Fran Ross, Nathan Heard, Clarence Major, Hal Bennett, and William Melvin Kelley, find their best work either out of print entirely or in print for merely the shortest stints. Nevertheless, if it were not for the enormous interest that newer authors had brought to African American literature, these veteran authors and their forgotten classics might never have returned to print at all.
Although the number of African American authors writing and publishing in the 1990s exploded beyond all expectations, this growth had at least as much to do with the desire of publishing houses to capitalize upon the success of such popular authors as Terry McMillan as it was a sign of a new creative spirit among African American writers. Many of the works published in that boom, while certainly accessible, smart, and frequently ambitious, did not always aspire to do much more than provide solid, enjoyable, and entertaining fiction. Of course, this is not necessarily a negative trait. While the public may still obtain most of its dominant images of African Americans from other media—particularly film, music, and television—the ascendance of African American fiction means that more facets of African American life and literary expression now have a chance to be published, read, heard, and appreciated than ever before.
Since 1970, for example, African American women authors have become dominant forces in creating and contributing to the larger tradition after many decades of being virtually silenced by outright neglect from publishers who considered them irrelevant. As with so much literature by and about women, that silence has been broken, giving voice to the infinite complexities of African American women’s lives, including women’s roles as leaders, creators of culture, mothers, lovers, among many others. These works have therefore helped make various forms of feminist critique available to the public for discussion and helped foster change. Equally important, these works vastly expand a potential medium for women readers of all backgrounds to see their lives and issues alternately represented, affirmed, and challenged. Similarly, black gay, lesbian, and bisexual authors and characters are now almost commonplace in African American literature, brought out of the closets of silence, invisibility, and marginalization that once dominated their identities and desires. Science fiction by such authors as Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delany, and Tananarive Due has grown in popularity, as has the detective fiction genre best represented by Walter Mosley. These authors have, in turn, placed such issues as class differences, police brutality, slavery, the Civil Rights movement, and the hidden histories of local African American communities into inspired fictional settings that help give new life to a history whose hidden stories are rapidly being rediscovered.
Consider also that popular works have helped to increase the active African American reading audience into the millions through the loyal readerships that such authors as Terry McMillan, Connie Briscoe, Eric Jerome Dickey, E. Lynn Harris, April Sinclair, and Sheneska Jackson enjoy. While readership rates among African Americans remains behind that of other groups,* popular fiction has improved it nonetheless. Publishing houses that once dismissed manuscripts by and about African Americans out of a widespread belief that blacks do not read books have been proven wrong time and again. The doors of mainstream publication and distribution may remain open indefinitely to black authors.
Of course, a caveat applies to these upbeat views as well. African Americans still own few presses and therefore have relatively little control over how and where their works are marketed and distributed. These same authors have long struggled with the position of privilege that liberal white Americans, whether embodied by antislavery abolitionists or commercialpress editors, have frequently occupied. This position has historically meant that whites have assumed greater authority to speak on behalf or in support of African Americans than African Americans have had for themselves. In the literary world, this privilege is not merely symbolic; it determines the types of texts that are published or, to be more specific, the types of narratives about African American lives that see print. Critics as diverse as Henry Louis Gates Jr., Barbara E. Johnson, W. Lawrence Hogue, and J. Lee Greene have argued that the goal of many African American authors and texts has been, and should be, to avoid the fallacy of seeing value only in those narratives that reaffirm the supremacy of white Western cultures by emulating them and attempting to be “the same.”* Instead, countless African American authors have used their creative abilities to write against or parody—to “signify upon,” in black colloquial terms—the same Western traditions that have attempted to write African Americans out of history. In the contemporary period, these authors have often sought to recover that history, to reclaim and transform it, by positing the diversity, complexity, and inextricability of African American cultures within it.
The purpose of this overview is to participate in this project by highlighting the diversity of African American literature throughout its history. What follows is an attempt to do in a relatively small number of pages what the professor of African American literature typically has to do over the course of a single semester, quarter, or trimester: give a short history of African American literature and of the key historical and literary events that have fed the minds and imaginations of the authors included in this volume’s main A–Z reference section. That story includes a history and examination of those events from the 1970s to the 1990s that set that period apart from larger African American literary traditions, while simultaneously writing it into them.
African American Literature Through the 1960s
Even the most cursory glance at the breadth of African American literature reveals two facts: First, African American experiences have varied widely since Africans were forcibly brought to the Americas. Second, these experiences are bound by African Americans’ eternal desires to continue surviving and thriving in the Americas. This desire stems primarily from the long and extremely difficult period of indentured servitude and chattel slavery (1619–1865), the systems under which the overwhelming majority of African Americans lived and struggled until 1865, when slavery was abolished in the United States with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Both before and after the abolition of slavery, African American literature was a flourishing field. Most of the published literature consisted of nonfiction, with the slave narrative being the dominant form of literary expression until the end of the Civil War in 1865. The prominence of this particular form had everything to do with the cause it supported: the abolition of slavery. Slave narratives were meant to arouse in the reader—often a Northern, white, Christian woman—righteous indignation toward the physical, psychological, and sexual brutalities commonplace under slavery. Ideally, this would in turn arouse support for the abolitionist movement, resulting in the eradication of slavery and the installation of true equality for all Americans. What little fiction existed aided the abolitionist cause as well, as free African Americans saw the artistic development of fictional texts, and the novel in particular, as less important than addressing the ongoing crisis of slavery itself. This does not mean, however, that African American literature lacked artistic ambition and achievement. Many of the most famous autobiographical slave narratives, including Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845), Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), and The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1814) have become bona fide classics in American literature and cornerstones of African American literature and literary studies. The same may be said of the fiction. William Wells Brown’s Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (1853), Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig; or, Sketches from the life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story White House, North, Showing That Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even There (1859) were not only the first two novels by African Americans (Brown’s was the first but was not published in the United States until 1860) but also two antebellum works that condemned slavery, especially the practice of miscegenation via rape. In addition, such novelists and short story authors as Martin R. Delany, Frances E. W. Harper, and Victor Séjour were notable pioneers of prose fiction and powerful essayists. Each author’s fictional subject matter necessarily differed from the others, but autobiographical portrayals of the complexities and common horrors and frustrations of enslaved and free life frequently dominated the field. Both fictional and nonfictional works, then, were explicit vehicles for political and ideological purposes.
Within this group, it is safe to say that proslavery sentiments were understandably nonexistent, except as positions to be soundly rejected. While some nonfiction accounts of slavery looked upon a select few slaveholders as relatively beneficent individuals, such perspectives in a work of fiction would have been unthinkable so long as millions of African Americans remained enslaved. Yet subtle philosophical differences remained among African American authors. The most notable were, and continue to be, between male and female authors or between authors of either gender who advocated more radical or more gradual means to end slavery and other forms of oppression.
These differences amongst antebellum works were the natural forebears of the literature published from the post–Civil War Reconstruction period through at least the Harlem Renaissance. The 1880s and 1890s witnessed the rise of Charles W. Chesnutt, whose highly successful “Conjure Woman” stories blended the conventions of the “local color” genre, with its emphases on the quaintness of provincials and their concomitant dialects, and African American folklore. Less successful were Chesnutt’s later novels and nondialect short works, primarily because they tended to confront contemporary racial issues in ways that were offensive to white sensibilities. Such novels as The House Behind the Cedars (1900) and The Marrow of Tradition (1901) failed to find a sizeable audience for their complex interrogations of racial definitions and categories at the time, although scholars now consider them perceptive, if flawed classics. Chesnutt’s contemporary, Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906), considered the most significant African American poet since the eighteenth century’s Phillis Wheatley, wrote several novels and short stories that reflected the same alternating pattern of concern with African American cultures, though most of his novelistic output spent little time dealing with black characters.
A criticism frequently leveled against Chesnutt’s and Dunbar’s works, as well as those of James Weldon Johnson, James D. Carrothers, and other contemporaries, is whether each author’s use of black dialect and inclusion of stereotypical black characters qualified as acquiescence to the generally ugly racial climate of the years between Reconstruction and the Harlem Renaissance. The issue was closely related to the ongoing debates over the direction and strategies of African American political, economic, and social progress that began in antebellum times. Some of the era’s most prominent political voices were Booker T. Washington (1856–1915), founder and president of Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama; William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868–1963), a founding father of American empirical sociology and one of the most prolific African American activists, essayists, and scholars of the twentieth century; and Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862–1931), an investigative journalist and political activist.
