Black and More than Black

African American Fiction in the Post Era

Cameron Leader-Picone

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781496824530
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios afroamericanos

CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title for 2020 Post-Blackness. Post-Soul. Post-Black Art. New Blackness. How has the meaning of blackness changed in the twenty-first century? Cameron Leader-Picone suggests that this proliferation of terms, along with the renewed focus on questioning the relationship between individual black artists and the larger black community, indicates the arrival of novel forms of black identity and black art. Leader-Picone defines these terms as significant facets of a larger post era, linking them with the social and political context of Barack Obama's presidency. Analyzing claims of progress associated with Obama's election and post-era thinking, he examines the contours of black aesthetics in the new century. To do so, he sifts through post-era African American fiction, considering both celebrations and rejections of an early twenty-first-century rhetoric of progress. In addition, he maps the subsequent implications of these concepts for rearticulating racial identities. Through the works of Colson Whitehead, Alice Randall, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Paul Beatty, Kiese Laymon, and Jesmyn Ward, Leader-Picone tracks how recent fiction manifests the tension between the embrace of post–civil rights era gains and the recognition of persistent structural racism. Ultimately far less triumphal than the prefix post would imply, these authors address the Black Arts Movement and revise double consciousness and other key themes from the African American literary tradition. They interrogate their relevance in an era encompassing not only the election of the nation's first black president, but also the government's failed response to Hurricane Katrina, the expansion of class divisions within the black community, mass incarceration, and ongoing police violence.

1

ON THE BLACKNESS OF POST-BLACKNESS

Colson Whitehead and Racial Individualism

About halfway through Colson Whitehead’s novel Sag Harbor (2009), his narrator, Benji, steals a six-pack of Coca-Cola from a friend’s house. During the summer of 1985, in which the novel is set, Coca-Cola introduced New Coke, containing a supposedly improved formula and taste. Dedicated Coke drinkers such as Benji were not pleased, and there was a substantial backlash, leading the company to reissue the previous formula under the instantly nostalgic name of “Coca-Cola Classic.” At this point in the novel, Benji has been hoarding Old Coke. Finding several six-packs of Old Coke at the house of his friend Karen, Benji finds himself in a dilemma over whether to steal them or not. A few pages earlier, thinking about whether to shoplift from a convenience store, Benji imagines the “crisp, familiar, and so-dignified” voice of Sidney Poitier saying, “They think we steal, and because they think we steal, we must not steal” (Whitehead 2009a, 101), leading him to pay for his Fruit Roll-Up. At Karen’s house, however, he does decide to steal the Cokes, comically spilling them all over the floor as he attempts to make a stealthy exit. He reflects on the unique paralysis of his position: “Move. Don’t move. Act. Don’t act. The results were the same. This was my labyrinth” (Whitehead 2009a, 106). Benji’s dilemma, framed as it is by Poitier’s assertion of racial stereotypes, typifies the discursive tension over the definition of African American art in the twenty-first century. Much like Benji, the Black artist stands at the nexus of diverse racialized expectations about the relationship between an individual’s racial identity and the form and content of their expression. Returning to the image of Benji, his crime exposed, I suggest one can read Sag Harbor as Whitehead’s interrogation of a major post era dilemma: how do African American authors negotiate the ongoing attempt to define and label African American cultural expression in the twenty-first century?

In the wake of the substantive cultural and legal changes enabled by the long-term advocacy of African Americans during the civil rights and Black Power movements, the scope and nature of the opportunities available to African Americans has shifted, particularly for members of the growing Black middle and upper class. In response, African American literature has traced the consequences of these changes for African American identity. As the above scene in Whitehead’s Sag Harbor illustrates, questions remain about the scope of the changes that have occurred during the post–civil rights era. Particularly, do economic gains among certain segments of the Black community simply mask the same stubborn structures of racial hierarchy and racial violence? Sag Harbor, rather than offering any definitive answer to the implications of the changing class structure of the Black community, hazards a tenuous portrait of racial power structures amid the transition. Specifically, this chapter analyzes Colson Whitehead’s novel through the lens of Thelma Golden’s concept of post-Blackness (Golden 2001) to argue that it typifies the term’s evocation of a generational tension between the liberation of the individual African American subject and the recognition of the continued role that collective racial identities play in the larger society.

