I. Access
http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured_document/emanicpation_proclamation
II. Read
1) Manuscript of the Emancipation Proclamation
2) The Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation of 1862
3) John Hope Franklin's essay "The Emancipation Proclamation: An Act of Justice," which contains this noteworthy sentence: "The law itself is no longer an obstruction to justice and equality, but it is the people who live under the law who are themselves an obstruction to justice." Franklin also incorporates James Weldon Johnson's "Fifty Years" (New York Times, January 1, 1913) in his essay.
III. Remember
Forms of slavery and enslavement still exist on this planet.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
December 26, 2012
Kwanzaa Day One
Wednesday, December 26, 2012
Sunday, December 23, 2012
Rereading Henry Van Dyke
Rereading Henry Van Dyke (3 October 1928--22 December 2011): The
Pleasure of the Text
Often you can derive pleasure from rereading a novel by an
author whose contribution to African American literary tradition is not a hot
critical topic. For example, Henry Van Dyke’s Ladies of the Rachmaninoff
Eyes (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1965) provokes laughter, the robust folk
laughter of recognizing how rich and educational African American idioms can
be. On the surface, Van Dyke’s novel is
a relatively slight Bildungsroman, the narrative of a young man’s learning that
“when a peacock’s days are over, they’re over.” But the matter under the
surface demands a reckoning.
Van Dkye is a fine storyteller. Through the voice of Oliver Eugene, a naïve but
reliable narrator, you hear about the melodramatic antics of Mrs. Harriet
Giles, the Negro housekeeper, who is the narrator’s Aunt Harry and Mrs. Etta
Klein, a wealthy Jewish widow who is overly fond of rum and who is as self-deceptive
as the mother in Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly,
Last Summer. Forty-seven years ago
when the novel was published, you might not have noticed the gendered imbalance
of the name “Aunt Harry.” In 2012, you
notice the name is metonymic, a shorthand for all the structural imbalances in
the tragicomedy of Van Dyke’s first novel.
Etta Klein and Aunt Harry are one of the more remarkable odd couples in
twentieth-century American literature, and the moral lessons implicit in their
dealings and dalliance with the con-artist Maurice LeFleur are precious. Precious is a sufficient description of the
novel’s sexual identity. Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes promotes
a humor unto life rather than a sickness unto death.
As a novelist writing in the homophobic spaces provided by
the integrationist discourses of the early 1960s, Van Dyke digested the
practicality of Langston Hughes’ remark that if a Negro writer stepped outside
of himself, he would see “how human, yet how beautiful and black [he is]. How very black –even when you’re integrated.”
The narrator deconstructs the hyper-pretense of American
English by stepping outside just enough to expose the prohibitions and
dispensations in the psychology of Black American English. Van Dyke was a master chef in using racial
flavors. He was signifying twelve years
before Geneva Smitherman dealt seriously with the linguistic dimensions of
black modes of speech and twenty-three years before Gates discovered the
signifying monkey was a literary critic. Only Zora Neale Hurston could beat Van
Dyke to the punch. His technical mastery
of storytelling and language is matched only by the mastery of Al Young, Eudora
Welty and Toni Cade Bambara.
Bright laughter is dominant during and after rereading Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes, and Van
Dyke’s artistry of complex simplicity is a reason to praise the power of
blackness. He took revenge on the
post-racial prior to the nativity of the post-racial. That achievement is cause for deep and satisfying
laughter.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
December 22, 2012
Rereading Henry Van Dyke (3 October 1928--22 December 2011): The
Pleasure of the Text
Often you can derive pleasure from rereading a novel by an
author whose contribution to African American literary tradition is not a hot
critical topic. For example, Henry Van Dyke’s Ladies of the Rachmaninoff
Eyes (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1965) provokes laughter, the robust folk
laughter of recognizing how rich and educational African American idioms can
be. On the surface, Van Dyke’s novel is
a relatively slight Bildungsroman, the narrative of a young man’s learning that
“when a peacock’s days are over, they’re over.” But the matter under the
surface demands a reckoning.
Van Dkye is a fine storyteller. Through the voice of Oliver Eugene, a naïve but
reliable narrator, you hear about the melodramatic antics of Mrs. Harriet
Giles, the Negro housekeeper, who is the narrator’s Aunt Harry and Mrs. Etta
Klein, a wealthy Jewish widow who is overly fond of rum and who is as self-deceptive
as the mother in Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly,
Last Summer. Forty-seven years ago
when the novel was published, you might not have noticed the gendered imbalance
of the name “Aunt Harry.” In 2012, you
notice the name is metonymic, a shorthand for all the structural imbalances in
the tragicomedy of Van Dyke’s first novel.