These figures initiated a debate regarding African American progress in their major nonfiction works. Washington’s rise to fame and power, narrated in his powerful autobiography, Up from Slavery (1901), was a product of the program of self-help, thrift, business, and practical, vocational education that he instituted at Tuskegee as a model for African American progress. Washington’s approach to education, civil rights, and black leadership appealed to a wide cross-section of African Americans and whites, particularly in the South, for its stress upon the manual arts, the importance of friendship between the races, and a more gradual movement towards civic equality. At the same time, Washington stirred controversy for his concession of African Americans’ civil rights, particularly as delineated in his famous speech at the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1895. Known as the “Atlanta Compromise,” Washington’s address brought him great prestige and power both in the South and in Washington, D.C., on all matters related to African American progress. Simultaneously, however, such rising leaders and intellectuals as Du Bois later argued that Washington’s tendency to avoid demands for civil rights, suffrage, and a combination of both industrial and liberal arts education contributed to the rapid disenfranchisement of African Americans in the wake of 1896’s landmark Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision, which made segregation of public accommodations legal. Washington, however, was virtually the only African American leader able to work closely with American political figures to help protect African Americans’ struggles for equality, frequently behind the scenes. His model of education at Tuskegee, duplicated at hundreds of Negro colleges, also enabled many thousands of African Americans to obtain educations that did contribute to the growth of real economic progress. To this day, Washington remains a controversial figure who helped define a model of African American leadership that remains attractive for its appeals to common principles and optimism.
Du Bois and Wells-Barnett, on the other hand, offered an increasingly popular alternative to Washington’s leadership, stressing civil rights, activism, and full citizenship for all African Americans. Du Bois was among the thirty-one founders of the openly anti-Washington Niagara Movement for Civil Rights, which first met at Niagara Falls in Ontario, Canada, on July 10, 1905. Almost four years later, on May 31, 1909, both Du Bois and Wells-Barnett were among those who met in New York City to transform the Civil Rights goals of the Niagara Movement into the platform and bylaws of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), an interracial organization devoted to radical resistance to segregation and all forms of racial discrimination. The NAACP became much more than an organ of political activity. Via its journal, The Crisis (1910–present), originally edited by Du Bois and (by 1919) his indispensable literary editor, Jessie Redmon Fauset, by the latter half of the 1910s the NAACP became one of African America’s key sources of fresh literary talent. In addition, Du Bois’s classic work The Souls of Black Folk (1903), a complex mix of sociology, political critique, history, personal essay, and fiction, was itself an enormous influence upon subsequent debates on African American life, literature, and culture. It includes the crucial essay, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” in which Du Bois applied the concept of “double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of the world that looks on in amused contempt and pity,” to the African American collective psyche. The metaphor of double-consciousness is but one Du Bois employs to argue that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,” an idea that informs all of his early work and has influenced sociologists, writers, and activists through the present. Du Bois’s arguments conveyed gracefully the struggle within many African Americans to reconcile the role of pariah that American society imposed upon them with their own culture and feelings of self-worth.
Du Bois’s conception had a profound effect upon the fiction of the next significant movement in African American literature, the “New Negro” or Harlem Renaissance (ca. 1919–1940). One of the most prolific and artistically sound collections of literature by and about African Americans to date, it has been surpassed in significance only by the flowering of African American literature and arts that budded in the 1960s and reached full bloom after 1970. The “New Negro” Renaissance was a product of many different elements, all essential, yet none so dominant as to be the single definitive cause. Racial tensions were at one of their highest points since Reconstruction after World War I, in which hundreds of thousands of black soldiers served and fought valiantly, albeit primarily under French command after U.S. military commanders refused to give black soldiers any significant opportunities to prove their abilities. Both the soldiers’ valor and the commanders’ resistance helped to rally the pride of millions of African Americans who had heard of black soldiers’ heroism in that horrendous conflict. The postwar tensions exploded in the “Red Summer” of 1919, which saw thousands of antiblack lynchings and riots in hundreds of American cities and towns as communities throughout the nation attempted to move African Americans back to their prewar status as second-class citizens. This repression combined with the growth of the industrial might of the United States and numerous severe agricultural blights in the South to spur the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to other regions in the nation, but particularly to the urban North. Over the six decades from the 1910s through the 1960s, approximately 7,000,000 African Americans moved from a homeland plagued by racial violence, boll weevil infestations, floods, and fluctuating prices for cotton—the crux of the South’s economy—to better economic and cultural opportunities in northern cities where industrial might, decent wages, and more tolerable housing could be found.
The urban cultures that African Americans created in these new environs were the foundations of the Harlem Renaissance and later literary movements, giving them their raison d’être and spirit. Without the Great Migration and the optimism for racial progress that it harnessed and inspired, neither the Harlem Renaissance, the social realism and naturalism of Richard Wright, Ann Petry, and Chester Himes, nor the radicalism of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s would have been possible. As African Americans moved northward and westward, they took their music, stories, and customs with them, forcing such formerly regional, largely black musical forms as ragtime, the blues, jazz, and—much later—rap and hip-hop to grow and develop, transforming African American and American life and literature in turn. F. Scott Fitzgerald did not call the 1920s the “Jazz Age” for naught; that eternally malleable and continuously evolving musical form gave the decade its soundtrack, eventually becoming America’s popular music. The blues, one of jazz’s foundations, became a central motif of the works of Ralph Ellison, Sherley Anne Williams, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Chester Himes, Ishmael Reed, J. California Cooper, Clarence Major, Gayl Jones, John Edgar Wideman, Albert Murray, and countless others.
Concomitant with the Great Migration, the death of Booker T. Washington in 1915 meant that the gradualist program of the controversial Tuskegee Institute president would no longer be the dominant ideology influencing the content and tenor of African American politics, educational policy, and intellectual discourse. Such major players of the New Negro movement as Alain Locke, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Langston Hughes argued that the earlier generation of African Americans loyal to Washington represented a type of “Old Negro” who saw African Americans as a sociological “problem” almost as often as whites did and were therefore more accepting of the conditions of legal segregation. The New Negro, in contrast, was a product of a new black urban population, which comprised a class of younger intellectuals and artists who felt free to imagine a future of rapid progress for the African Diaspora as a whole. Literature and other arts would capture this imagination in the spirit of modernity that infused the 1920s. The intellectual exchanges during the Harlem Renaissance, therefore, resulted in a wider dissemination of the full scope of African American political thought, bursting the limits of Washington’s program and reaching beyond Harlem into mainstream American discourse.
The founding of the American version of Jamaican Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in 1916 signified the emergence of the first modern Black Nationalist movement. Garvey and the UNIA aimed to uplift the peoples of the African Diaspora by instilling within them a deep and abiding pride in their history and cultures that would lead to their political, economic, and social independence. This independent and united black nation would then work to end European colonialism of the African continent and recolonize it. Garvey’s motto of “Africa for the Africans” was a powerful rallying cry that attracted followers from all classes and backgrounds, from the Caribbean to black Harlem. Garvey also based his movement in Harlem, which meant that he had easy access to and worked closely with some of the best minds of the New Negro movement, at various times including fellow Jamaicans W. A. Domingo and Claude McKay.
Most significant of all, over four dozen novels, anthologies, and books of poetry or short stories emerged in the period, aided by a coterie of new, younger publishers (especially Alfred A. Knopf, Boni & Liveright, Harcourt Brace, J. B. Lippincott, and Harper) who did not share the prejudices against African American authors found at most of the established publishing houses. Such journals as Crisis, Fire!!, Opportunity, American Mercury, The Nation, The New Republic, The Messenger, and Alain Locke’s seminal collection of fiction, poetry, and essays, The New Negro (1925) were responsible for publishing hundreds of stories by the movement’s best authors. While some of these journals, particularly Crisis, the NAACP’s official organ, and Opportunity (organ of the National Urban League) existed prior to the movement’s most celebrated years in the 1920s, some were either direct products of the era or made special efforts to publish and promote African American authors. Fire!! (1926), for instance, was edited by Wallace Thurman, one of the central figures among the Harlem literati, and published works by Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Aaron Douglas, two writers and an artist, respectively, who were among the most celebrated of their time. Fire!! had as its express goal the promotion of younger, avant-garde writers who shunned the middle-class aesthetics frequently found in literature published in Crisis and Opportunity. These journals, however, were just as instrumental in publishing and featuring young writers thanks to the efforts of editor W. E. B. Du Bois and, especially, his literary editor, Jessie Redmon Fauset, an important novelist in her own right.
In contrast, the much older Nation (1865–present) aggressively solicited essays and stories from such African American intellectuals and writers as Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, Eric Walrond, Hughes, and George S. Schuyler at the behest of its editor, Oswald Villard. Both Villard and rival John Dewey of The New Republic were interested in promoting a sense of American cultural pluralism—that is, the simultaneous independence and interdependence of different ethnic and racial groups—among their readers, and they turned to African American writers and many others to help them achieve this purpose.* Together, the movement’s literary outlets reveal that African Americans were reevaluating their cultures using ideas and language informed by sociology, political science, anthropology, and a desire to work outside of stereotypical roles.
The writers of the Harlem Renaissance possessed and debated fresh, new perceptions of African Americans’ history and potential fortune in America and began to defy whites’ and middle-class blacks’ definitions of “acceptable” behavior in the arts or in person. Harlem owed its singular place in the African American imagination in the early twentieth century to its being a locus that attracted many of the preeminent black institutions, including the NAACP, the Urban League, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, Father Divine, and virtually every denomination of black church. Consequently, almost every major viewpoint was represented in the movement, including those concerned with artistic production. The debates that arose among Harlem Renaissance luminaries regarding the place of the African American artist still resound today. At the heart of these debates was the question of the African American artist’s responsibility to represent her or his community and “race”: should the artist serve him- or herself, or a particular ideology?
