African
American Literature and Southern Tradition
Interview
with Professor Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
Introduction:
Jerry W. Ward, Jr., Professor of English at Dillard University (U.S.A.),
is a literary critic, poet, essayist, and Richard Wright scholar. His special
interests include literary theory and criticism, oral history, African American
literature, and aesthetics. He compiled and edited Trouble the Water: 250 Years of African American Poetry (1997). He
has co-edited Redefining American Literary History (1990), Black Southern
Voices (1992), The Richard Wright Encyclopedia (2008), and The Cambridge
History of African American Literature (2011). His book THE KATRINA PAPERS: A
Journal of Trauma and Recovery (2008) has received critical acclaim for its
unique perspectives on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, August 29, 2005. His
works-in-progress include Reading Race Reading America: Literary and Social
Essays and Richard Wright: One Reader’s Responses. This interview was conducted
by email over several months in 2010. In this interview, Ward comments on
several of his 2010 lectures for Chinese universities and makes speculations about the current research on and trends in
the development of African American literature.
Jiang: Just now you
talked about the African American Literature’s response to the modernity, and
you also said the “black responses are different in degree and kind from
typical American responses”? Can you give us some examples?
Ward：My saying that African American responses to modernity
were different in
degree and kind is predicated on the belief that the change we call “modernity”
is not a unity but a rather diverse confluence of attitudes. Imagine two trains moving on parallel tracks.
Both are headed toward a destination named MODERNITY, but the trains are moving
in opposite directions. Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes are on Train A.
T. S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway are riding on train B. While Hurston’s
fictions and Hughes’ poetry were radically different in style from the works of
African American writers of the late nineteenth century and early years of the
twentieth century, Hurston and Hughes did not seek to renounce values and
traditions that evolved among enslaved black people. On the other hand, Eliot’s
poetry is a rejection of the democratic poetics of Walt Whitman. Hemingway’s
unadorned prose in fiction turns its back on the nuanced examples of William
Dean Howells and the vernacular humor of Mark Twain. These four American
writers are making literature new, modern. Nevertheless, Hurston and Hughes
infuse their works with folklore and folk talk, blues and jazz to maintain
intimacy with their ethnic group; the notion of intimacy is remote in the
thinking of Eliot and Hemingway, and it is immediately clear that neither of
these men understood the importance of his American ethnicity. Ann Douglas
provides an enlightening perspective on American modernity in Terrible
Honesty (New York: Noonday, 1995): “Hurston, Hughes, and many other black
artists of the 1920s built their art on the extended kinship configurations of
African-American religious and social life as surely as leaders of white
literary modernism like Eliot and Hemingway built theirs on the nuclear model
of Northeastern theological and social expression”(96). Douglas helps us to
understand that the objectives in being modern were vastly different for blacks
and for whites.
Jiang: In your
lecture “Recent African American Studies”，you have talked about literary globalization, what do you think
of it? From the African American perspective, what does the literary globalization mean? From a global
perspective, what is the African American literature? You are specialized in
Richard Wright, therefore, if it is possible, can you take Richard Wright and
his works as an example to discuss the problem of globalization?
Ward: From an
African American perspective, literary globalization might pertain to efforts
to discover connections among writers of African-descent throughout the world.
If we had a genuine global perspective, African American literature would
probably be viewed as a unique, catalytic feature of what we think American
literature is. In his later works, especially his non-fiction travel writings,
Richard Wright tried to express the importance of global thinking and critical
analysis of transnational dynamics during the Cold War period in world history.
Black Power (1954), for example, represents Wright’s profound inquiries
about a dying colonialism and struggles for independence from British rule in
the Gold Coast (now the nation of Ghana). Yet, the book is instructive about the
misunderstandings and misreadings that occur when outsiders think they have
something to say to the insiders of cultures remarkably different from the
culture or society the outsider is most familiar with. [e1] Wright
subtitled his book “A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos,” which was a
strong signal about his attitudes towards African peoples.[e2]
He wanted them to be Western. Likewise, some proponents of globalization urge
us to minimize the importance of cultural histories or national boundaries;
they wish for us to become dreamy idealists like themselves. Their posturing is
akin to Wright’s in 1954 and slightly dangerous. The possibility of
globalization is the central idea in The Color Curtain: A Report on the
Bandung Conference (1956), but what I find most striking about that book is
Wright’s uncanny prediction that religious fanaticism might lead to the forms
of terrorism that plague us today. Two of the four essays Wright chose to
include in White Man, Listen! (1957), “The Psychological Reactions of
Oppressed People” and “Tradition and Industrialization,” deal with topics that
are still relevant in discussions of globalization. Thus, without making
unwarranted claims about Wright and globalization, I suggest that some of his
disconcerting questions are good models for our contemporary research and
analyses about world affairs.
