The Routledge Introduction to African American Literature

D. Quentin Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317605638
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Routledge Introduction to African American Literature considers the key literary, political, historical and intellectual contexts of African American literature from its origins to the present, and also provides students with an analysis of the most up-to-date literary trends and debates in African American literature. This accessible and engaging guide covers a variety of essential topics such as:

• Vernacular, Oral, and Blues Traditions in Literature
• Slave Narratives and Their Influence
• The Harlem Renaissance
• Mid-twentieth century black American Literature
• Literature of the civil rights and Black Power era
• Contemporary African American Writing
• Key thematic and theoretical debates within the field

Examining the relationship between the literature and its historical and sociopolitical contexts, D. Quentin Miller covers key authors and works as well as less canonical writers and themes, including literature and music, female authors, intersectionality and transnational black writing.

1

Introduction and Overview

The Stories of African American Literature

We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too…. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either.

Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” 1926

The Negro writer who seeks to function within his race as a purposeful agent has a serious responsibility. In order to do justice to his subject matter, in order to depict Negro life in all of its manifold and intricate relationships, a deep, informed, and complex consciousness is necessary; a consciousness which draws for its strength upon the fluid lore of a great people, and moulds this lore with the concepts that move and direct the forces of history today.

Richard Wright, “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” 1937

I would like to write novels that were unmistakably mine, but nevertheless fit first into African American traditions and second of all, this whole thing called literature.

Toni Morrison, interview, 1993

These days I find myself wanting to avoid being pigeon-holed, ghettoized, held in a different category [from] other authors. And when people ask me if I’m a black writer, or just a writer who happens to be black, I tend to say that it’s either a dumb question or a question which happens to be dumb. I’m an African-American writer, I’m a lazy writer, I’m a writer who likes to watch The Wire, I’m a writer who likes to eat a lot of steak.

Colson Whitehead, interview, 2013

These pronouncements about the nature and function of African American literature by some of the most prominent black writers over the past hundred years indicate some crucial differences of opinion. There are some easily discernible patterns based on history: in moments of crisis, such as the racially segregated Great Depression during which Richard Wright wrote his “blueprint,” there is an intensity and sharpness to his message as he uses phrases like “purposeful agent,” “serious responsibility,” and “complex consciousness” to describe the situation of the black writer. Colson Whitehead, writing in our contemporary world which seems much more prosperous and less fraught by racial antagonism than Wright’s did, can joke about how the fact that he likes steak is nearly as important as his race. Regardless of their historical context, all four of these quotations raise important questions that cannot be answered easily, especially about audience and about the responsibilities of the black writer. There is always a tension between an African American writer’s individual impulses and a perceived duty to respond to a tradition defined in racial terms. Note that Morrison’s first obligation is to write works that complement that tradition, and that Wright is conscious of “the fluid lore of a great people.” Both Hughes and Whitehead seem to want to rise above their audience’s expectations, but both begin their responses heavily conscious of what those expectations are.

Hughes’s 1926 essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” is often read as a cogent definition of the goals of the Harlem Renaissance (or “New Negro Renaissance”). This brief period during the 1920s marks a significant moment in African American literary history, as it was the first time black authors had articulated their hopes and goals as a collective group of artists. Hughes celebrates black American life and acknowledges that it is different from white American life: not inferior, but different. The quotation above is a clarion call not only to black artists, but also to all African Americans. Hughes hopes for a celebration of black culture and identity. But the words “fear” and “shame” at the beginning of it are significant. Why are fear and shame associated with blackness in America? Why does it take an exhortation like this one from Hughes to rally black artists to express themselves honestly? Why did some black readers in 1926 favor what Hughes called “ordinary” (read “dull”) white books over the exuberant expressions of their own culture? Why did they need art to teach them how to appreciate their own beauty?