Although African American literature continued to flourish as the Harlem Renaissance wound down during the Great Depression (1929–1940), it did so with considerably less public fanfare than it had enjoyed in the 1920s. The late 1930s and early 1940s were a period of naturalism in African American fiction, a period in which Richard Wright published his greatest novel, Native Son (1940). Native Son irrevocably shifted the paradigm for African American writing. Wright’s themes of protest, his use of theories espoused by Chicago School of Sociology regarding the marginalization of African Americans within American society, his open confrontation of the hypocrisies of American racial thinking, and his support for Marxist thought catapulted him to the top of the mountain of African American writers. Wright wielded an enormous influence on his contemporaries and protégés, especially novelists Chester Himes, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Ann Petry, as well as on poet and personal friend Margaret Walker. Each of these authors explored inter- and intraracial discourse before and after World War II, using elements of Wright’s naturalistic style. Eventually, however, Wright’s advancements became part of African American fiction’s mainstream, leading protégé Ralph Ellison to write his magnum opus, Invisible Man (1952), as both an homage and reaction to the limits Wright’s eminence engendered.
Invisible Man also elicited a new respect for black authorship that would extend through the next few decades, due to Ellison’s highly nuanced views of race and its problematic relationship to the idealistic principles upon which America was founded and by which it operates. Centered around the picaresque adventures of its anonymous narrator, Invisible Man drew upon, parodied, and paid homage to Ralph Waldo Emerson (Ellison’s namesake) and his transcendentalism, Herman Melville, black folklore, American pragmatism, black colleges, modernism, the blues, Sigmund Freud, and the entire history of African Americans. This tour de force novel’s artistic achievement earned it a National Book Award, which would not be bestowed upon another African American author until Charles Johnson earned it in 1990 for Middle Passage. Moreover, Invisible Man is widely recognized as one of the finest novels in canons of both African American and American literature. Ellison died before he could complete the manuscript for his second novel. Yet even when editor John Callahan edited Ellison’s manuscripts into Juneteenth (1999), the work still caused a considerable stir. Although Invisible Man towered over African American literature in the 1960s, it was by no means alone. James Baldwin, who had also been a protégé of Richard Wright, emerged as a powerful novelist in the 1950s, owing to the success of two early works, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1952) and Giovanni’s Room (1956).
If the 1950s was a phase in which African American authors honed and perfected their craft, the mid-to-late 1960s was a period of expansion, of fascinating experimental writing that may be called revolutionary. The 1960s brought with them a comprehension, by both blacks and whites, of black American politics and culture that had not been paralleled since the height of Marcus Garvey’s influence in the 1920s and 1930s. The Civil Rights Movement was in full swing and being continually debated by the American public in all of the most dominant media by white and black integrationists, Black Nationalists or separatists (most notably the Nation of Islam and its chief spokesman, Malcolm X), white segregationists and racists, white moderates, and every other group or position that had a stake in the preservation or elimination of accepted racial categories and stratifications. Nowhere did these debates rage more hotly than within the black community itself, which was forced to redefine its own parameters when faced with the possibility that national de jure segregation might actually be eliminated through the efforts of Civil Rights activists and presidential administrations that at least appeared to be sympathetic to the social plight of black Americans.
America in the 1960s became a land of gut-wrenching political turmoil on many different fronts. Between the election—and assassination—of President John F. Kennedy, the beginning of the American phase of the Vietnam War (with the concomitant antiwar movement), the rise of a new brand of feminist political activism, and the Civil Rights Movement, America’s mainstream had its work cut out for it in attempting to inculcate radical social change. We now rightly consider the Civil Rights Movement in particular as emblematic of the forefront of the nation’s changes; it forced America to confront its appalling oppression and brutal failure to live up to its democratic ideals, the same principles that had been the focus of so much African American literature. Equally important, the Civil Rights Movement ushered in a period of national awareness and appreciation of African American politics and culture unparalleled since the Harlem Renaissance. Its grandest victories and most troubling defeats dominated much of the American discourse on race. In the forefront of the public’s consciousness were the rhetoric, actions, and posturing of black and white integrationists, Black Nationalists and separatists, white segregationists and racists, white liberals, and many other groups that had a stake in the elimination or preservation of America’s racial caste system. Considering “the centrality of race in shaping American politics and culture,” as elucidated by Michael Omi and Howard Winant,* the debate encompassed most communities, ideologies, and organizations within the American political spectrum.
In fact, since the late 1960s the terms of the intraracial debate over “racial” and cultural identity, the course of black political organizing and action, and the individuals or organizations that constituted the diverse positions within the debate itself all bore a remarkable likeness to those of the 1920s and 1930s. At the simplest level, the debate raged between those who believed in racial integration as the most effective means of obtaining social justice and civil rights, and those who advocated racial separatism or Black Nationalism as the primary means of reaching complete social, political, and economic freedom. As in any serious debate, of course, numerous individuals and groups supported positions that fell between these poles, sometimes combining their rhetoric and ideologies. Despite the basic goals of civil and human rights and political freedoms that the integrationist and nationalist camps shared, some of the most vitriolic discourse passed between those in the extreme corners of this political and cultural scene. Significantly, the type of support given to particular positions could also be mapped out along regional and class lines. Black Nationalism’s strongest support, for example, generally came from the Northern, urban segment of black communities, whereas integration had some of its strongest support among and appealed most often to the disenfranchised Southern African American. The class factor substantially heightened existing conflicts between the two poles, however, as lower-class blacks began to view the middle class as that portion of the community that sought to escape its less fortunate brethren, whether for moral or social reasons. The middle class, on the other hand, tended to view the lower classes as the people who could potentially disrupt or destroy efforts to appeal to the government and the rest of society to implement and enforce civil rights laws and integrative policies, due to their alleged inability or unwillingness to assimilate. This conflict within the black community was not isolated from the rest of society, inasmuch as most of the discussion and arguing occurred in public, via debates between integrationists such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy and such nationalists as Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad, and, later, Stokely Carmichael.
King, of course, has become an icon of recent American history for his leadership within the larger Civil Rights movement. Both he and Abernethy were crucial figures working for the full dismantling of legal segregation and the integration of African Americans into all levels of American life via the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In contrast, Black Nationalists argued that the very nature of racism (and, in the case of the Nation of Islam, the supposed nature of whites themselves) practically ensured that the overwhelming majority of African Americans would never be allowed to integrate fully into America. Even if this were possible, the argument went, integration into the American cultural and political mainstream amounted to racial suicide or an attempt to jump onto a national ship rapidly sinking from its own corruption, a corruption stemming from its long practice of racial oppression. It would therefore be futile to fight for integration, which seemed to insult the possibility that African Americans could establish and operate their own businesses, schools, community councils, and cultural apparatuses (artistic and publishing ventures, galleries, dramatic troupes and production companies, and the like). Black Nationalists of the 1960s offered instead a call for racial pride that simultaneously echoed strongly and openly honored the example that Marcus Garvey had offered two generations earlier.
The foremost among these in the popular imagination was Malcolm X, who, as the leading minister of the Nation of Islam religious sect (NOI), made frequent appearances on radio and television in the early 1960s, excoriating the leadership, strategies, and goals of the mainstream Civil Rights movement. Malcolm X and other Black Nationalists found the movement’s philosophy of nonviolence and its strategic stance in favor of integration too slow and lacking any appreciation of the particular needs of African Americans living in Northern cities, where poverty, unemployment (or underemployment), urban decay, and de facto segregation were more immediate threats to millions of African Americans than the strict, de jure segregation of the South. Malcolm X focused primarily upon racism’s effects upon Northern black communities, often through searing indictments of those white and black leaders who appeared either hypocritical or ineffective in terms of their ability to give African Americans dignity and economic independence through the Nation of Islam’s program of black pride, thrift, business economics, and racial separatism. This program called as well for African Americans to reject all forms of mainstream political activity—rallying, voting, lobbying, and nonviolent direct action—as irrelevant. This policy made it easier for intragroup rivals to drum Malcolm X out of the NOI after he made pointed remarks about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, although his ouster had more to do with these rivalries and alleged disloyalty than his insensitivity. Malcolm X then established the Muslim Mosque, Inc., and the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), modeled after the Organization of African Unity, whose goal was to unite African American groups and leaders for the complete liberation of African Americans from racist oppression and the implementation of full human rights. Although the OAAU never completely got off the ground, when Malcolm X was assassinated on February 21, 1965, he became an instant martyr for Black Nationalism and, by the 1980s, a major cultural icon.