Etta Klein and Aunt Harry are one of the more remarkable odd couples in
twentieth-century American literature, and the moral lessons implicit in their
dealings and dalliance with the con-artist Maurice LeFleur are precious. Precious is a sufficient description of the
novel’s sexual identity. Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes promotes
a humor unto life rather than a sickness unto death.
As a novelist writing in the homophobic spaces provided by
the integrationist discourses of the early 1960s, Van Dyke digested the
practicality of Langston Hughes’ remark that if a Negro writer stepped outside
of himself, he would see “how human, yet how beautiful and black [he is]. How very black –even when you’re integrated.”
The narrator deconstructs the hyper-pretense of American
English by stepping outside just enough to expose the prohibitions and
dispensations in the psychology of Black American English. Van Dyke was a master chef in using racial
flavors. He was signifying twelve years
before Geneva Smitherman dealt seriously with the linguistic dimensions of
black modes of speech and twenty-three years before Gates discovered the
signifying monkey was a literary critic. Only Zora Neale Hurston could beat Van
Dyke to the punch. His technical mastery
of storytelling and language is matched only by the mastery of Al Young, Eudora
Welty and Toni Cade Bambara.
Bright laughter is dominant during and after rereading Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes, and Van
Dyke’s artistry of complex simplicity is a reason to praise the power of
blackness. He took revenge on the
post-racial prior to the nativity of the post-racial. That achievement is cause for deep and satisfying
laughter.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
December 22, 2012
Rereading Henry Van Dyke (3 October 1928--22 December 2011): The
Pleasure of the Text
Often you can derive pleasure from rereading a novel by an
author whose contribution to African American literary tradition is not a hot
critical topic. For example, Henry Van Dyke’s Ladies of the Rachmaninoff
Eyes (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1965) provokes laughter, the robust folk
laughter of recognizing how rich and educational African American idioms can
be. On the surface, Van Dyke’s novel is
a relatively slight Bildungsroman, the narrative of a young man’s learning that
“when a peacock’s days are over, they’re over.” But the matter under the
surface demands a reckoning.
Van Dkye is a fine storyteller. Through the voice of Oliver Eugene, a naïve but
reliable narrator, you hear about the melodramatic antics of Mrs. Harriet
Giles, the Negro housekeeper, who is the narrator’s Aunt Harry and Mrs. Etta
Klein, a wealthy Jewish widow who is overly fond of rum and who is as self-deceptive
as the mother in Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly,
Last Summer. Forty-seven years ago
when the novel was published, you might not have noticed the gendered imbalance
of the name “Aunt Harry.” In 2012, you
notice the name is metonymic, a shorthand for all the structural imbalances in
the tragicomedy of Van Dyke’s first novel.
Etta Klein and Aunt Harry are one of the more remarkable odd couples in
twentieth-century American literature, and the moral lessons implicit in their
dealings and dalliance with the con-artist Maurice LeFleur are precious. Precious is a sufficient description of the
novel’s sexual identity. Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes promotes
a humor unto life rather than a sickness unto death.
As a novelist writing in the homophobic spaces provided by
the integrationist discourses of the early 1960s, Van Dyke digested the
practicality of Langston Hughes’ remark that if a Negro writer stepped outside
of himself, he would see “how human, yet how beautiful and black [he is]. How very black –even when you’re integrated.”
The narrator deconstructs the hyper-pretense of American
English by stepping outside just enough to expose the prohibitions and
dispensations in the psychology of Black American English. Van Dyke was a master chef in using racial
flavors. He was signifying twelve years
before Geneva Smitherman dealt seriously with the linguistic dimensions of
black modes of speech and twenty-three years before Gates discovered the
signifying monkey was a literary critic. Only Zora Neale Hurston could beat Van
Dyke to the punch. His technical mastery
of storytelling and language is matched only by the mastery of Al Young, Eudora
Welty and Toni Cade Bambara.
