Simultaneously, within the academy, scholars of black literature were undertaking important projects that would bear directly on the direction of their field. Whereas in the late sixties, when black studies formally entered the curriculum, history had been the predominant subject, a decade later, literary studies had become the “glamor” area of black studies. While the black arts movement of the mid-sixties had declared literature, and especially poetry, to be the cultural wing of the black power revolution, it had little effect on the curricula offered by traditional departments of English. As Kimberly Benston aptly characterizes the import of this movement, “the profound reorientation of energy and vision which took place among Afro-American thinkers, writers, performers, and their audiences during this period, centering on considerations of a nationalist, or sui generis, understanding of the ‘black self,’ took place through dynamic and complex disputations about the provenance, nature, and teleology of the sign of blackness.” More than any other single factor, the black arts movement gave birth to the larger black studies movement, even if it did not have a direct impact on traditional university literature departments. This intervention would be dependent on the studies produced by a group of younger scholars—Donald Gibson, June Jordan, Houston Baker, Robert Stepto, Arnold Rampersad, Geneva Smitherman, Jerry Ward, Mary Helen Washington, Kimberly Benston, Addison Gayle, Werner Sollors, Stephen Henderson, Sherley Ann Williams, Carolyn Fowler, and others—many of whom had been trained by an older generation of African Americanists. That generation included such literary critics as Charles Davis, Charles Nilon, Michael Cooke, Charles Nichols, Richard Barksdale, Blyden Jackson, Darwin Turner, and J. Saunders Redding, many of whom had been recruited to previously segregated schools in response to student demands for the creation of black studies, as well as Arthur P. Davis, Hugh Gloster, Sterling Brown and others who remained at historically black colleges.
For a variety of reasons, and in a remarkable variety of ways, these scholars began to theorize about the nature and function of black literature and its criticism and, simultaneously, to train an even younger generation of students. While it is difficult, precisely, to characterize their concerns, it seems safe to say that they shared a concern with the “literariness” of African American works, as they wrestled to make these texts a “proper” object of analysis within traditional departments of English. Whereas black literature had generally been taught and analyzed through an interdisciplinary methodology, in which sociology and history (and, for African literature, anthropology) had virtually blocked out the “literariness” of the black text, these scholars, after 1975, began to argue for the explication of the formal properties of the writing. If the “blackness” of a text was to be found anywhere, they argued, it would be in the practical uses of language. So, at a time when theorists of European and Anglo-American literature were offering critiques of Anglo-American formalism, scholars of black literature, responding to the history of their own discipline, found it “radical” to teach formal methods of reading.
Of the several gestures that were of great importance to this movement, I can mention only three here. In chronological order, these are Dexter Fisher’s Minority Language and Literature (1977), Dexter Fisher and Robert Stepto’s Afro-American Literature: The Reconstruction of Instruction (1979), and Leslie Fiedler and Houston A. Baker, Jr.’s Opening Up the Canon: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1979 (1981). Conveniently, for my argument here, each of these anthologies, the published results of seminal conferences, expresses a different aspect of a larger movement.
The first two collections grew out of conferences sponsored by the Modern Language Association, while the third was sponsored by the English Institute. “In an effort to address the critical, philosophical, pedagogical, and curricular issues surrounding the teaching of minority literature,” Dexter Fisher explains in her introduction to Minority Language and Literature, the MLA in 1972 formed the Commission on Minority Groups and the Study of Language and Literature. (Until the early seventies, black scholars did not find the MLA a welcoming institution; they formed instead the predominantly black College Language Association, which still thrives today. The commission’s establishment was an attempt, in part, to redefine the MLA sufficiently to “open up” its membership to black and other minority professors.) Beginning in 1974, the commission, funded by the NEH, sponsored various colloquiums “to stimulate greater awareness and to encourage more equitable representation of minority literature in the mainstream of literary studies”(8). Fisher’s book stemmed directly from a conference held in 1976, at which forty-four scholars, publishers, and foundation program officers came together to consider “the relationship of minority literature to the mainstream of American literary tradition”:
One of the major issues raised repeatedly at Commission-sponsored meetings is the relationship of minority literature to the mainstream of American literary tradition. The question of the “place” of minority literature in American literature raises a deeper, and perhaps more controversial, question: “In what ways does minority literature share the values and assumptions of the dominant culture, and in what ways does it express divergent perspectives?” This question has implications not only for curriculum development and critical theory, but also, and even more important, for the role of the humanities in bringing about a truly plural system of education.(9)
The conference’s participants, including J. Lee Greene, Mary Helen Washington, Michael G. Cooke, Michael Harper, Geneva Smitherman, and Houston A. Baker, Jr., each a specialist in African American literature, explored the relations between “principles of criticism” and social contexts. As Fisher puts it nicely:
The emergence of the Black Aesthetics Movement in the 1960s focused attention on the dilemma faced by minority writers trying to reconcile cultural dualism. Willingly or otherwise, minority writers inherit certain tenets of Western civilization through American society, though they often live alienated from that society. At the same time, they may write out of a cultural and linguistic tradition that sharply departs from the mainstream. Not only does this present constant social, political, and literary choices to minority writers, but it also challenges certain aesthetic principles of evaluation for the critic. When the cultural gap between writer and critic is too great, new critical approaches are needed.(11)
Above all else, the conference was concerned with “revising the canon of American literature,” a matter that Fiedler and Baker would explore in even broader terms three years later at the English Institute.