Perhaps most important, the politics and principles Malcolm X espoused and his public persona inspired countless black writers and intellectuals to begin working more assiduously for African Americans’ artistic independence. Poet, playwright, and critic LeRoi Jones (who later changed his name to Amiri Baraka), for example, was so moved by Malcolm’s assassination that he left his bohemian life in New York’s Greenwich Village for Harlem, where he founded the Black Arts Repertory Theater/School, which in turn attracted the talents of such artists as poet Clarence Reed, critic Larry Neal, and musicians and bandleaders Sun Ra and Albert Ayler. It should be noted, though, that LeRoi Jones’s artistic vision was also inspired by novelist and critic James Baldwin, whose play Blues for Mister Charlie (1964) was a hard-hitting indictment of the current state of race relations. The play also embodied many of the viewpoints espoused by King and Malcolm X and gave Jones many of the ideas used in his own Obie Award–winning play, The Dutchman, which premiered barely a month after Baldwin’s play opened on Broadway.
One thread runs through all of these events: African American art and politics often inspired each other. The foundation of Jones’s Black Arts Repertory Theater/School, which effectively began the Black Arts movement in earnest, meant that African American literature and art would be asked once again to integrate creative ambitions with political ones, although different writers and artists would take different positions within vivid contemporary debates about black life. At the base of these debates were many questions about the popular understanding of black identity and the future of African Americans in a nation that repeatedly revoked the promise of democracy every time it was tentatively offered. That is, how would black people identify themselves from that moment for themselves and vis-à-vis the nation? What would be the advantages or disadvantages of a particular sort of identification? If black people perceived themselves as a group that should hold itself apart from the rest of society to form cohesive bonds among themselves, how would that affect their social and economic position? If, conversely, black people attempted to integrate with and possibly assimilate into mainstream American society, would that result in the advancement or destruction of black communities?
These questions were not merely academic; in the late 1960s and early 1970s, African Americans, along with Latinos/Hispanics and poor whites, were being drafted into the United States armed forces and sent to fight in the brutal and unpopular war in Vietnam, where they were maimed and killed in grossly disproportionate numbers and, like so many other veterans returning to the United States, suffered psychologically from their experiences and became addicted to various narcotics. The effect of the war and its psychological aftermath upon black communities was nothing short of devastating, as it saw a substantial portion of an entire generation of youths, many of whom were former or potential community leaders, destroyed physically and mentally. In addition, the violence of the uprisings or riots of the “long, hot summers” of the mid-1960s and after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, combined with frequent incidences of police brutality and the government’s well-documented surveillance of militant black groups (see the entry on the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense) convinced many African American intellectuals that integration was not only unwise but virtually impossible, as the nation seemed to have declared war on African Americans. Some African American authors saw all of these events as closely connected ways to destroy or drain the spirit of liberation that defined the Civil Rights movement at its best moments. This led many African American authors to write about the conflict in either direct or oblique ways. John A. Williams’s Captain Blackman (1972), Toni Morrison’s Sula (1974) and Song of Solomon (1978), Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972) and Flight to Canada (1976), and Walter Dean Myers’s young-adult novel Fallen Angels (1989) all make explicit or implicit, symbolic references to the impact of the period’s events upon black communities.
The terms of the intraracial debate over racial/cultural identity and the course of black political organizing and action (as well as the parties and organizations who argued for and against specific terms and actions) were remarkably similar to those of earlier decades. Significantly, the type of support given to particular positions could be mapped out along class lines as well; a great deal of Black Nationalism’s support came from the disenfranchised (and often urban) component of black communities, whereas integration appealed most often to middle-class black people, though many blacks of the working class and below lent their political support to integration as well. In the writings and work of black artists in particular, though, the debates of the 1960s centered on questions of images and aesthetics that were, according to Hoyt W. Fuller, “about the business of destroying those images and myths that have crippled and degraded black people, and the institution of new images and myths that will liberate them.” The “business” of which Fuller wrote was the Black Arts Movement, with its Black Aesthetic school of thought, which rejected the notion that black culture was forever inferior to or dependent on European-centered aesthetics. The Black Arts Movement argued that adherence to such aesthetics was ultimately destructive to blacks of all nationalities, as it required a repudiation of the inherent value of the peoples and cultures of the African Diaspora. According to such critics as Addison Gayle, Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, and Larry Neal, the responsibility of the black artist was to use the word, to use language as a tool invested with the power to transform ideas generated by black people into action, especially revolutionary action.
This new set of narratives was devoted to elevating the most valuable and cherished aspects of the African American and criticizing those who would stand in the way of black progress and empowerment. In essence, then, the Black Arts Movement perceived itself as a direct advocate of the black masses and a staunch adversary to any agency that upheld oppressive stereotypes, whether that agency originated within or outside black communities. Not every African American author subscribed to all the tenets of the Black Aesthetic; Ralph Ellison was perhaps the most famous author to refuse to embrace it, which brought him a great deal of scorn from younger authors. Ellison’s refusal was grounded in his belief that “there is an American Negro idiom, a style and a way of life, but none of this is inseparable from the conditions of American society, nor from its general modes or culture,” which directly contradicted Black Aesthetic critics’ basic assumption of African American difference.* Yet the politics that spawned the Black Aestheic influenced a wide sampling of black artists, young and old, including Ishmael Reed, Hal Bennett, William Melvin Kelley, Cecil Brown, and John Oliver Killens. Such younger poets as Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Haki R. Madhubuti (né Don L. Lee), Etheridge Knight, and Jayne Cortez worked to represent the pains of black ghetto life and black life in general, while Gwendolyn Brooks’s poetry took on a somewhat more nationalistic tone in the late 1960s.
As Madhu Dubey points out, however, “Black Aesthetic critics, and especially those who wrote on the novel, regarded form as a transparent medium of ideological meaning.” The critical problem, then, was that though some 1960s Black Aestheticians were “successfully challenging a formalist aesthetic at one level, by insisting that all art is ideological, Black Aesthetic theorists, by default, allowed the category of form to remain immune and peripheral to the field of ideological analysis.” Dubey provides a succinct interpretation and application of Bakhtin’s “Discourse in the Novel” as an aid to reading the project of the Black Aesthetic as well as that of black women writers. In Dubey’s argument, Black Aestheticians fell into the same trap as the white critics before them of dividing literature among a fallacious form/content split. The problem with the demand for a reflective/realistic aesthetic “is that an exclusive focus on themes helps to maintain the form/content split that usually justifies a nonideological analysis of literary texts,” which was a major failing of white critics. Conversely, a bias toward the content side of this split prevents recognition of the diversity of social and political histories with which specific forms are invested; the realistic, reflective form of literature went relatively unquestioned, becoming an ideal model for all Black art.
Dubey’s critique of the Black Aesthetic in her Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic is particularly valuable when she demonstrates how even authors heavily influenced by Black Nationalism might simultaneously defy every edict of a nationalist aesthetic yet still be accepted by some of these same nationalists. Dubey offers a piercing example in her recounting of the initial reception of The Bluest Eye (1970), by Toni Morrison. Citing Frances Smith Foster’s argument that “the prescribed role of black women writers in the … 1960s was to destroy negative stereotypes of black women … and to affirm the black family and community,” Dubey demonstrates that “relationships between black men and women in the novel are driven by violence and sexual perversion.” The “black community [in the novel] is equally out of keeping with Black Aesthetic requirements,” insofar as it is “committed to white middle-class values, and is divided by color-bias and sexism” and many of the characters are severely pathological, which fits squarely within common stereotypes about African Americans. Yet, Dubey notes, The Bluest Eye was among the “most sympathetically received by Black Aesthetic critics,” many of whom argued that Morrison’s depiction of the destructive nature of “white” values is its most powerful feature, a reading that Morrison encouraged.*
Therein lies the contradiction that troubled writers and intellectuals who championed a Black Aesthetic; it was meant to liberate African American authors, critics, and readers from standards that negated African Americans’ experiences, yet it was far too easy to accept, excuse, or dismiss an individual work’s merits or flaws as the critic saw fit, depending upon his or her particular agenda, rather than see the work as both an artistic and social whole. Moreover, as W. Lawrence Hogue argues, the influence of the Black Aesthetic upon black studies programs and departments or upon faculty in traditional departments who taught African American literature led inevitably to a process of canon formation in which only a small handful of authors and texts were ever discussed at any substantial length in major critical studies.*
African American Fiction from 1970 to the Present
The decades following the passage of the Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s and 1970s witnessed enormous and unprecedented transformations in the composition of the African American and mainstream American communities and their respective politics. Economists, political scientists, and sociologists have documented at length the changes within African American communities as de jure Civil Rights and racial integration allowed African Americans greater (though still limited) access to mainstream institutions, professions, and corporations through equal opportunity and affirmative action programs. These new forms of access helped empower a significant portion of African Americans, who quickly found themselves endowed with increased purchasing power and (with the help of antidiscriminatory housing laws) the means to move to the neighborhoods of their choice and to send their children to better schools at the primary, secondary, and college levels in greater numbers than ever before. Thus a new, ever-expanding middle class was created within African American communities. This class’s existence, combined with the decidedly antibourgeois slant of Black Nationalism, forced African Americans to try to articulate a new meaning for “race” and its subsequent effects upon black political and economic life, since that life was no longer legally circumscribed, at least not openly.