In assessing the implications of post-Blackness as a concept, Whitehead’s fiction raises several key complications. First, in declaring Sag Harbor a “post-black story,” the critic Touré, author of Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?, cites its unwillingness to depict the “horror of being black” as one of the novel’s defining features (Touré 2009). Touré’s comments align post-Blackness with Charles Johnson’s injunction in “The End of the Black American Narrative” to tell “new and better stories” that move beyond the simplistic narrative of struggle that has been at the heart of much of African American literature (Johnson 2008, 42). Both Johnson and Touré note that such an emphasis does not mean that society has wholly moved beyond the structures of racialized discrimination that gave rise to such struggles. However, as Touré’s review also points out, it is precisely because of Whitehead’s protagonist’s “enormous class privilege” that he can write a story capable of being described as post-Black (Touré 2009). Though Touré highlights his association between class privilege and post-Blackness, Emily Lordi pointedly countered that Touré’s assessment of “post-black” classism, in Whitehead’s novel, relegates numerous already marginalized people to the position of being “still-black” (Lordi 2009).

Consequently, the issue of Whitehead’s own class privilege, and the class privilege of the characters in his novels, calls into question the validity of analyzing his work as the basis for broader claims about the post–civil rights era. Whitehead’s work underscores Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s argument that the central transformation of Blackness in the twenty-first century is specifically class-based, stating that “the fundamental problem for African Americans in the twenty-first century” is “how class differentials within ‘the race’ compound individual experiences of anti-black racism, and ever more profoundly shape what it means to be ‘black’ itself” (Gates 2012, x). Gates’s decision to place “the race” and “black” in quotes highlights the broader indeterminacy emphasized by each attempt to characterize race in the new century. Gates’s statement consciously borrows the form of Du Bois’s famous turn of the twentieth century declaration that the “problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line” to argue for the centrality of different class experiences in generating the transformation of African American identity in the twenty-first century (Du Bois [1903] 1999, 5). Furthermore, Gates is not the only one to document growing class cleavages within the Black community. Political scientists like Adolph Reed (2016) and Lester K. Spence (2015) have emphasized how intraracial inequality has transformed Black politics, incentivizing candidates that cater to the wealthy at the expense of a broad-based consideration of Black community interests.

In many ways, when Touré declares that “It’s time for us to hear more post-black stories like [Benji’s]” (Touré 2009), he expresses the common refrain that representations of Blackness in popular culture traffic in stereotypes focusing on crime and the urban underclass. Saying this, Touré argues that African American literature needs to properly reflect the shifting class demographics of the Black community. Writing only a few years after the summer of 1985 during which the novel is set, it is these class advantages that Trey Ellis described as defining what he called “the New Black Aesthetic.” In that essay, Ellis discussed a generation of Black artists, most in their twenties at the time, who felt “misunderstood by both the black worlds and the white” (Ellis 1989, 234). As discussed in the introduction, Ellis defines “the New Black Aesthetic” widely, refusing to provide concrete characteristics to either restrict or clarify the qualities that unites the works of the artists he describes, from the California punk band Fishbone to filmmakers Spike Lee and Reginald Hudlin. Indeed, the characteristic that most unites the people he discusses is their shared class background, which he describes as “a minority’s minority mushrooming with the current black bourgeoisie boom” (Ellis 1989, 234).

Touré’s review of Whitehead’s novel echoes Ellis’s definition, arguing that what makes the novel a post-Black story, and what makes it both worthwhile and a model for future African American writing, is precisely because it tells a class story within the Black community that he presumes his reader has not heard before. Leaving aside the fact that stories of the Black bourgeoisie have been quite common and prominent throughout the African American literary tradition—stretching back at least as far as Charles Chesnutt’s The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line (1899) and The Marrow of Tradition (1901) and continuing through works by Jessie Fauset and others during the New Negro Renaissance—the depiction of the Black middle and upper class is one of the dominant characteristics of contemporary African American literature, with its parades of professors, doctors, lawyers, and, in Whitehead’s fiction alone, a range of Black professionals, many of whom come directly from privileged backgrounds.

That so much contemporary African American fiction focuses on the experiences of the Black bourgeoisie, while also seemingly compelled to express the novelty of doing so, reflects several trends. First, the post–civil rights era has seen the expansion of the Black middle and upper class over the past half century. While overall income inequality between African Americans and whites remains substantial, a greater proportion of the Black population has seen not only income and wealth gains, but also entrance into institutions (up to and including the presidency) previously the exclusive province of whites (see Smith and King 2011).¹ Second, Whitehead’s representation suggests that differential class experiences (particularly in the context of incorporation into the existing power structure) diminish what Michael Dawson called the sense of “linked fate”—the belief that the interests of the individual are directly connected to those of the race as a whole—among African Americans (Dawson 1995; see also Gay, Hochschild, and White 2016).²