In the same year that Fisher’s volume appeared, she and Robert Stepto, a professor of English, American, and Afro-American studies at Yale, again with NEH funding, convened a two-week seminar at Yale entitled Afro-American Literature: From Critical Approach to Course Design. The five seminar leaders—Fisher, Stepto, Robert O’Meally, Sherley Anne Williams, and I—defined its purpose as “the reconstruction of instruction”: “in this case,” as Fisher and Stepto put it, “to design courses in, and to refine critical approaches to, Afro-American literature yielding a ‘literary’ understanding of the literature” (vii). The “literary,” Stepto explains, is contrasted with the “sociological,” the “ideological, etc.” Noting that “many schools still do not teach Afro-American literature, while other institutions offering courses in the field seem to be caught in a lockstep of stale critical and pedagogical ideas, many of which are tattered hand-me-downs from disciplines other than literature” (1), Stepto and his colleagues, with all the zeal of reformers, sought to redefine African American literary study by introducing into its explication formalist and structuralist methods of reading and by providing a critique of the essentialism of black aesthetic criticism that had grown out of the black arts movement. These scholars were intent on defining a canon of both African American literature and its attendant formal critical practices.
As bold and as controversial as the Fisher-Stepto volume was within African American literary studies, the volume edited by Fiedle
r and Baker was perhaps even more daring, since it sought to explode the notion that English was, somehow, or could ever be, somehow, a neutral container for “world literature.” Indeed, the institute’s theme in 1979 was English as a World Language for Literature. The volume, featuring papers by Dennis Brutus and Edward Kamau Braithwaite on South African and Caribbean literature, respectively, carries a succinct yet seminal introduction by Baker that suggests something of the polemics generated by the notion that English might be anything but the most fertile and flexible language available to any writer for the fullest expression of literary sensibility. Baker’s laconic remarks, made just a decade ago, suggest the heated responses of the institute’s audience to the participants’ critique of the “neocolonialism” of traditional English studies and to Baker’s observations that “the conception of English as a ‘world language’ is rooted in Western economic history” and that we must juxtapose “the economic ascendancy of English and the historical correlation between this academy and processes of modern thought.” English literature, Baker concludes, is not what it appears to be:
The fact that a Sotho writer claims that he has chosen English because it guarantees a wide audience and ensures access to the literary reproduction systems of a world market may be less important as a literary consideration than what the writer has actually made of the English language as a literary agency. One might want to ask, for example, what summits of experience inaccessible to occupants of the heartland have been incorporated into the world of English literature? What literary strategies have been employed by the Sotho writer to preserve and communicate culturally-specific meanings? What codes of analysis and evaluation must be articulated in order to render accurate explanations for a Sotho or a Tewa or a Yoruba literary work written in English?(xiii)
These foundational volumes proved to be, each in its own way, enabling gestures for the growth of sophisticated theories and critical practices in African, Caribbean, and African American literatures. In the past decade, scores of books and hundreds of essays, reflecting structuralist, poststructuralist, gay, lesbian, Marxist, and feminist theories and practices, have been devoted to the study of black literature. Even the essentialism of race itself, long thought to be a sacrosanct concept within African American studies, has been extensively analyzed as a social construction rather than a thing. The black women’s literary renaissance has found counterparts in Africa and the Caribbean. Since 1970 alone, fifty-six novels by black women have been published in the Caribbean. One scholar even declared recently that we are living in the age of the greatest African American novelist (Morrison), therefore the critical endeavor in black literary studies has a certain immediacy not found in other English studies. Derek Walcott’s achievements in poetry and Soyinka’s in the drama have had a similar effect on the study of Caribbean and African literature. That this generation of critics lives contemporaneously with the first black Nobel laureate is only one sign, albeit a large one, of the vibrancy and youth of the field today.
When the MLA’s Executive Council and PMLA’s Editorial Board decided to introduce “special topics” into PMLA’s format, the unanimous choice for the first issue was African and African American literature. Despite the great activity in the field, the journal had published only three essays in this area. And despite the large number of sessions devoted to such topics at the annual convention, membership in the African, black American, and ethnic divisions remained surprisingly low. While the black American division had grown by a remarkable 93.3% between 1985 and 1987, there were still only 319 members. We hoped that our announcement of this special topic would attract new members in these divisions.
We were not to be disappointed. Since 1987, when the first advertisement for this special topic appeared, memberships in the three divisions have grown dramatically (I am grateful to David Cloyce Smith, of the MLA, for compiling the statistics):
Change in Membership, %
Division 1985–87 1987–89
African + 3.3 + 39.4
Black American + 93.3a + 88.7
Ethnic − 1.9 + 30.4
Total MLA + 3.7 + 11.7
aThe black American division owes its initial increase in part to its newness; it was created in 1982. By 1987, however, enrollments had slowed. While the increase for 1985–86 was 48%, the increase for 1986–87 was only 30%.