African American literature has simultaneously absorbed and effected changes in the black political landscape as often and as radically as black people themselves have. Since 1970 in particular, the African American literary tradition has witnessed the ascendance of black women authors, many of whom have helped propel the advancement of African American literary studies overall. Beginning with the Black Studies Department founded in 1968 at San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State University) after extensive student protests, black/Afro-American/African American studies programs and departments grew rapidly at both major and minor universities and colleges nationwide, usually through student-faculty coalitions and activism. Literature of all genres was a foundational component of these programs, with fiction and poetry that supported the Black Nationalism of the Black Arts Movement especially popular. Students of African American history and culture enthusiastically began to rediscover and recover authors who had been locked out of school curricula from kindergarten through Ph.D. programs, and to change American education permanently. The number of black/African American studies programs and departments at American colleges and universities dropped dramatically between 1970 and 1980, with dozens either defunded or absorbed into other departments on their campuses. Nevertheless, as more African American faculty were hired at majority-white institutions in that period, they successfully fought for African American literature courses to be offered regularly and to a lesser, but not insignificant extent, to make study of African American literature part of general American literature courses. Similarly, it is no longer strange for African American fiction to sell hundreds of thousands, even millions of copies, or for the authors and their texts to win awards, fellowships, grants, and internationally renowned prizes. African American fiction is popular reading material and, perhaps most important, has almost become a staple of American university curricula and the subject of hundreds of critical studies. We may even argue, with considerable evidence, that African American literature now possesses a core canon, although, like other literary canons, it is constantly in flux and subject to changes in both cultural climates and taste.
Not surprisingly, the establishment of a canon of sorts has transformed the Black Aesthetic established in the mid-1960s and early 1970s, though it has not necessarily invalidated all of its claims. While the original Black Arts Movement, as the artistic branch of Black Nationalism, was supposed to reflect the masses of African Americans, this particular purpose became more complicated in a black nation that has fractured into several class-divided states. As Madhu Dubey argues, without the “sheer possibility of blackness” that came out of 1960s and 1970s nationalist thought, the focus of contemporary black authors on the black community would be rendered moot; a contemporary text’s foregrounding of previously neglected issues more often than not assumes a loosely cohesive black community, albeit one that needs to be more inclusive if it wishes to maintain its cohesion and progress simultaneously.* The bonds that would hold such an ideal black community together vary from text to text, but recent African American literature frequently assumes that the term “African American” comprises extremely diverse subject positions—and always has. Rather than relying entirely upon a definition of African American identity that makes the lives and experiences of black males the norm, contemporary African American fiction as a whole affirms the reality of African Americans’ experiences even as it reinscribes the experiences of black women, black gays and lesbians, and black people of every class and region as no less “black” because of their differences.
In the works of Alice Walker, for example, we may find examples of her “womanist” aesthetic, which calls for black women to “fearlessly pull out of [themselves] and look at and identify with [their] lives the living creativity” of all black women, especially those rendered nearly voiceless by their class status, and to recognize and recover black women’s literature and other forms of creative expression.* In pursuit of this aesthetic, Walker was instrumental in reviving the novels of Zora Neale Hurston in the early 1970s, catapulting Their Eyes Were Watching God to a new height of celebration for its close attention to women’s concerns. Walker’s own novels and womanist aesthetic, as well as novels by other black women, especially Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, Ntozake Shange, Maya Angelou, Gayl Jones, Audre Lorde, Jamaica Kincaid, Gloria Naylor, and J. California Cooper, have helped redefine African American literature so that previously marginalized voices moved to the center. In 1993, when Toni Morrison received the Nobel Prize in Literature, she became the first African American ever to be so honored. Her popular novels—The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1974), Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), and Paradise (1996)—combine rich lyricism, the symbolic virtues of modernism, and the politics of the Black Arts Movement for a powerful mix that has made her one of the most frequently studied African American authors in history. Her work as an author and critic helped inspire the career of Gloria Naylor; as an editor at Random House in the 1970s, Morrison helped bring the work of younger African American authors, especially women, into published form. Morrison played a direct hand in the careers of Gayl Jones, Toni Cade Bambara, and Gloria Naylor as editor, mentor, and friend, allowing three major voices of the New Literature to emerge and attract critical attention.
Toni Morrison’s role as a pivotal editor in the 1970s highlighted the importance of access to publishers that defined earlier movements in African American literature, most notably the Harlem Renaissance. That movement’s success depended largely upon the interest and influence of such new, smaller, and decidedly liberal publishers as Alfred A. Knopf—who has published Morrison’s novels from 1970 until the present—and Boni and Liveright. In contrast, African American authors from the 1960s until the present have published with both large, mainstream presses—Doubleday, Random House, MacMillan, Vintage—and smaller presses that have published African American works exclusively: Third World Press, Black Classics Press, and Holloway House. Others, such as Grove, City Lights, or the Free Press, have tended to publish works that mainstream publishers would not, including the speeches of Malcolm X, the writings of Frantz Fanon, and the work of other intellectuals crucial to radical politics in the period.
African American male authors have been no less productive since 1970. Equally as influenced by some precepts of the Black Aesthetic as African American women authors, a new coterie of authors entered into literary canons and found new respectability in the academy. Their work may be classified in any number of ways, ranging from traditionally modernist, to postmodern, to Black Nationalist or Afrocentric. The novels of Leon Forrest—especially The Bloodworth Orphans (1977) and Divine Days (1992)—and Albert Murray—particularly Train Whistle Guitar (1974)—for example, exhibit the influence of their friend Ralph Ellison. Ellison’s classic Invisible Man may be considered an outgrowth of literary modernism because of its ambiguity, focus upon the inner psyche, extensive allusions to diverse literary traditions and pioneers (particularly Mark Twain, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and André Malraux), and its attempt to capture the totality of African American experiences through the rhythms and dynamics of such musical forms as the blues and jazz. Both Forrest and Murray take Ellison’s cue in all of these respects. John Oliver Killens provided humorous takes on black politics in the early 1970s from a largely nationalistic outlook in which the goals of the Black Aesthetic are most transparent.
On the other hand, Ishmael Reed, Toni Cade Bambara, Clarence Major, Charles Johnson, Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, and John Edgar Wideman are among the many authors whose work, however widely divergent, has often been described as postmodern, usually because of their tendency to undermine the very genres in which they write and to question the very meaning of such categories as “history” and “truth.” Each interrogates traditional ways of constructing narratives and history to highlight how those narratives simultaneously help and hinder our attempts to get at history and experience. The narrator of Toni Morrison’s 1992 novel Jazz, for example, frequently talks to the reader and doubts her—or its—own ability to tell the story at hand. Many of John Edgar Wideman’s novels, including The Lynchers (1973), Philadelphia Fire (1990), and his Homewood Trilogy (Damballah [1981; short stories], Hiding Place [1981; novel] and Sent for You Yesterday [1983; novel]), tell us about the ways that histories are constructed as much as they tell complexly woven stories. In this respect, Wideman is comparable to the late Toni Cade Bambara, whose dense and intricate prose in Gorilla, My Love (1972) and The Salt Eaters (1980) tells of the wonder and ambiguity in common, everyday lives, while making the reader work for the rich rewards of these inner worlds.
Postmodern African American authors have frequently earned that label for scrutinizing, revising, or subverting popular or foundational genres and authors, particularly the slave narratives and their narrators. The product of their scrutiny has been the neo–slave narrative, which adopts many of the conventions of the slave narratives that defined and dominated early African American literature but uses them to reveal the stories and angles hidden behind the nineteenth-century literary and publication practices to which the original slave narratives had to conform. Many neo–slave narratives emerged in the 1970s as responses, in part, to the controversy surrounding William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), which numerous African American writers and critics roundly condemned for its questionable reconstruction of slave-insurrectionist Nat Turner’s original testimony by focusing upon his imagined psyche and his sexual proclivities. The goal of many neo–slave narratives, then, is to offer a more sympathetic view of enslaved people’s lives than Styron seemed to present, using modern literary techniques and understandings of history. Gayl Jones’s Corregidora (1975), for instance, reveals the extremes of black women’s sexual exploitation under slavery and links it to present-day tensions between men and women, while Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada (1976) seamlessly weaves relatively obscure facts about Harriet Beecher Stowe, the U.S. Civil War, and American and black intellectual politics of the 1970s into a fantastic parody of the conventional slave narrative. Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose (1985), Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Lorene Cary’s Price of a Child (1995) use sketches of actual historical events as the bases for powerful novels that reimagine those events, turning them into metaphors for more recent issues in black life. Each of these works has helped broaden our comprehension of a nearly incomprehensible institution; they have also brought immense accolades to African American fiction.