Bright laughter is dominant during and after rereading Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes, and Van
Dyke’s artistry of complex simplicity is a reason to praise the power of
blackness. He took revenge on the
post-racial prior to the nativity of the post-racial. That achievement is cause for deep and satisfying
laughter.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
December 22, 2012
Rereading Henry Van Dyke (3 October 1928--22 December 2011): The
Pleasure of the Text
Often you can derive pleasure from rereading a novel by an
author whose contribution to African American literary tradition is not a hot
critical topic. For example, Henry Van Dyke’s Ladies of the Rachmaninoff
Eyes (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1965) provokes laughter, the robust folk
laughter of recognizing how rich and educational African American idioms can
be. On the surface, Van Dyke’s novel is
a relatively slight Bildungsroman, the narrative of a young man’s learning that
“when a peacock’s days are over, they’re over.” But the matter under the
surface demands a reckoning.
Van Dkye is a fine storyteller. Through the voice of Oliver Eugene, a naïve but
reliable narrator, you hear about the melodramatic antics of Mrs. Harriet
Giles, the Negro housekeeper, who is the narrator’s Aunt Harry and Mrs. Etta
Klein, a wealthy Jewish widow who is overly fond of rum and who is as self-deceptive
as the mother in Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly,
Last Summer. Forty-seven years ago
when the novel was published, you might not have noticed the gendered imbalance
of the name “Aunt Harry.” In 2012, you
notice the name is metonymic, a shorthand for all the structural imbalances in
the tragicomedy of Van Dyke’s first novel.
Etta Klein and Aunt Harry are one of the more remarkable odd couples in
twentieth-century American literature, and the moral lessons implicit in their
dealings and dalliance with the con-artist Maurice LeFleur are precious. Precious is a sufficient description of the
novel’s sexual identity. Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes promotes
a humor unto life rather than a sickness unto death.
As a novelist writing in the homophobic spaces provided by
the integrationist discourses of the early 1960s, Van Dyke digested the
practicality of Langston Hughes’ remark that if a Negro writer stepped outside
of himself, he would see “how human, yet how beautiful and black [he is]. How very black –even when you’re integrated.”
The narrator deconstructs the hyper-pretense of American
English by stepping outside just enough to expose the prohibitions and
dispensations in the psychology of Black American English. Van Dyke was a master chef in using racial
flavors. He was signifying twelve years
before Geneva Smitherman dealt seriously with the linguistic dimensions of
black modes of speech and twenty-three years before Gates discovered the
signifying monkey was a literary critic. Only Zora Neale Hurston could beat Van
Dyke to the punch. His technical mastery
of storytelling and language is matched only by the mastery of Al Young, Eudora
Welty and Toni Cade Bambara.
Bright laughter is dominant during and after rereading Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes, and Van
Dyke’s artistry of complex simplicity is a reason to praise the power of
blackness. He took revenge on the
post-racial prior to the nativity of the post-racial. That achievement is cause for deep and satisfying
laughter.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
December 22, 2012
Rereading Henry Van Dyke (3 October 1928--22 December 2011): The
Pleasure of the Text
Often you can derive pleasure from rereading a novel by an
author whose contribution to African American literary tradition is not a hot
critical topic. For example, Henry Van Dyke’s Ladies of the Rachmaninoff
Eyes (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1965) provokes laughter, the robust folk
laughter of recognizing how rich and educational African American idioms can
be. On the surface, Van Dyke’s novel is
a relatively slight Bildungsroman, the narrative of a young man’s learning that
“when a peacock’s days are over, they’re over.” But the matter under the
surface demands a reckoning.
Van Dkye is a fine storyteller. Through the voice of Oliver Eugene, a naïve but
reliable narrator, you hear about the melodramatic antics of Mrs. Harriet
Giles, the Negro housekeeper, who is the narrator’s Aunt Harry and Mrs. Etta
Klein, a wealthy Jewish widow who is overly fond of rum and who is as self-deceptive
as the mother in Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly,
Last Summer. Forty-seven years ago
when the novel was published, you might not have noticed the gendered imbalance
of the name “Aunt Harry.” In 2012, you
notice the name is metonymic, a shorthand for all the structural imbalances in
the tragicomedy of Van Dyke’s first novel.
Etta Klein and Aunt Harry are one of the more remarkable odd couples in
twentieth-century American literature, and the moral lessons implicit in their
dealings and dalliance with the con-artist Maurice LeFleur are precious. Precious is a sufficient description of the
novel’s sexual identity. Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes promotes
a humor unto life rather than a sickness unto death.
As a novelist writing in the homophobic spaces provided by
the integrationist discourses of the early 1960s, Van Dyke digested the
practicality of Langston Hughes’ remark that if a Negro writer stepped outside
of himself, he would see “how human, yet how beautiful and black [he is]. How very black –even when you’re integrated.”