Jiang: What are the trends and
characteristics of the African-American authors’ creation? What are the trends
and characteristics of the study on the African American literature?
Ward: The first question can be
answered adequately if and only if a person has done a great amount of work in
the sociology of contemporary African American literature. I have not yet done
such work and can only speculate about trends and
characteristics. It is fair to assume that African American writers will
continue to deal with the primal themes that have been of interest to people
throughout recorded history. Perhaps the writers will decide to write less
about slavery and more about the tragic aspects of alienation as James Cherry
has done in Shadow of Light (2007) or
the bittersweet humor of alienation as we find it represented in Platitudes (1988) by Trey Ellis. Just as
Richard Wright and Ann Petry sought to expose some of the dreadful problems of
living in cities, we might anticipate more works that engage urban issues with
the relentlessness of Sapphire’s PUSH (1996)
and Carl Hancock Rux’s Asphalt (2004).Your
second question requires more reading and assessment than I find time to do as
I try to balance many projects. There is a very partial answer in my earlier
remarks about recent African American studies. We should also consider how
probable it is that we shall have more studies of how the electronic revolution
affects the reading and interpretation of old and new texts. And there will be
new examinations of tradition. I have begun to think about how very necessary
it is to reexamine the evolution of African American literature under the
influence of historical circumstances and of how ideas about literary evolution
may be related to ideas about regional literature. Thus, I share with you the
first stage of my work in progress on that subject matter.
Jiang: You said you
have co-edited the book of The Cambridge
History of African American
Literature (2011) in your introduction. Does it have some new ideas
different from other’s history of African American Literature? Please introduce
it for us.
Ward: Yes, The Cambridge
History of African American Literature contains many new ideas.
Perhaps the best
introduction is a paragraph that Maryemma Graham and I wrote in our 2004
prospectus for the book, the proposal we sent to Cambridge University Press.
The Cambridge History of African American Literature (CHAAL) has a goal
that may seem radical within the tradition of writing literary histories.
Beyond presenting a fairly complete chronological description of African
American literature in the United States (1600 to 2005), this reference work
seeks to illustrate how the literature comprises orature (oral literature) and
printed texts simultaneously. The reason is not far to seek. As Henry Louis
Gates, Jr. demonstrated in The Signifying Monkey, performance is one of
the distinguishing features of African American literature. The role of
utterance or speech is not necessarily secondary to the role of writing or
inscription. They are interlocked frequencies of a single formal phenomenon.
Increasingly, literary historians are beginning to recognize that writers are
not the sole shapers of literature, that people who are not usually deemed
citizens in the republic of letters must not be ignored in the interweavings of
literature, imagination, and literacy. Thus, we must give attention to the
roles of publishers, editors, academic circles, and mass media reviewers in
shaping textual forms, literary reputations and literary tastes. This project
is a part of that emerging recognition. We do contend that a literary history of
African American verbal expressions will make a stronger contribution to
knowledge about literary production and reception if it exploits insights from
Stephen Henderson’s theorizing in Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black
Speech and Black Music as Poetic References and from Elizabeth
McHenry’s claim that “to recover more fully the history of African American
cultural production…we must be open to replacing our notion of a singular black
literary tradition by attending to the many, diverse elements that form the
groundwork of any tradition.”
Jiang: What do you think of the future
of the African American literature?
Ward: The future of African American
literature will be strongly influenced by how it adapts new technologies and
complex mixed genres, modes, or forms to address human concerns. That future
will be partially determined by the rapid changes in the literary marketplace
and by the desires of consumers (emerging readers) and by the work that
scholars are willing to do by way of using interdisciplinary methodologies to
critique new kinds of literature. The future of African American literature and
all literature is quite subject to the conditions that will obtain in the new
global order of things that we have already begun to inhabit.
BLACK WRITERS ARE THE SOUTHERN TRADITION
In Cane (1923), Jean Toomer’s response to 20th century
modernism’s tendency to be skeptical about the past, one poem that distills the
project of Toomer’s collage and might inform artist, historical, and social
consciousness about a sped-up future is “Song of the Son.” The speaker’s apostrophe to land, soil, and
the dead is poignant, Romantic in a Wordworthian sense of moments to be
recollected, and flush with yearning. The third, fourth, and fifth stanzas are
germane to my concerns about the architects of Southern tradition.
In time,
for though the sun is setting on
A
song-lit race of slaves, it has not set;
Tough
lat, O soil, it is not too late yet
To catch
they plaintive soul, leaving, soon gone,
Leaving,
to catch thy plaintive soul soon gone.