These are questions that had to be raised with some urgency in the 1920s, and they reverberate thereafter. Hughes and his contemporaries were conscious that there was a body of African American literature that preceded them, but also that the historical and social circumstances that produced that literature was fraught with injustice and immorality. Bluntly, the horrors of the system of chattel slavery in the United States are impossible to overcome, even for those who were born after slavery was abolished. Although the era of slavery is now a century and a half in the past, its long-term effects live on. The goal of racial equality and harmony remains an elusive one. African American writers respond to these basic facts, but they do so in a variety of ways broad enough to produce a rich literary tradition.

The Nature of The Routledge Introduction to African American Literature

With the idea in mind that the African American literary tradition is neither stable nor complete, I offer a short meditation on the nature of this book, to distinguish it from a host of other books on this subject that are also available. The chapters that follow constitute a literary history of a fairly traditional kind: a chronological arrangement of some of the most significant works written by people of African descent living in the nation that is now the United States. This book is very much an overview of this tradition, an introduction intended to provide context for readers who are approaching the body of African American literature for the first time. The works, authors, and movements or periods discussed here are ones that the student of African American literature should become acquainted with. Ideally, this book will deepen the experience of anyone coming to African American literature with little previous exposure to it. It is not a book for experts: its primary intent is to provide an accurate and informative overview of the main works in the tradition, their basic relationship to one another, and their connection to the historical circumstances in which they were produced. I refer to more works and authors here than one could study in a semester or two, but that is the nature of an overview. My hope is to provide readers with a cursory familiarity with the traditions surrounding the literary works they will read and discuss closely, as well as brief summaries of the central works in the tradition so they are better equipped to situate and contextualize those works.

Even though the amount of literature discussed in these pages may seem overwhelming to a student encountering the African American literary tradition for the first time, teachers or advanced scholars might be aghast by all this book leaves out. The African American literary tradition is vast. There are significant African American authors, individual works, and even movements that are not represented in this study in the interest of brevity. Also, any literary history is more a narrative than an encyclopedia. In constructing this narrative, I have had to cope with questions of not only what to include and what to leave out, but also what to emphasize. Some literary historians try to avoid distinguishing between authors who are important (or “major”) from those whose works have traditionally been marginal or ancillary to the mainstream of the tradition. Insofar as it is possible, I have tried to sidestep the fallout from the so-called “canon wars” of the late twentieth century, when scholars bickered over the politics behind critics’ and educators’ decisions about which works constitute “required reading” for students. These debates (still ongoing) are important, as they encourage scholars and students to examine the reasons why some works have been considered “great” while others have been forgotten, but for the purpose of this book, without sounding too naïve, I have merely tried to include at least a glimpse of the works of African American literature that are required reading, or once were, or should be for a variety of reasons. My hope is that this volume will inspire its readers to read every work and author it references, then go on to discover those many other worthy works and authors I couldn’t include. The “Suggestions for Further Reading” at the end of each chapter are good starting points for anyone wanting to deepen their appreciation and understanding of the field.

Historical and Literary Overview

Since it is organized chronologically, this book progresses against the background of history. African American history begins with the importation of African slaves by European colonizers into the “New World” beginning in the seventeenth century. The story continues through the abolition of slavery into an unstable period toward the end of the nineteenth century when black Americans no longer had slave status, yet faced abhorrent discrimination (some of it legally sanctioned, through the practice of segregation and Jim Crow laws, some of it deeply felt through social ostracism, discrimination in the workplace, and hate speech). The early twentieth century saw the Great Migration of more than a million African Americans from the agrarian South to cities in the industrial North. Following the two world wars, black Americans concentrated on attaining what came to be known as civil rights, and the passage of anti-segregation legislation in 1954 and voting rights legislation in the mid-1960s were steps in the direction of long overdue racial equality. Still, there was considerable turbulence in the 1960s as is evident in the assassinations of prominent black leaders Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as race riots in many major cities.