The narrator deconstructs the hyper-pretense of American
English by stepping outside just enough to expose the prohibitions and
dispensations in the psychology of Black American English. Van Dyke was a master chef in using racial
flavors. He was signifying twelve years
before Geneva Smitherman dealt seriously with the linguistic dimensions of
black modes of speech and twenty-three years before Gates discovered the
signifying monkey was a literary critic. Only Zora Neale Hurston could beat Van
Dyke to the punch. His technical mastery
of storytelling and language is matched only by the mastery of Al Young, Eudora
Welty and Toni Cade Bambara.
Bright laughter is dominant during and after rereading Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes, and Van
Dyke’s artistry of complex simplicity is a reason to praise the power of
blackness. He took revenge on the
post-racial prior to the nativity of the post-racial. That achievement is cause for deep and satisfying
laughter.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
December 22, 2012
v
Sunday, December 16, 2012
Quare Jewish Meditations
Heilbut, Anthony. The Fan Who Knew Too Much. New York: Alred A. Knopf, 2012.
The most valuable part of this book is Heilbut's confessional essay "The Fan Who Knew Too Much" (304-328) with its recognition that a fan is "someone who's discovered an endless storehoue of personal satisfaction" (304), the satisfaction derived primarily from the ability of the computer to "dissolve all the familiar hierarchies" (305). A reader, however, can defeat the dissolving power of a computer by remembering that hierarchies did and shall once again exist.
The least valuable feature of this book is its lack of endnotes and bibliography, the minimal requisites if entertaining gossip about Aretha Franklin, the queer culture of gospel music, the Jewish contribution to the genre of soap opera, and quaint Jewish self-hatreds are to secure credibility. We expect better of an author who possesses a Ph.D. from Harvard. Perhaps we have no right to expect better from a man who has spent considerable time in the company of the gospel children. It is sufficient that he has been slain by the Spirit and transformed from a scholar into a fan. God is good and just.
December 16, 2012
The most valuable part of this book is Heilbut's confessional essay "The Fan Who Knew Too Much" (304-328) with its recognition that a fan is "someone who's discovered an endless storehoue of personal satisfaction" (304), the satisfaction derived primarily from the ability of the computer to "dissolve all the familiar hierarchies" (305). A reader, however, can defeat the dissolving power of a computer by remembering that hierarchies did and shall once again exist.
The least valuable feature of this book is its lack of endnotes and bibliography, the minimal requisites if entertaining gossip about Aretha Franklin, the queer culture of gospel music, the Jewish contribution to the genre of soap opera, and quaint Jewish self-hatreds are to secure credibility. We expect better of an author who possesses a Ph.D. from Harvard. Perhaps we have no right to expect better from a man who has spent considerable time in the company of the gospel children. It is sufficient that he has been slain by the Spirit and transformed from a scholar into a fan. God is good and just.
December 16, 2012
Friday, December 14, 2012
Voices Beneath the Water: Arthenia Bates Millican (1920-2012)
Listen. Be still and
listen. Be still and listen and learn
something for everyday use. Our
ancestors are stern, purposeful and dignified, impatient with foibles, adamant
that memory shall be. During her ninety-two years of navigating life on Earth,
Arthenia Jackson Bates Millican listened faithfully. She translated the sounds
of ancestral text-messages into the gestures that bespeak profound humanity and
enviable modesty, into the works that one might argue leave this world somewhat
better than when we arrived. She
produced seeds beneath the snow, the life-kernels we are obliged to cultivate
as proof that we are worthy holding her legacy in our minds, our ears, and our
hands. Having given us a model of how to
live and make contributions to humanity without pretense, having given us many
lessons in altruism or the best habits of the heart, she is now speaking with
the millions of voices beneath the water.
Listen to her. Be still and listen
to her. Be still, listen, and learn how best to use the gifts she gave us to do
the work that is always there to be done.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
December 14, 2012
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Salman Rushdie's Ritual Suicide
Rushdie, Salman. Joseph Anton. New York: Random House, 2012.