O Negro
slaves, dark purple ripened plums,
Squeezed,
and bursting in the pine-wood air,
Passing,
before they stripped the old tree bare
One plum
was saved for me, one seed becomes
An
everlasting song, a singing tree,
Caroling
softly souls of slavery,
What
they were, and what they are to me,
Caroling
softly souls of slavery.
Toomer’s poem is akin to such
collective academic enterprises as that of the Project on the History of Black
Writing (University of Kansas), whose mission is the recovery and documentation
of “lost” or forgotten texts. The speaker in the poem wants to recover ethos
and performance. The mission of poem and PHBW is to save for memory the songs
about the song, the fruit, the plum and the seed. Toomer’s individual artistic
effort to defy the obliterating effects of change ought, in my humble opinion,
to be taken up again, not as poem or fiction or drama, but as humanistic essays
that speak to consciousness of who we Southern Americans are and who we are
becoming. In this sense, “Black Writers Are the Southern Tradition” is an essay
not an academic paper.
The essay emerges from a larger project
entitled Reading Race Reading America:
Literary and Social Essays. My
project has been much delayed, because it is not easy to redeem with many
implications and to confirm the overwhelming power, pervasiveness in America,
and permanence of race as currency in the economy of American democracy. Of
course, truth –telling and lying exist in all regions of our nation, but in the
South truth and lies seem to be more magnified, more mythologized, than
elsewhere. Thus, my remarks are provocative and biased by choice as well as
default.
I anchor my provocation in an edgy
hypothesis: Were race and slavery not the germinating soul of Southern thought
(and the burden for many early Black writers to bear), there would not be a
Southern tradition as we know it. Nor would there a
need to endlessly justify a region so obviously postlapsarian. I am proposing,
of course, that the historical formation of Southern region and tradition is
grounded in notions of privilege, skin privilege, compromised notions of
freedom and justice, traffic in human beings as tools of production, the
cultivation of hatreds of all colors, the oddities of class, aristocratic
fictions, and patronizing attitudes. Present in the mix of historical formation
are counter-discourses from the unempowered, the writers who inscribed
alternative forms of power and made it clear that being named “slave” was an
act of language rather than a confirmation of essence and being-in-this-world.
Or, to bring
language matters to the present day, it is a relief to hear Phyllis Alesia
Perry, author of the novels Stigmata
(1998) and A Sunday in June (2004),
say in response to a question involving Alice Walker’s admonition that black
writers must give voice to centuries of “silent bitterness and hate, but also
of neighborly kindness and sustaining love” -----
I think that’s true. And it’s an
on-going challenge for a black native Southern person like myself to take in
all the wonderful things about being a Southerner, because I wouldn’t choose to
be anything else. But I also live with the legacy of what that culture thinks
of me, says about me, has treated me, my family and my ancestors. And partly because
of the struggle that we’ve had here in the South as African American people, I
feel as if we’ve bought our birth right to be Southerners. We have a right to
say whoever we want to say we are. I do think of myself as a Southern writer.
What else would I be? (636)
[Duboin, Corinne. “Confronting
the Specters of the Past, Writing the Legacy of Pain: An Interview with Phyllis
Alesia Perry.” The Southern Quarterly 62.3-4 (2009): 633-653.
Although certain racial and color
frames of reference pre-date the founding of the American colonies and a
vigorous Atlantic slave trade, these frames are prominent in the writing of our
nation’s founding documents and lend much credibility to Charles Mills’
extended critique of American social contract theory, The Racial Contract (Cornell UP, 1997). Obviously, specialized
studies of the writing of founding documents reveal how instrumental white
Southern delegates were in shaping final
drafts. Two very brief, eloquent historical meditations on founding give more
support to my radical speculations. Gary B.
Nash’s The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution
(Harvard UP, 2006) focuses mainly on how Northern blacks participated in
forming ideas regarding citizenship, equality of opportunity during the Revolution
and in the early years of the Republic. And Nash reminds us that the black
Southern writer David Walker alarmed the nation and particularly the South with
his 1829 Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, where his use of the word
“citizens” exposes the maximum hypocrisy of the word “citizen” in the U. S.
Constitution. David Waldstreicher’s very principled examination of writing and
reasoning in Slavery’s Constitution: From
Revolution to Ratification (Hill and Wang, 2009) leads to a rather stunning
conclusion about Southern tradition and why nothing in the original U. S.
Constitution “could be disentangled from slavery” .(157) Waldstreicher
discusses how the writers of the Confederate Constitution used the excuse that
slavery was God’s will (just as Black writers counter-argued in essays,
abolition speeches, and narrative of enslavement that white Christians were in
violation of God’s will), in order to “mimick the Constitution of 1787….To
compromise once again in 1861, either side would have had to give up not just
slavery, or antislavery, but also its constitution: its written political
order. In this sense, slavery did not itself cause the Civil War: Slavery’s
Constitution did” (157). Waldstreicer’s final sentence is weak as explanation
but effective as wake-up call!