The 1970s and 1980s saw less violent and less urgent demonstrations arising from the desire for harmony, yet despite the prominence of high-profile black politicians (such as National Security Advisor Colin Powell, who later became Secretary of State) and presidential candidates (Shirley Chisholm in 1972 and Jesse Jackson in 1984), the main focus during those decades in the popular imagination was on the alarming rise of black-on-black homicide, the rise of gang culture, and an unprecedented spike in the rate of incarceration of black people. The 1992 Los Angeles riots following the acquittal of police officers accused of beating a black motorist named Rodney King indicated that a great deal of racial animosity remained just below the surface of American life.

The election of Barack Obama as America’s first black president in 2009 indicates a level of racial cooperation unimaginable even a half-century earlier, and the extraordinary success and media exposure of certain black figures – from Oprah Winfrey and Jay-Z at the popular end of the spectrum to bell hooks and Cornel West at the academic end – reinforces the widespread perception that the worst horrors of racism are largely behind us. Yet many Americans remain skeptical that these success stories tell the whole tale, especially as gaps continue to widen between whites and blacks in terms of income, education, and rates of incarceration. In recent years, demonstrations and sometimes violence over incidents involving the deaths of black citizens at the hands of white police officers and rogue racists bearing arms have stirred up dormant racial unrest.

Against the background of that brief history, one might describe African American literary history as follows. Most of the earliest works of African American literature were slave narratives: non-fiction works by slaves about the slave experience. As the genre evolved in the early nineteenth century, virtually all of these narratives shared a few common features: they were framed by the testimonies of white authors about the veracity and character of the author; they were overtly committed to the cause of abolition and often spoke directly to their intended audiences who were presumed to be sympathetic whites; and they did not end at the moment of the slave’s escape, but went beyond to tell how the free ex-slave discovered commitment and purpose in the North, generally in the service of the abolitionist cause. In short, these works, though powerful and inspirational, are somewhat formulaic. While fighting for their literal freedom, the earliest African American writers were hampered by a lack of creative freedom. Toward the end of the era of slavery, black writers started to branch out into imaginative forms of literature (fiction, poetry, and a smattering of drama), and by the end of the nineteenth century, there were a handful of black writers who made a living from writing.

Still, in most critics’ estimations, African American literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not produce the finest or most fully realized works of the tradition, even if it produced some important foundational ones. The horrors of slavery and the traumatic aftershocks of segregation, lynching, and general widespread discrimination in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (including limited publication opportunities) continued to inhibit the black literary imagination. Black writers arrived at a new level of artistic freedom in the early decades of the twentieth century, especially in the 1920s when the Harlem Renaissance marked an outpouring of creative expression and a flourishing of artistic spirit that had not occurred earlier. As the epigraph to this chapter by Langston Hughes (the central figure of the Renaissance) makes clear, it was a time of tremendous positive energy, and the sheer number of enduring novels, poems, plays, and works of non-fiction by African Americans from the 1920s is astounding. The diversity and depth of these works is even more important than their number, and the achievements of this period laid the groundwork for many works that came after.

This is not to say that the works of the Harlem Renaissance were uniformly optimistic, nor that the optimism was deeply felt. There remained serious issues of racial inequality during the 1920s (legal segregation and voting disenfranchisement being the most obvious), as well as nagging self-doubt or even racial self-loathing. Black writers in the decades which followed explored some of the contradictions, discontentment, and rage that might have been buried below the surface of some Renaissance works. Richard Wright in the 1930s and 1940s expressed that rage in no uncertain terms, and his works, along with those of Ralph Ellison, Ann Petry, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, and Lorraine Hansberry, made the 1940s and 1950s a time of intense literary examination of the psychology as well as the sociology of black life in America.