It is rare to consider literature as a murder weapon, although in the eyes of some beholders Richard Wright's Native Son (1940) appears as the novel that killed the pretense of American innocence and ignorance in the United States. Seven decades later, the Anglo-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie uses fictive biography as autobiography to commit ritual suicide. Fashioning Joseph Anton from the remains of Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov, Rushdie accomplishes what fatwa could not: the death of the author. Obviously, anxiety, fear, pints of guilt and gallons of spleen drove Rushdie to defend the moral rightness of The Satanic Verses. "He [Salman/Joseph] looked at himself in the mirror and loathed what he saw"(342). What he saw was the image of an Anglo-Indian, a zigga (T. Geronimo Johnson's magnificent neologism), a male whose desire to become a British gentleman of letters could never be accomplished; thus, the man so alienated from his culture(s) as to become the Other of himself, chose the tragic action of self-murder.
Rushdie can write, can write well, even if the eloquence of his prose descends from time to time into the bowels of what is utterly arch. But he lacks the deceptive masculinity of an Ernest Hemingway, a writer capable of making suicide the real thing. Instead, he manipulates the kindred genres of autobiography and biography to speak from the grave of being.
Rushdie's ritual suicide empowers him to let slip a truth from which much of the world retreats in fear and denial and trembling: the Sauds of Arabia are ultimately responsible for the tragedy of 9/11. As far as I know, this revelation puts the legitimacy of fatwa under erasure. For providing this choice insight about the cesspool of contemporary history, the intrepid Queen of England should tap him on head and shoulders and give him her garter. An Anglo-Indian writer who possesses spleen enough to defy Islam deserves no less an honor.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
12/12/12
It is rare to consider literature as a murder weapon, although in the eyes of some beholders Richard Wright's Native Son (1940) appears as the novel that killed the pretense of American innocence and ignorance in the United States. Seven decades later, the Anglo-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie uses fictive biography as autobiography to commit ritual suicide. Fashioning Joseph Anton from the remains of Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov, Rushdie accomplishes what fatwa could not: the death of the author. Obviously, anxiety, fear, pints of guilt and gallons of spleen drove Rushdie to defend the moral rightness of The Satanic Verses. "He [Salman/Joseph] looked at himself in the mirror and loathed what he saw"(342). What he saw was the image of an Anglo-Indian, a zigga (T. Geronimo Johnson's magnificent neologism), a male whose desire to become a British gentleman of letters could never be accomplished; thus, the man so alienated from his culture(s) as to become the Other of himself, chose the tragic action of self-murder.
Rushdie can write, can write well, even if the eloquence of his prose descends from time to time into the bowels of what is utterly arch. But he lacks the deceptive masculinity of an Ernest Hemingway, a writer capable of making suicide the real thing. Instead, he manipulates the kindred genres of autobiography and biography to speak from the grave of being.
Rushdie's ritual suicide empowers him to let slip a truth from which much of the world retreats in fear and denial and trembling: the Sauds of Arabia are ultimately responsible for the tragedy of 9/11. As far as I know, this revelation puts the legitimacy of fatwa under erasure. For providing this choice insight about the cesspool of contemporary history, the intrepid Queen of England should tap him on head and shoulders and give him her garter. An Anglo-Indian writer who possesses spleen enough to defy Islam deserves no less an honor.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
12/12/12
Friday, December 7, 2012
CHARLIE R. BRAXTON
As a poet, Braxton defies the premature comfort that may accompany change; his is the fierce preservation of traditions of the near past, an affirmation that genuine poetry involves tracing a people's diverse states of being and thought. Braxton's work is an affirmation that the prophecy that lends power to the jermiad burns productively in "the suffering soul / of a real black artist." Do not ask what is real. Feel what is audacious in the flames of anger as redemption.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
April 10, 2011
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
April 10, 2011
Saturday, December 1, 2012
The Death of African American Literature
THE DEATH OF AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE
Little children, it
is the last time: and as ye have heard that antichrist shall come, even now are
there many antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last time.
John 2.18
Most scholars, writers, and readers might agree that African American literature consists of orature (oral literary creations) and writings by people of African descent in the United States from the colonial period to the present. Once we move beyond so simple a definition, we forced to navigate a swamp of competing claims.
The definition of what was called Negro literature from the
colonial period up to the 1960s was challenged by two of LeRoi Jones' (Amiri
Baraka's) essays ---"Myth of a Negro Literature" and "Black
Writing" --in Home: Social Essays
(New York: William Morrow, 1966). Following the spirit of Richard Wright's
"Blueprint for Negro Writing" (1937), Baraka argued successfully that
Negro literature was created more for the inspection of white people than as a
body of work that directly addressed the needs of African Americans; he called
for black writing or black (African American) literature that would speak
directly to black people. Thus, a new definition of African American literature
came into being in the 1960s.