A different assertion that drives
me to provoke is one Fred Hobson made in Tell
About the South: The Southern Rage to
Explain (LSU Press, 1983). Agreeing with C. Vann Woodward that “there is no
one more quintessentially Southern than the Southern Negro” and claiming
Southern blacks are most entitled to a rage to explain, Hobson denies the
entitlement to Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison on the thin ground that
treatment of their rage must be “a book in itself” (12-13). With faint praise, he
excludes black rage from the telling. Imagine my making a study of Southern
autobiography and say I omit Eudora Welty and Willie Morris because their
autobiographies can only be done justice in a book!
A full exposition of the black
writer as the Southern tradition necessitates point-counter-point among John
Smith, William Byrd, John Pendleton Kennedy, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin
Banneker; George Moses Horton and Henry Timrod; Harriet Jacobs, Mary Boykin
Chestnut, Kate Chopin, Lillian Smith and Anna Julia Cooper: Booker T.
Washington, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston; Allen Tate and Sterling
Brown; James Agee and Richard Wright; Margaret Walker and Margaret Mitchell;
Ellen Douglas, Dorothy Allison, and Alice Walker. It demands explanation of the
exclusive representation of black writers in Black Southern Voices (1992) to expose the Southern component of a
broader African American literary tradition; it demands inquiry about exclusion
itself, the absence of black voices in early anthologies of Southern literature
and the presence of some of those voices in The
Literature of the American South
(1998), a Norton anthology that strives for balance; it demands a fuller
examination of motives for representation from either side of the black/white
binary. Perhaps the topic does demand a book, but I am content to let someone
with a longer life expectancy than I have do that work. I want to limit myself
to the essay and to the limits of racial reading to be enlightened about
Southerness and Americaness. It is a good choice, I think, for African American
critics to comment on their stewardship of one plum and one seed. Otherwise, we
shall constantly delay saying how the Southern components of African American
traditions of writing are transmissions of profound love and profound hatred.
Jiang: Do you have an idea about study
of the African American Literature in China? Can you give some suggestions to
Chinese academics circles about the future of the African American Literature
study?
Ward: I
can speak only about academic circles in Wuhan, Nanjing, and Beijing, the
places where I have had rich and rewarding exchanges with my Chinese colleagues
and their students. I find that in these circles, the efforts to expand
knowledge about the entire historical range of African American literature and
culture is very disciplined and very serious. Indeed, I will be bold enough to
say that there is honesty in these efforts that I do not often find in my own
country. The special cultural idioms and nuances of the language used by some
African American writers do present a major challenge to Chinese readers who
have learned either Standard American English or British English. The effort to
understand requires patience and hard work, especially if the Chinese reader is
dealing with eighteenth and nineteenth century African American writing. And it
may not be much easier to read twentieth and twenty-first century works that
exploit certain African American uses of language. Even native speakers of
English may have difficulty with slang, regional variations in dialect, and the
more extreme forms of signifying. In the latter instance, one needs to be
guided by the explanations of such a linguist as Geneva Smitherman or such a
critic as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. I do urge my Chinese colleagues, however, to
give more attention to works by such early African American writers as David
Walker, William Wells Brown, Fredrick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper,
Sutton Griggs, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Pauline Hopkins, and Charles Chesnutt. I
do not know how thoroughly slave narratives have been studied in China, but
they too deserve much attention. They are foundation texts for African American
autobiographies and for works of fiction that try to render what we might call
“subcutaneous” examinations of enslavement and oppression. For the sake of
understanding change and continuity in the writings of African Americans, it is
crucial to ask whether earlier works do indeed inform the choices made by
contemporary writers. These are only a few of the many challenges Chinese
scholars have in their study of African American literature. I am willing to
help them, in such modest ways as I can, with this massive, long-term
enterprise. I believe very strongly that Chinese scholars will make noteworthy
contributions to the study of African American literature by combining Chinese
perspectives with Houston A. Baker, Jr.’s impressive discussions in Blues,
Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (1984), with the
forms of inquiry made possible by eco-criticism, and with John Ernest’s very
useful suggestions in Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American Literary
History (2009). I want to make it very clear that I do not advocate the
dismissal of European and Euro-American critical stances (particularly the
wonderful insights about language in Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination (1981). What I
do recommend is that Chinese academic circles be forums where the arrogant
hegemony and imperialism of those stances are displaced by progressive,
liberating ways of knowing and seeing. And I do hope that my Chinese colleagues
will be receptive of my commitment to assist them with such work.
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