Charles Johnson has also gathered considerable laurels for his heady mix of humor, literary allusion, and philosophy from both Western and Eastern traditions in Middle Passage (1990), which won the National Book Award, only the second work by an African American author—Invisible Man was the first—to be so honored. His earlier works, Faith and the Good Thing (1974), Oxherding Tale (1982), and The Sorceror’s Apprentice (short stories, 1986) fall into the same vein, as does Dreamer (1997), a fictional meditation upon the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., set in the Civil Rights leader’s final days. Most important, this last work shows how the myth of King has been created since his assassination, forcing the reader to question whether it was ever possible to know King the person once the icon was created. The defining works of Ishmael Reed and Clarence Major were also genre-crossing and experimental fiction that challenged conventional narrative forms and trends. Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972), its quasi-sequel The Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974), and Flight to Canada (1976) each won acclaim and controversy for their satirical views of literary trends and contemporary politics, while Major’s NO (1973), Reflex and Bone Structure (1975), and Emergency Exit (1979) completely upset normal reader expectations in terms of their structure and ways of constructing meaning out of their fragmented, episodic formats. In the 1980s and 1990s, Reed and Major began to limit some of the formal innovations of their earlier fiction, but both remained committed to narratives that were political or artistic challenges. Reed’s novels The Terrible Twos (1982),Reckless Eyeballing(1985),The Terrible Threes (1987), and Japanese by Spring (1992) satirize American politics and current events in African American intellectual and literary life. Major’s short story collection Fun and Games (1990) and novels Painted Turtle (1988), Such Was the Season (1987), and Dirty Bird Blues (1996) combine experimentalism with Major’s deep interest in the place of the blues in African American culture.
Since the 1960s and 1970s, respectively, Samuel R. Delany and Octavia Butler have had brilliant careers as authors of complex science fiction, and their work has won most of that genre’s major awards, including the Hugo and Nebula. Each also received all-too-little attention in African American critical circles as part of the tradition of African American fiction in their early years, despite the fact that both frequently published works that offered some of the most sophisticated treatments of issues of race and sexuality. This relative dearth of attention may be explained by the fact that science fiction from African American authors had previously been extremely rare and therefore offered very little context for contemporary critics. In other words, science fiction had previously been considered a largely “white” genre, one closed to most African American authors, despite the tradition of allegorizing racial issues within the field since at least the 1940s. Butler and Delany took this tradition in new directions over their careers, with Butler’s Patternist series (1976–1984) and Delany’s Dhalgren (1975), Triton (1977), and Return to Nevèrÿon series (1979–1987), all of which explored the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality through frequently experimental narratives. By the 1990s, both had had all or part of individual issues of major literary journals devoted to criticism concerning their work. Delany was featured in the fall 1996 issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction, and Butler in the winter 1993 issue of Utopian Studies. Both were the most prominent authors studied in Black American Literature Forum’s special Science Fiction issue (summer 1984).
In the 1980s and 1990s, publishers’ interest in African American authors had become keener, as both African American literature and African American literary studies dramatically changed. By the time Johnson Publications shut the doors of its literary-critical magazine Black World in 1976, many of the same scholars and thinkers who had developed the Black Aesthetic that the magazine had helped champion were calling it into question. African American women writers now dominated the literary scene, expanding the roster of popularly read and taught African American authors. Prior to the late 1970s, a course on African American literature would rarely move beyond Frederick Douglass, James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Gwendolyn Brooks. By 1980, such a course would be more likely to include Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, poets Sonia Sanchez and Nikki Giovanni, and other women.
This development was inarguably aided by the rapid inroads that both African American women and men were making into the academy, where they began reinterpreting African American history via feminist, Black Nationalist, gay/lesbian/bisexual, formalist, poststructuralist, New Historicist, Marxist, and many other critical lenses. In addition, such authors as Virginia Hamilton, Rosa Guy, Walter Dean Myers, June Jordan, and Mildred Taylor were regularly winning awards for children’s or young-adult fiction that portrayed African American lives positively. Toni Morrison’s landmark Song of Solomon had won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1978. African American authors from previous decades who had been largely neglected, such as Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, and Jessie Redmon Fauset, had been brought back into print, giving a new generation of readers access to great forgotten works of African American fiction and coincidentally helping African American literary studies to grow. Negro American Literature Forum had changed its name in 1977 to Black American Literature Forum to reflect the fact that black scholars could extend their work beyond the foundational task of recovering and validating African American history to applying developments within contemporary critical theory to African American literature, in addition to some of the precepts of the Black Aesthetic.* Despite coming under attack almost immediately after founding them in the late 1960s and early 1970s, hundreds of American universities still retained black studies programs and departments, giving millions of students potential access to African American history and literature. On an everyday level, the dismantling of legal segregation and the institution of such antidiscrimination policies as affirmative action helped expand the black middle class—those making the American median income or above—from a tiny minority of African Americans prior to the Civil Rights movement to over one-third of the black population of the United States, although African Americans’ income remained behind the national median.*
The year 1980 also brought a marked shift in racial politics that had its roots in the conflicts of the 1960s and 1970s. When the United States Supreme Court ruled in the Regents of the University of California v. Bakke case in 1978, it outlawed strict quotas that employers and educational institutions had put in place to help redress decades of overt discrimination. It also signaled a shift in American attitudes toward racial equality that would reach their high point when Ronald Reagan was elected president of the United States in 1980. For millions of African Americans, Reagan’s election portended a backlash against the Civil Rights movement and the affirmative action policies that had its origins in the 1960s. Reagan openly courted conservative Southern white voters who resented legal and economic gains African Americans had made and the loss of legal white supremacy. While the issue of race was far from the only issue that ushered Reagan into office, it certainly played a role in his election and in the policies his administration enacted to roll back many of the changes of the Civil Rights movement and the liberal social policies of previous administrations. The political and social gains that African Americans had obtained during or with the aid of the Lyndon B. Johnson administration’s Great Society programs were under attack at the same time that new threats began to hit African American communities: the debilitating recession of 1981; HIV/AIDS, which affected African Americans well out of proportion with the general population; the crack, or rock cocaine epidemic and the concomitant “War on Drugs” that led to skyrocketing incarceration rates for African Americans in the nation’s prisons; cuts in Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) or welfare and similar programs; the loss of jobs and infrastructure in the inner cities; and so on. Many African American intellectuals laid these problems squarely at the feet of the Reagan administration and its policy of benign neglect.
Some African American authors in the 1980s, particularly Samuel R. Delany, Alice Walker, and Ishmael Reed, did try to take account of the immediate effects of the Reagan administration’s policies in their fiction and essays. Delany’s Return to Nevèrÿon (1987) is commonly read as the first novel ever written specifically about the AIDS crisis. The opening pages of Ishmael Reed’s Terrible Twos (1982) indict the decade’s materialism in particular, while his most controversial novel, Reckless Eyeballing (1985), accuses black feminists of collaborating with the forces of oppression—in Reed’s view, white feminists and powerful racists in general—for the sake of material gain. In the same vein—albeit lacking Reed’s critique of feminism—Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills (1985) creates a Dantean allegory that questions whether the expansion and enrichment of the black middle class in the 1970s and, to a lesser extent, the 1980s came at the cost of its very soul.
The majority of African American authors in the 1980s, however, were less explicitly political in terms of interrogating the administration in the White House. The artistic goals of the 1970s still captivated new and old authors, especially desires to recover lost stories within African American history, to help create a stronger, more complex black identity, and to explore the possible long term effects of the Civil Rights and Black Power eras upon African America as a whole. This last goal resonated widely as the first generation to grow up without the specter of a seemingly intractable, wholly visible, and thoroughly legal segregation came of age. This younger generation, born since the modern Civil Rights era began with the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decision of 1954 and the ascendance of Martin Luther King Jr. as a leader, came of age in a nation transformed by the legacy of social protest, but it did not always perceive or appreciate the breadth of the changes. The iconic black political heroes of the 1960s were either dead (King, Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad, Medgar Evers), had fallen out of the public spotlight, often due to harassment by the government (Huey P. Newton, Elaine Brown, Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown), or had moved into less obviously sensational phases of their lives and careers (Angela Y. Davis, Black Panther Party founders Newton and Bobby Seale, and many others). Political leaders and figures still played key roles in African American politics, of course, as the career of the Civil Rights leader Reverend Jesse Jackson demonstrates. The former lieutenant of Martin Luther King Jr., present when his mentor was assassinated in 1968, made two celebrated bids for the presidency of the United States, in 1984 and 1988, both of which helped galvanize the African American community.
Jackson’s political ambitions, however, did not alter the fact that the central problem of the 1980s was how African American life was being marked by greater ambivalence and ambiguity in the absence of Jim Crow; in fact, they threw this situation into relief. This ambiguity, which Charles T. Banner-Haley lists among the “fruits of integration,” was embodied in African American literature as an ever-shifting postmodernism.* These texts question the way Western versions of history have been constructed, and by whom; revise, update, or parody such traditional literary forms as the travel narrative, slave narrative, romance, and tragedy for the purpose of expanding these forms or showing how they have limited African American forms of expression; and construct experimental texts that dispense with many literary conventions, including linear plots, rules about the mechanical arrangement of text and other media, and the obligation of the author to help the reader construct meaning. Postmodernism was not new to black writers in the 1980s; Clarence Major, Ishmael Reed, Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, Samuel R. Delany, and Leon Forrest had already pushed generic limits, with Major arguably the most radically experimental of all. Their fiction consciously resisted easy or linear interpretations, often questioning the boundaries of its own composition and existence, or at least the integrity of the plots and the identities of their characters. African American literature could protest and challenge through its rhetorical stridence, but it was also becoming a site for an expanding artistic freedom as it refused ghettoization.