The essays submitted reflected a variety of topics, including the following:
•African and Caribbean literature: Buchi Emecheta, Sembene Ousmane, Olaudah Equiano, Jacques Romain, Ngugi wa Thiongo, Aimé Césaire, Mongo Beti, Jose Luandino Vieira, Wole Soyinka, Francisco Jose Tenreiro, mariage force in francophone African theater, Orisa principle and African literary aesthetics
•Nineteenth-century African American: Frederick Douglass, slave narratives, Paul Laurence Dunbar
•Twentieth-century African American: James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Gayl Jones, Martin Luther King, Jr., Nella Larsen, Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, Ishmael Reed, Ntozake Shange, Melvin Tolson, Jean Toomer, Alice Walker, Richard Wright, Harlem Renaissance
•Performance/Music: blues, francophone African theater, jazz
•Theory: African American deconstruction, Africanist discourse, language theory, literary history, neocolonialism, Yoruba Ifa divination
This range of subjects suggests something of the breadth of work being undertaken in black studies today.
And what is the current state of the field? While one can be encouraged by the important institutional interventions that are serving to integrate African and African American literature into traditional literature departments and by the several editorial ventures that are making “lost” black texts available once again and generating sophisticated reference works and anthologies, black authors are still not well represented in many college curricula. (It is one of the paradoxes of pedagogic reform that the newfound prominence of black literature is still primarily a phenomenon of elite institutions.) Moreover, a large percentage of those who teach this literature are black, and such black scholars are themselves a diminishing presence in the profession. (In 1986, according to the National Research Council, blacks earned only seventy PhDs in all the humanities.) Thus we must conclude that the growth of the field within the academy depends in part on increasing the number of minority students in our graduate programs. The keen competition among literature departments for talented job candidates is based on scarcity; it is incumbent on the members of the MLA to develop viable recruitment mechanisms that will continue to diversify our graduate student population.
What, finally, has the experience of reading over a hundred submissions to this special issue revealed about the concerns of Africanists and African Americanists? Virtually no one, it seems clear, believes that the texts written by black authors cohere into a tradition because the authors share certain innate characteristics. Opposing the essentialism of European “universality” with a black essentialism—an approach that in various ways characterized a large component of black literary criticism since the black arts movement—has given way to more subtle questions. What is following the critique of the essentialist notions that cloaked the text in a mantle of “blackness,” replete with the accretions of all sorts of sociological clichés, is a “postformal” resituation of texts, accounting for the social dynamism of subjection, incorporation, and marginalization in relation to the cultural dominant.
Black literature, recent critics seem to be saying, can no longer simply name “the margin.” Close readings, of the sort gathered in this issue, are increasingly naming the specificity of black texts, revealing the depth and range of cultural details far beyond the economic exploitation of blacks by whites. This increased focus on the specificity of the text has enabled us to begin to chart the patterns of repetition and revision among texts by black authors. In Notes of a Native Son James Baldwin described his own obsession with “race” in his fiction: “I have not written about being a Negro at such length because
I expect that to be my only subject, but only because it was the gate I had to unlock before I could hope to write about anything else” (8). One must learn to be “black” in this society, precisely because “blackness” is a socially produced category. Accordingly, many black authors read and revise one another, address similar themes, and repeat the cultural and linguistic codes of a common symbolic geography. For these reasons, we can think of them as forming literary traditions.
Richard Wright once argued, polemically, that if white racism did not exist, then black literature would not exist, and he predicted the demise of the latter with the cessation of the former. It is difficult to deny that certain elements of African American culture are the products of crosscultural encounters with white racism. But black culture, these close readings reveal, is a self-enclosed mythos, also existing apart from the social dynamism of white racism. While it is important to criticize nativistic essentialism, in doing so we can lose sight of the larger social dynamic, the things that make people come together into groups in the first place. Developments in African American studies have helped to reveal the factitious nature of an “American” identity; that which had been systematically excluded has now been revoiced as a mainstream concern.
We might think of the development of African American criticism over the past two decades in four distinct stages, beginning with the black arts movement of the mid and late sixties. The black arts movement, whose leading theoreticians were Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal, was a reaction against the New Criticism’s formalism. The readings these critics advanced were broadly cultural and richly contextualized; they aimed to be “holistic” and based formal literature firmly on black urban vernacular, expressive culture. Art was a fundamental part of “the people”; “art for art’s sake” was seen to be a concept alien to a “pan-African” sensibility, a sensibility that was whole, organic, and, of course, quite ahistorical. What was identified as European or Western essentialism—masked under the rubric of “universality”—was attacked by asserting an oppositional black or “neo-African” essentialism. In place of formalist notions about art, these critics promoted a poetics rooted in a social realism, indeed, on a sort of mimeticism; the relation between black art and black life was a direct one.
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