That definition prevailed until it was challenged by Trey
Ellis' "The New Black Aesthetic," Callaloo
12.1 (1989): 233-243. By rejecting the ideological import of a Black Arts
Movement definition of the literature, Ellis modified the definition to
incorporate the interests of younger, often multiracial, writers who felt they
could be more "mainstream" (have more aesthetic options) and not
enslaved by responsibilities to the tradition associated with a narrative of struggle as promoted by Baraka.
Without attachment to the ideological
constraints of Baraka's notion of black writing, these artists could perfume
themselves with exotic theories and create in brothels of free will. Ellis'
essay forced a rethinking of what a definition of African American literature
actually described.
While Ellis's essay received some attention and then
vanished, as it were, into an outburst of writing attached more to the wishes
of individual writers than to any imagined needs of a "black
community," the rupture of Kenneth Warren's What Was African American Literature? (2011) has been more
successful in creating uncertainty, confusion, and urgency regarding the
definition of African American literature. The whiteness of blackness falls now
like ancient acid rain, and the twin myths of a black community and a white
community are moribund. The wasteland is decorated with the coffins of the
colorblind.
Without giving any special attention to Ellis, the definition of the literature was adjusted by the essays in Redefining American Literary History (New York: MLA, 1990), particularly by Paul Lauter's essay "The Literature of America: A Comparative Discipline" and by the essays in the volume edited by Hortense J. Spillers, Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex and Nationality in the Modern Text (Routledge, 1991). There was a region-specific modification of definition in the anthology Black Southern Voices (New York: Meridian, 1992), which I co-edited with John Oliver Killens and in Trudier Harris' earlier essay "Black Writer in a Changed Landscape, Since 1950" in The History of Southern Literature (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1985). Houston A. Baker, Jr. provided a race-wise matrix in Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. went on safari in The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
Without giving any special attention to Ellis, the definition of the literature was adjusted by the essays in Redefining American Literary History (New York: MLA, 1990), particularly by Paul Lauter's essay "The Literature of America: A Comparative Discipline" and by the essays in the volume edited by Hortense J. Spillers, Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex and Nationality in the Modern Text (Routledge, 1991). There was a region-specific modification of definition in the anthology Black Southern Voices (New York: Meridian, 1992), which I co-edited with John Oliver Killens and in Trudier Harris' earlier essay "Black Writer in a Changed Landscape, Since 1950" in The History of Southern Literature (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1985). Houston A. Baker, Jr. provided a race-wise matrix in Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. went on safari in The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
All this adjusting of definition was occurring during the
period of canon/cultural wars in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I think the
publication of The Norton Anthology of
African American Literature (1997) and Call
and Response: The Riverside Anthology
of the African American Literary Tradition (1998) made possible a temporary
consensus about the definition of African American literature. Those
anthologies emerged, however, from competing ideological vantage points. Thus,
it is crucial to notice the current, shifting grounds of definition in Kenneth
Warren's book. The Cambridge History of
African American Literature
basically follows what I would call the "consensual definition,” but
Warren's book opens the gates for a flood of redefining and rethinking efforts.
The consensual definition is fully operational mainly among African American
scholars and non-black scholars who embrace its premises. With a few exceptions,
American scholars (the majority of them are white) who deal with American
literature still believe African American literature is not yet integrated into
their definition of American literature.
What Was African American Literature? was the topic for a roundtable at the 2012 MLA Convention, and the roundtable proceedings are available in "Assessing What Was African American Literature?; or, The State of the Field in the New Millennium," African American Review 44.4 (2011): 567-591. The commentaries from the roundtable give us a reasonable notion of what the contemporary views are.
What Was African American Literature? was the topic for a roundtable at the 2012 MLA Convention, and the roundtable proceedings are available in "Assessing What Was African American Literature?; or, The State of the Field in the New Millennium," African American Review 44.4 (2011): 567-591. The commentaries from the roundtable give us a reasonable notion of what the contemporary views are.
These views, however, are rooted in the thinking promoted by
Charles Johnson’s “The End of the Black American Narrative,” The American Scholar 77.3 (2008): 32-42,
Gerald L. Early’s “The End of Race as We Know It,” The Chronicle Review (October 10, 2008) http://chronicle.com/wwwkly/v55/i07/07b01.htm ,Reginald Dwayne Betts’ “Why I’m No Longer a
Black Poet,” Phillis Remastered,
February 6, 2012 http://www.phillisremastered.wordpress.com,
Joyce Ann Joyce’s “A Tinker’s Damn: Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and The Signifying Monkey Twenty Years
Later,” Callaloo 31.2 (2008):
370-380, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim
Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New
Press, 2010) and the essays in Ishmael Reed’s Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media (Montreal: Baraka Books, 2010)
and Going Too Far (Montreal: Baraka
Books, 2012).