In the 1980s, this social and artistic ambiguity in black texts merged into a complex, sometimes controversial new state of the arts. The first major defining moment was arguably the publication of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Color Purple (1983) and its subsequent transformation into a major motion picture directed by Steven Spielberg. With the film’s images often overpowering the novel’s complexities, African Americans were split roughly between those who admired Walker for exposing the history of sexual and physical abuse that countless black women had endured and those who believed the film denigrated African American men in general. The controversy was arguably the apex of tensions wrought by the rise of black women authors in the 1970s, as it revealed deep resentment and fears of the new power and influence that these women had finally won through their art. Lost in the furor at times was Walker’s masterpiece itself, an epistolary novel in which the protagonist, Celie, tells her story through letters to God and to her beloved sister, Nettie. Celie’s story forced readers and viewers to consider gender roles, sexuality, and modern African history in a fluid blend of imaginative lyricism and overtly political messages. Most important of all, Walker helped convince thousands of African American women to take a greater interest in literature, paving the way for the massive success of Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale (1992) nearly a decade later. Walker’s novels, short stories, and essays became the foundation of many hundreds of scholarly theses and dissertations, books, and conference panels. Walker also revived interest in the works of Zora Neale Hurston, who had fallen almost completely out of the public eye since her death in 1961. She has been an exemplar of other womanists—black feminists who steadfastly embrace both their ethnic and gender identities—in her determination to show the more intimate sides of black lives as she champions political causes (fighting racism within the women’s movement, banning clitoridectomies and genital mutilation, and black sexuality, among others) and tells the hidden stories that a white-male-centered and -driven world frequently silences.
By the late 1980s, and particularly after the publication of her landmark novel Beloved, Toni Morrison had become arguably the most important figure in contemporary African American literature due to a number of key factors: her consummate skill in bringing stories of African American women from the background of history into its foreground; the mellifluous lyricism of her prose; the complexities of her characters and plots; a burgeoning interest in feminism in the academy, which owed some of its momentum to Alice Walker’s popularity; a growing interest in slavery and other complex or neglected periods and events in African American history; and the combined efforts of scholars of African American literature to establish a canon of literature of the African Diaspora. Beloved addressed all of these interests through its revision of the story of Margaret Garner, a refugee from slavery who, in 1857, slew two of her own children rather than see them returned to bondage. When the novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988, the high esteem with which Morrison was regarded in academic circles was both affirmed and extended via one of the most prestigious awards in American letters. This award helped pave the way for one of the crowning achievements of the contemporary period: the Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to Morrison in 1993.
Alice Walker’s and Toni Morrison’s success and artistically pathbreaking works of the 1980s were directly responsible for emboldening and establishing the careers of J. California Cooper and Gloria Naylor and helped the enthusiastic critical and commercial reception that greeted the late masterpieces of Paule Marshall (Praisesong for the Widow [1983], Reena and Other Stories [1983], Daughters [1991], and The Fisher King [2000]) and Sherley Anne Williams (Dessa Rose). Similar to Morrison and Walker, all of these authors created novels in which the narrators often frame their stories in informal, colloquial language, thereby demonstrating the validity of different voices in creating or re-creating African American history.
The late 1980s and 1990s also yielded a number of newer, younger authors whose work, whether influenced by the work of previous generations of African American and white writers or such cultural phenomena as hip-hop, is already carving out a new niche in the African American literary tradition. Novelists Paul Beatty, Trey Ellis, Bebe Moore Campbell, Darryl Pinckney, Walter Mosley, Terry McMillan, Danzy Senna, Colson Whitehead, and Darius James have all had a part in reshaping contemporary African American literature into a “New Renaissance” in African American literature harkening back to and exceeding the Harlem Renaissance of the 1910s through the 1930s in terms of its intellectualism, popularity, and influence. McMillan and Mosley’s popular fictions have helped spur widespread interest in African American fiction, thus feeding what Trey Ellis called in 1989 a “New Black Aesthetic,” which would leave black artists and writers free to pursue artistic projects that reflect all of their influences, rather than enthralled to a single, overarching vision of “blackness” or black progress.*
Ellis’s definition of the New Black Aesthetic takes equally from Langston Hughes’s declaration of artistic independence nearly sixty-five years earlier in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” and the many debates over the responsibilities of African American artists to their community that have dominated African American literary criticism ever since, but especially those of the 1960s and 1970s. To paraphrase Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s preface to Greg Tate’s Flyboy in the Buttermilk, New Black Aestheticians feel but resist “the temptation to romanticize black culture [and] can parody black nationalism because [they have] a real measure of sympathy for it.” By the same token, these artists and intellectuals have also learned too much from feminism, the gay rights movement, other liberation struggles, and their own immersion in the complexities of black culture either to “apologize” for it or to excuse the fallacies of its past proponents.*
Ellis’s argument in “The New Black Aesthetic” stems from the fact that one segment of the first generation of African Americans born during or after the modern Civil Rights Movement—the “Post-Soul” generation—has benefited from the new opportunities that the movement engendered by learning how to move between two cultures: the dominant, or “white,” defined by rock ’n’ roll music and Caucasian cultural and literary icons; and “black,” as defined by rap and hip-hop, jazz, African American literature and history, and so on. The healthy “cultural mulattoes,” the core of the NBA, are sufficiently “torn between two worlds to finally go out and create [their] own” (236). Ellis’s generation comprises African Americans who find themselves with unprecedented access to middle-class privileges, employment opportunities, and cultural cachet. In fact, the very goal of New Black Aestheticians is to show the degree to which African Americans have already given their “message to the world” or, more accurately, to the world’s culture.
The popularity of African American literature in the twentieth century’s last two decades ensured that this message would spread rapidly. Terry McMillan played an essential role in this regard as both an author and editor. Her 1990 collection of contemporary African American writing, Breaking Ice, remains one of the finest anthologies ever assembled and was a popular hit upon its initial publication. McMillan’s breakthrough novel, Waiting to Exhale (1992), however, irrevocably changed the way that publishers regarded African Americans as authors and readers. This frequently comic novel about four middle-class black women searching for love and personal peace became a runaway bestseller among American readers of all backgrounds almost overnight and spawned an ever-growing and lucrative trend of novels focusing upon relationships and romance. McMillan used the novel’s momentum to leverage a lucrative contract and develop it into an equally popular film, which in turn led to a chart-topping soundtrack album. McMillan’s example inspired dozens of African American authors, including Tina McElroy Ansa, Connie Briscoe, Eric Jerome Dickey, E. Lynn Harris, and Sheneska Jackson, to begin writing in the same genre. These novels are often referred to as “Sister Novels” because of their casts of smart, sassy black women and their appeal to a cross-section of upwardly mobile African American women and quite a few men.
The authors who create this popular fiction exist alongside their established elders on bookstore shelves but in many cases are marketed quite differently from those who came before them, particularly if they follow the newest trends. For the better part of the 1990s, it was difficult to find novels by and about African American women that did not have cover art echoing Synthia Saint James’s dust jacket painting for Waiting to Exhale—until McMillan published her next novel, How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1996), which spawned its own imitators.
Publishers’ advertising campaigns could be equally confusing, as hundreds of books that discussed male-female romantic relationships as but one of many issues suddenly found publishers casting them with the Sister Novel genre, regardless of the content. The novice reader of African American fiction would understandably have a difficult time separating the critically acclaimed artist from the more accessible young lion, if she or he wished to do so. A major grassroots solution to this problem was the book-club phenomenon that swept the nation in the middle of the 1990s, in which people from disparate backgrounds would gather to read and discuss a book assigned to the group. In African American communities in particular, such clubs exploded after Waiting to Exhale made more black women and men curious about the literature that people who looked like them were writing. It began to change the demographics of the readership for African American fiction. Throughout American history, the majority of the audience for African American literature has always been nonblack, largely because Caucasians are in the majority and are almost exclusively in control of the publishing industry. African Americans, of course, have always read and been supportive of African American authors. These same authors, however, have faced the same problem that Langston Hughes noted regarding the Harlem Renaissance: “The ordinary Negroes hadn’t heard of the Negro Renaissance. And if they had, it hadn’t raised their wages any.”* In other words, African American fiction writers have but rarely enjoyed popular success among African Americans unless, as in the case of Donald Goines in the 1960s and 1970s, they publish with small presses that are marketed to and geared entirely towards representing the lives of the “ordinary Negroes.”
