Assessing What Was African American Literature?; or, the State of the Field in the New Millennium

Introduction Melissa Asher Daniels and Gregory Laski African American literature has ended. Or so claims Kenneth W. Warren, whose recent book What Was African American Literature? (2011) was topic of conversation at a special session roundtable at 2012 Modern Language Association convention in Seattle, Washington. Arguing that the collective enterprise we now know as African American literature is of rather recent vintage (1), Warren seeks to historicize, and in so doing, redefine what was for many a fine wine that kept getting better with time. In his account, African American literature emerged within and against epoch of state-sanctioned racial bookended by Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 on one end and civil and voting fights acts of 1960s on other. Understanding literary output of Americans during this period as an imaginative response to both and legal reality of segregation, Warren contends that a paradox lay at heart of this project: its very success necessitated its obsolescence (42, 18). Indeed, given that formal strictures of Jim Crow have been dismantled, Warren argues, African American literature can no longer be written. With such an ambitious thesis at its center, What Was African American Literature? claims a place in genealogy of critical works that aim to give coherent shape to literary and cultural production of Americans, from such foundational studies as Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s The Signifying monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (1988) and Hazel Carby's Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of Afro-American Woman Novelist (1987) to more recent reassessments of canon, such as John Ernest's Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History (2009) and Gene Andrew Jarrett's Representing Race: A New Political History of African American Literature (2011). But if Warren's book shares with these studies an attention to what we might consider constituent components of this critical genre--an interest in crafting a particular literary/historical narrative and accounting for relationship between aesthetics and politics, for instance--it distinguishes itself not simply in way it articulates a position on these themes, but in very valence it assigns to notion of an African American literary tradition in process. Indeed Warren, in urging to understand African American literature as a post-emancipation phenomenon that effectively ended with legal demise of Jim Crow, issues no lament. To contrary, he insists that because this literature was generated by a social and legal order that demanded cultural production by elites aimed at disproving notions of black inferiority, it is product of a past that is best put behind us (18, 84). What Was African American Literature? thus forces to rethink some of our most deeply held assumptions about this tradition. Can Phillis Wheatley and Toni Morrison accurately be classified as African American writers? What conception of history, historical process, and temporality--linear, recursive, or generally chaotic--do we bring to our readings of texts by and about Americans? What value do legacies of Middle Passage, slavery, and Jim Crow have for struggle to realize greater racial equality in present? For that matter, how might way we narrate literary history inflect discussions about race and politics in public sphere? The session treated Warren's book less as a postmortem on field than as a symptom that African American literary studies has arrived at an impasse. Though at one time considered marginal, discipline has achieved a prominent position in academy, as indicated by now-standard presence of authors on college syllabi and reading lists, and ubiquity of scholarly work on African American texts. And yet, other signs point to a less-promising future. …