The death of African American literature will occur
simultaneously with the death of American literature. It is prudent to write the obituary for both
bodies while obituaries can still be written. Among the crucial documents for writing
the subsequent eulogy are
Bolden, Tony, ed. The
Funk Era and Beyond: New Perspective on Black Popular Culture. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Davis, Thadious M. Southscapes:
Geographies of Race, Region, & Literature. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2011.
Ernest, John. Chaotic
Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
Ervin, Hazel Arnett, ed. African
American Literary Criticism, 1773 to 2000. New York: Twayne Publishers,
1999.
Harris, Trudier. The
Scary Mason-Dixon Line: African American Writers and the South. Baton
Rouge: LSU Press, 2009.
Jackson, Lawrence P. The
Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and
Critics, 1934-1960. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.
Jarrett, Gene Andrew. Representing
the Race: A New Political History of African American Literature. New York:
New York University Press, 2011.
Mullen, Harryette. The
Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be: Essays and Interviews. Tuscaloosa: University of
Alabama Press, 2012.
Napier, Winston, ed. African
American Literary Theory. New York: New York University Press, 2000.
Young, Kevin. The Grey
Album: On the Blackness of Blackness. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2012.
When the death of African American literature rises like the
moon in Arab summer, the life of African American literature will be reborn in
African winter.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. PHBW
BLOG
December 1, 2012
THE DEATH OF AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE
Little children, it
is the last time: and as ye have heard that antichrist shall come, even now are
there many antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last time.
John 2.18
Most scholars, writers, and readers might agree that African American literature consists of orature (oral literary creations) and writings by people of African descent in the United States from the colonial period to the present. Once we move beyond so simple a definition, we forced to navigate a swamp of competing claims.
The definition of what was called Negro literature from the
colonial period up to the 1960s was challenged by two of LeRoi Jones' (Amiri
Baraka's) essays ---"Myth of a Negro Literature" and "Black
Writing" --in Home: Social Essays
(New York: William Morrow, 1966). Following the spirit of Richard Wright's
"Blueprint for Negro Writing" (1937), Baraka argued successfully that
Negro literature was created more for the inspection of white people than as a
body of work that directly addressed the needs of African Americans; he called
for black writing or black (African American) literature that would speak
directly to black people. Thus, a new definition of African American literature
came into being in the 1960s.
That definition prevailed until it was challenged by Trey
Ellis' "The New Black Aesthetic," Callaloo
12.1 (1989): 233-243. By rejecting the ideological import of a Black Arts
Movement definition of the literature, Ellis modified the definition to
incorporate the interests of younger, often multiracial, writers who felt they
could be more "mainstream" (have more aesthetic options) and not
enslaved by responsibilities to the tradition associated with a narrative of struggle as promoted by Baraka.
Without attachment to the ideological
constraints of Baraka's notion of black writing, these artists could perfume
themselves with exotic theories and create in brothels of free will. Ellis'
essay forced a rethinking of what a definition of African American literature
actually described.
While Ellis's essay received some attention and then
vanished, as it were, into an outburst of writing attached more to the wishes
of individual writers than to any imagined needs of a "black
community," the rupture of Kenneth Warren's What Was African American Literature? (2011) has been more
successful in creating uncertainty, confusion, and urgency regarding the
definition of African American literature. The whiteness of blackness falls now
like ancient acid rain, and the twin myths of a black community and a white
community are moribund. The wasteland is decorated with the coffins of the
colorblind.