These trends continued throughout the 1990s as both authors and publishers continued to feed a growing demand from African American audiences for fiction that reflected the realities of living in the 1990s along the lines of Ellis’s New Black Aesthetic. Today, such popular authors as April Sinclair, E. Lynn Harris, Eric Jerome Dickey, Benilde Little, and David Haynes continue to plot novels with similarly middle-class protagonists searching for personal fulfillment and love in an era in which both seem all too fleeting. By the latter half of the 1990s, more authors were moving their foci to other directions in some of the more challenging fiction in recent times. Those challenges could range from characterization and language to formal innovation and philosophical sophistication. The novels Push (1996) by Sapphire and The Coldest Winter Ever (1999) by Sister Souljah, and most of Jess Mowry’s novels throughout the decade (especially Way Past Cool [1992]) featured protagonists from America’s inner cities that disturb the normal definition of the sympathetic lead. Each author took numerous cues from Richard Wright, to the extent that their characters are meant to discomfit the reader through their heavy use of dialect and current slang. Their protagonists struggle with horrific social ills, including teenage pregnancy, drugs, violence, and despair, but these novels also suggest that some of the problems within their young characters’ lives may find their solutions in a greater faith in and reliance upon communal ties.
The New Black Aesthetic/Post-Soul generation is equally exciting in its formal experimentation. In characteristically postmodern gestures, such newer authors as Jeffery Renard Allen, Melvin Dixon, Edwidge Danticat, Percival Everett, Randall Kenan, James Earl Hardy, Paul Beatty, Darius James, Danzy Senna, and Colson Whitehead try to cross generic boundaries by infusing their narratives with more irony and satire or by incorporating complex philosophical issues that implicitly or explicitly question what African American fiction is. One such example may be found in the work of Percival Everett, who has been publishing critically acclaimed novels and short stories since 1983 but only began receiving widespread recognition with 1999’s Glyph, simultaneously a spoof of contemporary philosophy and an homage to Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1761). His next novel, Erasure (2001), a quasiautobiographical satire on the contemporary African American literary scene (particularly Sapphire’s Push), garnered even higher praise, ironically for contributing to the very same scene it ridiculed. Colson Whitehead’s widely acclaimed debut novel The Intuitionist (1999) is an allegorical meditation upon race, politics, national identity, contemporary critical theory, and the Civil Rights movement’s legacy of integration, while its successor, John Henry Days (2001) ambitiously reworks the legend of the African American folk hero in its title into a parable for contemporary times. This novel helped earn Whitehead a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” grant in 2002. Jeffery Renard Allen’s debut, Rails Under My Back (2000), tells an ambitious, epic story of a black family’s migration to and from Chicago’s South Side over the course of the twentieth century, making Allen one of the most significant African American authors writing on the Windy City since Richard Wright and, in terms of his style and scope, a potential heir to Wright’s friend and protégé, Ralph Ellison. Darius James’s Negrophobia (1992) and Paul Beatty’s White Boy Shuffle (1996) and Tuff (2000) hilariously spoof the crisis in African American leadership of the last thirty years, while Danzy Senna’s Caucasia (1998) updates and critiques the “tragic mulatto” narrative of a century ago by pointedly removing the tragedy. As a result, Senna is free to create a bildungsroman—a novel of personal growth—that looks carefully at developments in African American life and culture since the 1970s.
Fiction by and about black gay males also made significant impressions upon the African American literary scene in the 1990s. Melvin Dixon’s Vanishing Rooms (1991), James Earl Hardy’s B-Boy Blues (1994), Randall Kenan’s Let the Dead Bury the Dead (1992), and the novels of E. Lynn Harris, particularly his debut Invisible Life (1994), each offered some of the most well-received, popular, and often innovative fiction of the period and, via their subject matter, breached one of the long-standing barriers in African American culture and literature. While fiction by or about homosexual black males had certainly appeared in earlier decades—Richard Bruce Nugent’s “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade” (1926), Wallace Thurman’s Infants of the Spring (1934), James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956), Hal Bennett’s Lord of Dark Places (1970), and Samuel R. Delany’s Return to Nevèrÿon series (1979–1987) being some of the most notable examples—it was only in the 1990s that this subject became more acceptable to a reading public that had not been accustomed to black gay male sexuality. This acceptance owed nearly equal debts to the authors’ artistic skills and to generally changing attitudes towards gays and lesbians in American society and to the AIDS crisis that continued to devastate both gay and African American communities in the 1990s. In terms of commercial success, Harris was by far the leader among this group, but all have been the recipients of great critical acclaim and widespread attention in lay and academic circles.
Most of the authors named above wrote from what may be called a Post-Soul viewpoint, often without as heavy an artistic burden as the novels of the previous generation. This is not to imply that Post-Soul artists are any less sophisticated or committed to their art or politics; rather, it is to argue that they are generally less concerned with any single artistic or political agenda than they are with creating art that is true to the enormous complexities of their times and their generation.
Yet the Post-Soul movement is no more the final definition of its era’s art than was the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s and 1970s. More established authors, such as Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson, Gayl Jones, Gloria Naylor, and Alice Walker published some of their more challenging and exciting works in the 1990s. Although neither Morrison’s Jazz (1992) nor Paradise (1997) have yet received the same voluminous scholarly treatment or high praise as her earlier Beloved, Song of Solomon, and The Bluest Eye, they helped bring more readers to the fold as they were featured on Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club and, in the case of Beloved, developed into a major (albeit unsuccessful) motion picture. In 1998, Gayl Jones ended a twenty-year hiatus from the public eye and literary attention by publishing The Healing and later Mosquito (1999), a seriocomic, epic travel narrative that relies upon dramatic—and often hilarious—shifts in narrative voice. Posthumously, with the help of their respective friends and editors Toni Morrison and John Callahan, the epic, flawed masterpieces on which Toni Cade Bambara and Ralph Ellison had long labored were presented to receptive, albeit mixed reviews. The appearance of Bambara’s Those Bones are Not My Child (2000) and Ellison’s Juneteenth (1999) were each greeted with considerable fanfare, but the publication of Ellison’s novel in particular became a media event due to the nearly fifty-year gap between Juneteenth and his classic Invisible Man. At issue as well was the fact that Ellison never actually completed his second novel; the work that Callahan presented to the world was the editor’s best attempt—with the blessing of Ellison’s widow, Fanny—to make sense of thousands of manuscript and typescript pages, notes, tangents, incomplete episodes, and other ephemera that Ellison had accumulated over forty years of work, using his knowledge of Ellison’s artistic vision and philosophical outlook. In both Bambara’s and Ellison’s cases, the results of their editors’ efforts were hailed for their ability to capture the authors’ ambitions even as they were lamented for the necessary flaws that arise from shaping an author’s work posthumously. Nevertheless, each novel stands as a very worthy conclusion to a distinguished career.
By the time Bambara’s and Ellison’s final novels became part of the literary scene at the end of the century and the beginning of a new millennium, the epic scope contained within them had become unusual in African American fiction. The current African American fiction scene is as diverse as ever, but the surge of popular fiction that arose after Terry McMillan’s success is now the dominant trend, comprising the overwhelming majority of fiction written and bought by a public hungry for narratives that affirm their experiences and ideals. This marketplace of ideas has made for rich opportunities for the reader interested in contemporary African American fiction, but its diversity has also complicated the goal of separating different genres and styles among the fiction for the novice reader. As the preface indicates, the Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction, 1970–2000, is meant to provide the reader with the means to make such separations, to help make distinctions between works of children’s and young-adult fiction, experimental novels, short stories, science and speculative fiction, popular Sister Novels, and other genres clearer. It is my hope that this Guide will give the authors, movements, institutions, and ideas the respect and consideration they are due and that the reader will join me in admiring one of the most astoundingly fruitful periods in African American literary history.
* “Do Blacks Read Books?” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 20 (Summer 1998): 43.
* See, for example, Barbara E. Johnson’s response to Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s essay “Canon-Formation and the Afro-American Tradition: From the Seen to the Told,” in Afro-American Literary Study in the 1990s, ed. Houston A. Baker Jr. and Patricia Redmond (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 40. W. Lawrence Hogue, The African American Male, Writing, and Difference: A Polycentric Approach to African American Literature, Criticism, and History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), extends this argument, as do Johnson, The Feminist Difference: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race, and Gender (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), and Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
* George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1995), 209–10.
* Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Transformation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s (New York: Routledge, 1986), 6.
* Ralph Ellison, “Some Questions and Some Answers,” in Shadow and Act (New York: Vintage, 1995), 271.
* Madhu Dubey, Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 33–34.
* W. Lawrence Hogue, The African American Male, Writing, and Difference: A Polycentric Approach to African American Literature, Criticism, and History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 42.
* Madhu Dubey, Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 29.
* Alice Walker, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1983), 237.
* Joe Weixlmann, “The Way We Were, the Way We Are, the Way We Hope to Be,” Black American Literature Forum 20, nos. 1–2 (Spring–Summer 1986): 4.
* Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library African American Desk Reference (New York: Wiley, 1999), 258, table 9.7.
* Charles T. Banner–Haley, The Fruits of Integration: Black Middle–Class Ideology and Culture, 1960–1990 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), xi–xii.
* Trey Ellis, “The New Black Aesthetic,” Callaloo 12, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 233–46.
* Henry Louis Gates Jr., foreword to Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America, by Greg Tate (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 14.
* Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (1940; New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1986), 228.