As riots erupted on the streets in 1960s America, there was also a riot going on in the literary world. The Black Arts Movement, led by Larry Neal, Amiri Baraka, Addison Gayle, Jr., Sonia Sanchez, and Askia Touré, sought to settle once and for all what black literature should be, and what it should do. The architects of this movement had little patience for literature that did not catalyze social change, or did not seek to alter the consciousness of its readers who were, for the most part, assumed to be black. Black Arts Movement authors built on the assassination of the Nation of Islam leader Malcolm X to infuse their works with a new mandate for radical change, and their impassioned writings were difficult to ignore. At the same time, their cries for solidarity carried with them a tendency to reinforce traditional gender roles, which pushed aside the voices of some women. Those voices, inspired not only by the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s but by the feminist movement flourishing at the same time, began to be heard in the 1970s and 1980s in a major way. African American literature in those decades was dominated for the first time by female voices, culminating in Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved (1987), the publication of which contributed heavily to her glorious achievement as the first African American recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.

Morrison and her contemporaries demonstrated finally that black writers had burst through the barriers that had once held them back in terms of widespread acknowledgement of their contributions. These writers turned their attention largely to history, which became an enduring topic for black writers of the late twentieth century. Revising and revisiting history has remained a prominent subject in African American literature, but it is not necessarily the central subject in recent writing. In fact, there is little consensus about what the central subject of contemporary black literature is, or whether there is a central subject. The direction of this tradition in the twenty-first century involves a dispersal of subject matter, and also of style. The radical experimentalism of the Black Arts Movement, with its emphasis on black vernacular traditions such as the blues, has given way to an array of styles and subjects so diverse that the authors of contemporary African American literature do not necessarily seem to form a coherent group. Black literature may no longer be “about” any one thing, including, even, a generic umbrella category like “black identity.” Depending upon one’s perspective, this development can be seen as a triumph (because black artists are no longer obligated to write about racial themes exclusively) or as a failure (because black artists might feel less compelled to work collectively to improve the circumstances of their race).

The historical and literary–historical scope of the African American literary tradition is covered in greater detail over the next seven chapters. These chapters provide a narrative timeline of some of the key movements and shifts that students of African American literature should know about as they encounter any work from the tradition, no matter where they enter. But the pleasure of learning about this tradition lies in the rich motifs and themes that occur along the timeline, the issues that continually arise for critics, the ongoing debates that will never be resolved, and the themes that emerge through all of these points of productive tension. What follows are some of these points that are likely to occur and recur throughout any sustained engagement with African American literature.

What Makes Black Literature “Black”?

It is easy enough in the abstract to say that everything written by black Americans constitutes African American literature, but literary traditions are not simply collections of all available texts. The epigraph to this chapter by Hughes acknowledges a difference between literature by black Americans and white Americans circa 1926. An assumption was firmly in place at that time: black writers wrote about black experiences, black themes, black history, etc. James Baldwin raised eyebrows in 1956 when he published his second novel, Giovanni’s Room, in which virtually all of the characters were white. (The novel’s treatment of homosexuality was admittedly part of its ability to shock, and Baldwin deliberately wrote about white characters so that the novel didn’t get muddled with multiple “issues”). A decade later, the white novelist William Styron – a friend of Baldwin’s – met with strong resistance from black readers, writers, and critics for daring to write from the slave’s perspective in his novel The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967). This resistance is born of a long history of white authors’ stereotyping and/or ignorance of the realities of the African American experience: see Sterling Brown’s 1933 essay “Negro Characters as Seen By White Authors” or Toni Morrison’s 1992 study Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the American Literary Imagination. As Carolyn F. Gerald wrote in 1969, “we must reject white attempts at portraying black reality….They are valid only in terms of the white man’s projection of himself. They have no place in the definition of blackness, for they reveal the white writer’s attempt to work through his own cultural guilt, fascination with blackness, or sense of spiritual emptiness” (133). Clearly many readers throughout history have expected black and white writers to stay on their side of the color line. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgement
• 1. Introduction and Overview: The Stories of African American Literature
• 2. The Era of Slavery
• 3. Reconstruction through the 1910s
• 4. The Era of the Harlem Renaissance
• 5. Mid-Twentieth-Century Literature
• 6. The 1960s and the Black Arts Movement
• 7. 1970–2000: The Flourishing of Black Women Writers and the Return to Black History
• 8. Twenty-First-Century Writing: A Time of Reckoning
• References
• Index