This chapter does not dispute the centrality of changing class demographics in the Black community to the conceptualization of post-Blackness. As I show, however, Whitehead’s novel reveals a post-Blackness less triumphal than Touré’s review suggests. Though the novel highlights a specific class experience, it signals a broader post–civil rights uneasiness with a definition of Blackness as a collective linked to civil rights era struggle and the African American literary tradition. Whitehead’s novel depicts a generation that is indebted to the struggles of their direct ancestors yet increasingly dissatisfied with the obligations that such a history seems to place on them based solely on their skin color. The remnants of Jim Crow’s racialized order are still present; however, Benji and his friends chart individualized paths that are at once inherited from their parents and grandparents, yet distinct in their possibilities. Like the concept of post-Blackness itself, Sag Harbor imagines the possibility of change through the lens of irony, hazarding the possibility of liberation while qualifying its scope. Ultimately, Whitehead’s novel emphasizes provisionality and anti-climax, promising revelation and consistently failing to deliver. The post-Blackness of Whitehead’s writing mirrors the vacillation between optimism and pessimism in African American literature of the early twenty-first century, foregrounding the possibilities of a new era for African American art while highlighting the incompleteness of the liberation promised by the progress of the last half century.

CATEGORIZING AFRICAN AMERICAN CULTURAL PRODUCTION IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM: FROM POST-BLACK ART TO POST-BLACKNESS

Whitehead’s fiction’s emphasis on provisionality lies within the context of attempts to categorize the cultural production of the post era. In this chapter, I provide a genealogy of one of the key “post” terms: post-Blackness. While the term originated in the world of visual art, its circulation expanded with the release of Touré’s book Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? (2011). Though I only focus on one of the many “post” categories of the post era in this chapter, the conceptions of identity and politics and the category’s relationship to the larger twenty-first century overlaps substantially with the various other terms. Consequently, my analysis of post-Blackness in this chapter can be read as largely applying to the full range of terms I have mentioned so far, with their subtle differences explained in my introduction. As the philosopher Paul C. Taylor has pointed out, despite the diversity of such terms, “there is considerable overlap between them” and they should be understood “as different names for the same complex reality” (Taylor 2007, 625).

As the scene with which I began this chapter illustrates, Whitehead is particularly attentive to the contradictory burdens felt by artists of color in the early twenty-first century. During a 1999 interview, Whitehead makes the connection between the post–civil rights era and the agency of the Black artist explicit. In response to a question about whether African American writers in the present “have more freedom than previous generations,” he states, “Now I think there are a lot more of us writing and a lot more different areas we’re exploring. It’s not as polemicized. I’m dealing with serious race issues, but I’m not handling them in a way that people expect” (Whitehead 1999a). Instead of feeling obligated to address the importance of race in American society through the lens of a specific ideology, Whitehead describes an aesthetic freedom that is not about moving beyond race but is about redefining the relationship between racial identity and the individual artist.

The way Whitehead explains this redefined relationship makes his importance to critics seeking to define “post-” categories no surprise. Two book-length academic works, Derek Maus’s Understanding Colson Whitehead (2014) and Kimberly Fain’s Colson Whitehead: The Postracial Voice of Contemporary Literature (2015) analyze Whitehead through explicit “post” frameworks: “the postsoul condition” in Maus and “postracialism” in Fain. Maus situates Whitehead within post-soul culture historically, linking his work to an “inter-generational tension” over Black identity (Maus 2014, 13). Fain goes further, positioning Whitehead as a prophetic figure in American literature and culture speaking to the “racial irrelevance” of “postracialism” in which “ethnicity remains an ancillary factor” for his characters or is able to be transcended (Fain 2015, xvii). Furthermore, Ramón Saldívar’s article in Narrative, “The Second Elevation of the Novel: Race, Form, and the Postrace Aesthetic in Contemporary Narrative,” uses Whitehead’s novel The Intuitionist to define a new “postrace aesthetic” characterized by what he calls “speculative realism” (Saldívar 2013, 3). As Saldívar makes clear, Whitehead’s novels typify how African American literature (and, according to Saldívar, American ethnic literatures in general) participates in a dialogical process by which racial identity and racial meaning are actively made and articulated. Literary works by authors of color have often served as radical critiques of American racial hierarchies. However, those very critiques have the potential to engender their own reified hierarchies, requiring still further, and distinct, interventions. Whitehead’s interview illustrates this fact in relation to the orthodoxies of African American literature itself, arguing for the necessity of writing in different forms and dealing with distinct themes in a new historical context. As he points out later in the interview, it is not that what his interviewer labels as “the black intellectual novel” is actually a phenomenon unique to the present, it is that the determination of which forms are privileged, read, critiqued, and debated shifts over time to highlight what counts as “serious race issues” at any given moment (Whitehead 1999a).³

