Amoebic Motion in Literature and Culture
Imagine that you have the good
fortune of getting a job interview at the MLA Convention for a position as “Assistant
Professor of African American and Diaspora Literature.” You feel secure. You defended your dissertation on “Signifying
and the Blues in the Detective Novels of Chester Himes” with honors. You have
read Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Gayatri Spivak, John Cullen Gruesser , and most
of Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism. You are prepared to talk about postcolonial
theory and the Diaspora. One member of
the interview team asks how you would incorporate issues about Sinterklass and
Zwarte Pieten in your teaching of African American literature. Sinterklass? Zwarte Pieten?
You are as paralyzed as a deer staring into headlights. Crestfallen, you leave the interview, knowing
you will not get this job. No one told
you the Diaspora the search committee had in mind pertained to northern Europe. No one warned you about how different African
American literature is from other ethnic-based literatures within the
deliberately ignored arena of American literature’s postcoloniality.
This hypothetical scenario is
instructive. Many people who decide the
fates of emerging scholars have given
inadequate attention to undergraduate and graduate education; to teaching as teaching (holistic pedagogy); to
the uncertain job market in our nation, and the impact of global political and
economic changes upon the shaping of higher education, especially as it
pertains to African American literature and culture. In advertising the position, the institution presumed
that “Diaspora” had an Alice-in-Wonderland definition. No one asked what
version of expertise in the Diaspora was most desired. Diaspora in
Canada, Mexico, Central and Latin America
(including Portuguese Brazil)? Diaspora
in the Caribbean (Anglophone, Francophone,
Spanish, and Dutch)? Diaspora in the UK and Europe (especially Germany, Italy,
the Netherlands, and Scandinavia)? Diaspora means differently. This fact
was not considered. Like the code term “people of color,” it means whatever people
of no color in a position to hire scholars want it to mean at any given moment.
A candidate
applying for the position needed to know if her chances of being hired are
greater if she had knowledge about Edwidge Danticat, Jamaica Kincaid, Erna
Brodber, and Derek Walcott but knew zero about Allen Polite, Ronald L. Fair,
and Ollie Harrington. Would her chances have been diminished by having to admit
she had never read any works by Paule Marshall and Audre Lorde? The institution is guilty of having become
specific at the eleventh hour. The
candidate was disadvantaged by not having asked the right questions before
applying, by simply assuming it does not matter to be specific. It is our
failure to be aggressive enough and loud enough about what ultimately counts in
the study of African American (United States) literature that has allowed the
swamp of misunderstanding to thrive. It
is a matter of common sense and scholarly responsibility to acknowledge that
literature by a few people in various African-derived Diasporas has influenced
literature by a few African American writers, and that was done in The
Cambridge History of African American Literature. But what obtains
in literature is not identical with what is happening in music, visual and
plastic arts, and film, or in culture-bound Diasporas.
There is a
conversation-in-progress among a small number of African American literary scholars
and critics about a future for the study of black writing, a conversation that
has little to do with responsorial rituals in the wake of Kenneth Warren’s What Was African American Literature? The conversation is grounded in certain hard
facts about the conduct of everyday life in the United States. Within the dynamics of the concrete, it is
suspected the field of African American literature is not growing or is not
seen as a “growth area” because too little has been articulated about its
foundational status for studies of hip hop phenomena, popular culture and the
public sphere in the anthropological sense, law and critical race theory, physical and mental health policies, print
cultures and the totalitarian politics of publishing in American history,
digital humanities, and Afro-futurism. It is suspected, too, that more students are
attracted to what I might call the more visible “life-connections” offered by
African American Studies or American Studies. It must be admitted that methods
and methodologies in disciplines called “Studies” seem to be more efficient for
the examination of “cultures ,” more adaptable in uncertain job markets than
are the methodologies traditionally associated with the humanities.
We have no proof that what we suspect is
true. Proof must be constructed by way
of a rigorous quantitative study of literature’s status in American higher
education in general and the changing status of teaching African American literature in particular, let
us say from 1999 to 2012.
If literary
theorists, scholars, and critics do not make bold efforts to connect African
American literature with contemporary life issues, if we do not transgress our
precious “theories” and destroy traditional
prisons of category, the study of our
literature might continue to move toward
endless amoebic motion.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. November 26,
2013