Without giving any special attention to Ellis, the definition of the literature was adjusted by the essays in Redefining American Literary History (New York: MLA, 1990), particularly by Paul Lauter's essay "The Literature of America: A Comparative Discipline" and by the essays in the volume edited by Hortense J. Spillers, Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex and Nationality in the Modern Text (Routledge, 1991). There was a region-specific modification of definition in the anthology Black Southern Voices (New York: Meridian, 1992), which I co-edited with John Oliver Killens and in Trudier Harris' earlier essay "Black Writer in a Changed Landscape, Since 1950" in The History of Southern Literature (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1985). Houston A. Baker, Jr. provided a race-wise matrix in Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. went on safari in The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
Without giving any special attention to Ellis, the definition of the literature was adjusted by the essays in Redefining American Literary History (New York: MLA, 1990), particularly by Paul Lauter's essay "The Literature of America: A Comparative Discipline" and by the essays in the volume edited by Hortense J. Spillers, Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex and Nationality in the Modern Text (Routledge, 1991). There was a region-specific modification of definition in the anthology Black Southern Voices (New York: Meridian, 1992), which I co-edited with John Oliver Killens and in Trudier Harris' earlier essay "Black Writer in a Changed Landscape, Since 1950" in The History of Southern Literature (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1985). Houston A. Baker, Jr. provided a race-wise matrix in Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. went on safari in The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
All this adjusting of definition was occurring during the
period of canon/cultural wars in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I think the
publication of The Norton Anthology of
African American Literature (1997) and Call
and Response: The Riverside Anthology
of the African American Literary Tradition (1998) made possible a temporary
consensus about the definition of African American literature. Those
anthologies emerged, however, from competing ideological vantage points. Thus,
it is crucial to notice the current, shifting grounds of definition in Kenneth
Warren's book. The Cambridge History of
African American Literature
basically follows what I would call the "consensual definition,” but
Warren's book opens the gates for a flood of redefining and rethinking efforts.
The consensual definition is fully operational mainly among African American
scholars and non-black scholars who embrace its premises. With a few exceptions,
American scholars (the majority of them are white) who deal with American
literature still believe African American literature is not yet integrated into
their definition of American literature.
What Was African American Literature? was the topic for a roundtable at the 2012 MLA Convention, and the roundtable proceedings are available in "Assessing What Was African American Literature?; or, The State of the Field in the New Millennium," African American Review 44.4 (2011): 567-591. The commentaries from the roundtable give us a reasonable notion of what the contemporary views are.
What Was African American Literature? was the topic for a roundtable at the 2012 MLA Convention, and the roundtable proceedings are available in "Assessing What Was African American Literature?; or, The State of the Field in the New Millennium," African American Review 44.4 (2011): 567-591. The commentaries from the roundtable give us a reasonable notion of what the contemporary views are.
These views, however, are rooted in the thinking promoted by
Charles Johnson’s “The End of the Black American Narrative,” The American Scholar 77.3 (2008): 32-42,
Gerald L. Early’s “The End of Race as We Know It,” The Chronicle Review (October 10, 2008) http://chronicle.com/wwwkly/v55/i07/07b01.htm ,Reginald Dwayne Betts’ “Why I’m No Longer a
Black Poet,” Phillis Remastered,
February 6, 2012 http://www.phillisremastered.wordpress.com,
Joyce Ann Joyce’s “A Tinker’s Damn: Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and The Signifying Monkey Twenty Years
Later,” Callaloo 31.2 (2008):
370-380, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim
Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New
Press, 2010) and the essays in Ishmael Reed’s Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media (Montreal: Baraka Books, 2010)
and Going Too Far (Montreal: Baraka
Books, 2012).
The death of African American literature will occur
simultaneously with the death of American literature. It is prudent to write the obituary for both
bodies while obituaries can still be written. Among the crucial documents for writing
the subsequent eulogy are
Bolden, Tony, ed. The
Funk Era and Beyond: New Perspective on Black Popular Culture. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Davis, Thadious M. Southscapes:
Geographies of Race, Region, & Literature. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2011.
Ernest, John. Chaotic
Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
Ervin, Hazel Arnett, ed. African
American Literary Criticism, 1773 to 2000. New York: Twayne Publishers,
1999.
Harris, Trudier. The
Scary Mason-Dixon Line: African American Writers and the South. Baton
Rouge: LSU Press, 2009.
Jackson, Lawrence P. The
Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and
Critics, 1934-1960. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.
Jarrett, Gene Andrew. Representing
the Race: A New Political History of African American Literature. New York:
New York University Press, 2011.
Mullen, Harryette. The
Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be: Essays and Interviews. Tuscaloosa: University of
Alabama Press, 2012.
Napier, Winston, ed. African
American Literary Theory. New York: New York University Press, 2000.
Young, Kevin. The Grey
Album: On the Blackness of Blackness. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2012.
When the death of African American literature rises like the
moon in Arab summer, the life of African American literature will be reborn in
African winter.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. PHBW
BLOG
December 1, 2012
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