Whitehead’s redefinition of what constitutes confronting “serious race issues” in the context of fiction mirrors attempts to define what Golden (2001) termed “post-black art.” As introduced in the previous chapter, like Whitehead does with his own work, Golden specifically contrasts “post-black art” with the aesthetic principles of the Black Arts Movement to construct a generational term emphasizing individual artistic agency over the meaning of racial identity.⁴ Post-Blackness underscores the simultaneous turn towards the privileging of individual agency over racial identity and expression and concurrent recognition of the continued centrality of race in contemporary American society. Golden’s initial usage of “post-black” was modest, and she has repeatedly expressed surprise at its spread (including dismissing it in the exhibition volume for the Freestyle follow-up Frequency [2005]). The term, with its embedded reference to the Black Arts Movement (the “Black art” these young artists were supposedly post), however, was a way of hazarding a new aesthetic framework for understanding Black art in the twenty-first century. For this reason, Golden’s short essay serves as the first major document of the post era, taking the turn of the century as an opportunity to rearticulate the meaning of Black identity and its relationship to the production of art.

With her use of “post,” Golden suggests what Paul C. Taylor describes as “a sense of being in the wake of an important historical shift” (Taylor 2007, 625). Because of the dominance of the Civil Rights Movement in contemporary U.S. iconographies of race, current “post” categorizations are especially fraught. As Erica Edwards argues, the post–civil rights era has seen “the simultaneous upward and downward expansion of life chances for African-American communities,” a disparity that has not only stalled “progress,” but also potentially placed the interests of different segments of the Black community in conflict (Edwards 2013, 193). The Civil Rights Movement’s dominant role in framing public discourse on race haunts the attempt to analyze African American art in the present precisely because it mirrors the tension between the triumphalism of many representations of the civil rights era and the incompleteness of the United States civil rights project. Thus, any attempt to argue that the current moment is “post” requires that an author negotiate this tension between the racialized structures of American society and the implications those structures hold for African American art.

To navigate this tension, Golden argues that the term refers to Black artists who are “adamant about not being labeled as black artists” even as they “[redefine] complex notions of blackness” (Golden 2001, 13). The looseness of Golden’s definition mirrors her uneasiness with the prescriptions she associates with the concepts of “black art.” In fact, Golden presents her original definition of “post-black art” ironically to preemptively deny the label’s definitional power. Describing the term arising from her and Glenn Ligon’s “shared love of absurd uses of language,” Golden states she settled on the label based on “evidence of art and ideas that could only be labeled (both ironically and seriously) in this way—post-black” (Golden 2001, 13). Though her introduction is peppered with references to “the multicultural moment” in art, “the new paradigm in the recognition of heretofore often marginalized artistic practices,” and a “new millennium” that “begged the inevitable question: ‘after all of this, what’s next?’” Golden seems reluctant to argue that “post-black art” is a definitive answer (Golden 2001, 13). Furthermore, Golden’s apparent uneasiness with the frequency with which she is asked about the term during talks and interviews following her 2001 Freestyle introduction reflects her clear desire not to replace past aesthetic prescriptions for Black artists with new ones of her own.

Indeed, as Golden made clear during a 2009 talk at London’s Tate Modern, she envisioned her initial use of “post-black art” as existing specifically within the particular history of African American visual art. Golden argues this approach to African American art becomes possible precisely because the generation of artists to which she refers relate to the civil rights era as “history” rather than through direct experience. The fact that these artists have heard about the civil rights and Black Power movements from parents and in schools and popular culture instead of having lived through it enables a simultaneous obsession with and distance from this history. Earlier in the talk, Golden explains the museum’s 1968 founding was an expression of Black Arts Movement ideologies that argued for the evaluation of African American art based on its relationship to a definable Black experience. Consequently, upon taking over her position as curator, she describes her desire to initiate an idea of “what difference could mean within an institutional space organized, founded, and continuing to live within a definition of blackness” (Golden 2009).⁵ As Golden’s statement makes clear, her conceptualization of “post-black art” exists directly within a space that continues to be defined by Blackness. In other words, she saw herself as referring to post-“black art,” rather than “post-black” art, based on the work of artists specifically resisting the prescriptive aesthetics of the Black Arts Movement. However, despite Golden’s attempts to clarify her initial definition in her 2009 talk, “post-black” has circulated most commonly as a separate adjective (see Byrd 2002, 35). Though a usage that Golden repud...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Post Era
• 1—On the Blackness of Post-Blackness: Colson Whitehead and Racial Individualism
• 2—”Katrina Is the Mother We Will Remember until the Next Mother”: Apocalyptic Storms and the Slow Violence of Structural Racism
• 3—”New and Better Stories”: Crafting a Literature to Fit a Barack Obama World
• 4—The Audacity of Hope Jones: Alice Randall’s Rebel Yell and the Idealization of Barack Obama
• 5—A Non-American Black Guide to American Blackness: Rearticulating Race through a Diasporic Lens
• Coda: African American Literature Post-Obama
• Notes
• Bibliography
• About the Author