JEAL Introduction
AFRICAN AMERICAN TRADITION AND THE IDEA OF A CANON
It is gradually becoming obvious in the early years of the 21st century that inquiry about traditions and their components can make little progress if scholarship and criticism cling to “traditional” methods, if thinkers do not test how interdisciplinary work might yield richer albeit contestable explanations. The vexed category of literature, particularly literature marked as ethnic, must be explored in the domain of the humanities by using methodologies (tools) and forms of thought most often associated with social sciences and natural sciences. Greater understanding of how and why literary traditions evolve does depend upon inspection of discrete acts of writing (texts) and of the social implications of their emerging on the grounds of history. Canons are important in representing the shapes of traditions, but the academic world has no charter or sacred rights to control how canons get reshaped and who is included or excluded.
In the concluding pages of Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History (UNC Press, 2009), John Ernest makes cogent remarks on the representative functions of a canon and on the contingent nature of such representation. He echoes what Henry Louis Gates proposed in Loose Canons (1992), namely that a canon is an opportunity and a strategy for representing the lives and the implicit values of a people’s lived experiences, “the lessons learned along the way, the wisdom forged through intimate examinations of the terms of the world’s always-delimited possibilities” ( Ernest 254). The logic of the proposal may persuade us that an anthology of African American literature does point “to a broader field of writing still unrecovered or relatively unread, the field that the anthology is asked to represent but cannot contain” (254). Neither of the two most widely taught African American anthologies – Call and Response (Houghton Mifflin , 1998) and The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 2nd ed ( Norton, 2004) – can contain what representation of uncanonized writing in a tradition might demand. What they do represent well are overlapping selections, the basis for paratextual apparatuses which bespeak divergent ways of valuing writing among members of an ethnic group.
Ernest ends Chaotic Justice with concerns that were starting points for issuing a call for the kinds of article that appear in the inaugural issue of the Journal of Ethnic American Literature. The call asked for submissions that would focus on writers who are infrequently discussed in our scholarly journals, because academic criticism profits from seeking greater balance between commentary on “overexposed” writers and critiques of writers who have been relegated to margins of dark shadows. As Maryemma Graham and I noted in the introduction for The Cambridge History of African American Literature:
Attention to forms of black writing that have special efferent and aesthetic properties ----namely, letters, personal and political essays, biographies, “pure” and collaborative autobiographies, film as literature, the graphic narratives of an Aaron McGruder, and contemporary orature ---is either diffuse or invisible (16).
Implicit in the call was a plea to make visible more authors who and works that are in the tradition and, thereby, echo John Ernest’s judicious ideas about applying chaos theory and fractal geometry to deepen debates about race, literacy, writing, and tradition.
The eight articles and two interviews in this special issue suggest directions that might be taken in ongoing discussions of ethnic American literatures. Keenan Norris deals with Chester Himes as a prototypical figure in accounting for the changing role of the literary marketplace in the production of African American generic variation. Catherine Michna provides one model of how archival research can be used to address the historical interrelationship among writers, aesthetic choices, and lived performances in a specific urban environment. Howard Rambsy’s assessment of Eugene B. Redmond as a cultural witness bids us to reconsider the hegemony of the visual in our own witnessing of literary performances. Veronica Watson’s reading of Yerby’s The Foxes of Harrow proposes that “the literature of white estrangement” demythologizes the ongoing making of “Whiteness” in American literature. Sheila Smith McKoy’s discussion of “the nuanced relationship of ontology and temporality in the hyphenated descent cultures that Toni Cade Bambara presents in The Salt Eaters” addresses a need to increase knowledge about philosophy and science in critical thinking about what is indeed represented in African American writing. Likewise, C. Liegh McInnis’s analysis of Reginald Martin’s fiction and poetry addresses a need to ponder the validity of W. E. B. DuBois’s dictum regarding art and propaganda in our tradition of writing. Toru Kiuchi’s reflections on how Lenard D. Moore uses the discipline of haiku reawaken curiosity about why some African American poets have deep investments in Americanizing forms that originate in other cultures. Preselfannie McDaniels uses three rhetorical windows to provide views of motives in C. Liegh McInnis’s writing of poetry. Randall Horton’s interview with Honorée Fanonne Jeffers and Reginald Martin’s ensemble interview with Arthur Flowers are valuable instruments for conducting sustained explorations of existing and forthcoming works by Jeffers and Flowers.
I am grateful to the contributors for creating articles and interviews which enable us to rethink how we shall or ought to confront the forms of things as yet not sufficiently known.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr., Guest Editor
WORKS CITED
Ernest, John. Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
Graham, Maryemma and Jerry W. Ward, Jr., eds. The Cambridge History of African American
Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
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