Assessing What Was African American Literature?; or, the state of the field in the new millennium.

Daniels, Melissa Asher ; Laski, Gregory

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 the topic of conversation at a special session roundtable at the 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 the epoch of state-sanctioned racial segregation, bookended by the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 on the one end and the civil and voting fights acts of the 1960s on the other. Understanding the literary output of black Americans during this period as an "imaginative response" to both the "social and legal reality of segregation," Warren contends that a paradox lay at the heart of this project: its very success necessitated its "obsolescence" (42, 18). Indeed, given that the 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 the genealogy of critical works that aim to give coherent shape to the literary and cultural production of black 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 the Afro-American Woman Novelist (1987) to more recent reassessments of the canon, such as John Ernest's Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History (2009) and Gene Andrew Jarrett's Representing the 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 the constituent components of this critical genre--an interest in crafting a particular literary/historical narrative and accounting for the relationship between aesthetics and politics, for instance--it distinguishes itself not simply in the way it articulates a position on these themes, but in the very valence it assigns to the notion of an African American literary tradition in the process. Indeed Warren, in urging us to understand African American literature as a post-emancipation phenomenon that effectively ended with the legal demise of Jim Crow, issues no lament. To the 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 the product of a past that is best put "behind us" (18, 84).

What Was African American Literature? thus forces us 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 black Americans? What value do the legacies of the Middle Passage, slavery, and Jim Crow have for the struggle to realize greater racial equality in the present? For that matter, how might the way we narrate literary history inflect discussions about race and politics in the public sphere?

The session treated Warren's book less as a postmortem on the field than as a symptom that African American literary studies has arrived at an impasse. Though at one time considered marginal, the discipline has achieved a prominent position in the academy, as indicated by the now-standard presence of black authors on college syllabi and reading lists, and the ubiquity of scholarly work on African American texts. And yet, other signs point to a less-promising future. The recent budget and enrollment crises confronting some black studies programs, the neoliberal investment in colorblindness, and the allure of the "post-racial" make the field's ostensibly secure position appear now to be tenuous.

With these factors in mind, we assembled a diverse group of scholars working in African American literary studies, broadly construed, to analyze this critical juncture. In short position papers, each speaker explored a particular aspect of Warren's thesis and its implications from a different interpretive or methodological perspective. Warren then offered a response. Though all of the presenters, as well as Warren, have revised their statements in preparation for this print forum, the essays featured here do not differ radically in length, tone, or content from the pieces delivered in January 2012. In this regard, we think, they capture the spirit of that exchange.

The first three papers examine how questions of history and time influence both the critic's and artist's relationship to craft. Adam Bradley warns against conceptualizing the African American literary tradition in a way that emphasizes historical, social, and political contexts at the expense of considerations of form, technique, and artistry--the "aesthetic freedom" that black writers have always possessed, even during Jim Crow. If Bradley encourages us to recognize the "unity and diversity" that characterized the cultural production of black Americans in the past as it does in the present, John Ernest seeks to understand the best way for critics to describe this phenomenon. Ernest suggests that the most important question that Warren poses to scholars may not come in the form of his contention about the "outdated ideological baggage" associated with the designation "African American literature," but in the largely linear and chronological vision of historical process that informs the book's treatment of "collective identity." Even as he favors a more chaotic historical model that can account for the ways in which it still makes sense to invoke the notion of an "African American church" or an "African American community," Ernest notes that he shares with Warren a commitment to "getting literary history right," a commitment that he sees as central to the project of African American literature more generally. Bringing the tools of performance studies as well as a more contemporary archive to the conversation, Soyica Diggs Colbert uses the work of a group of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century writers to complicate Warren's idea that African American literature of the Jim Crow era was "prospective," whereas post-civil rights authors take a more "retrospective" stance, turning to the past for inspiration. In the writings of Toni Morrison, August Wilson, Suzan-Lori Parks, and others, Colbert does not find a straightforward backward-looking posture but a "multi-temporal focus," or what she terms a practice of "[m]obilizing ... setting the lessons of the past in motion through future-oriented action."

Russ Castronovo and Sharon P. Holland move the discussion beyond the domain of African American literary studies, as narrowly construed. In his reflection, Castronovo uses the metaphor of travel to explore how Warren's book might influence conversations about race and ethnicity both within and beyond the academy. Noting the attention that What Was African American Literature? has already garnered in several public forums, Castronovo wonders how a declaration about the end of this literary tradition might be received "in places, not where ethnic studies has succeeded, but where it is still fighting for a toehold." Asking whether it would be possible to make a similar observation about Asian American literature, he underscores the difficulty in determining the impact that always-shifting forms of state and legal power have on the racialized subject, not to mention the many "motivations that inspire literary undertakings." In her comment, Holland similarly inquires into the subject that African American literature purports to represent, arguing that this "literature cares not for the black female body as much as it cares deeply for the preservation of its iconographic wholeness--a unity completed in the embodied presence of a signifying maleness through which the call-and-response to black community can be absorbed and understood by a wider body politic." If we are to leave the "was" about which Warren writes behind, Holland asks, might we also use this occasion to imagine a more expansive sense of our humanity, one that exceeds the terms of race?

As this precis suggests, the panelists covered significant intellectual ground, posing searching questions about the influence of state and juridical power on subjectivity, the nature of historical process, and the relation between face and representation, even if the panel's time constraints did not allow the fuller development of their positions. Equally evocative, but more difficult to reproduce here, was the open discussion that followed Warren's response to the panelists. From the audience of roughly two hundred--a standing-room-only crowd--a number of stimulating queries and comments emerged, both about the book's thesis and its implications for the field and the profession more broadly.

For instance, one participant wondered about the emphasis the book places on the law, asking whether a consideration of "material conditions on the ground" should also inform our thinking about the complicated interplay between aesthetics and politics. While Warren agreed that we should understand Jim Crow both as a form of legal power and as a set of practices, Castronovo took a slightly different approach to the notion of "material conditions." For him, it is important to consider not simply the sociopolitical circumstances that produced African American literature, but also those that generated What Was African American Literature?. That the book appears in a moment in which Barack Obama occupies the White House, and that it originates from a particular type of institution--a four-year private university in an urban setting--are not insignificant material contexts. Another audience member worried that for all the attention that Warren's study devotes to the political instrumentality of African American literature, it overlooks other, no less crucial ends of black cultural production. The ways in which African American writing serves as a mode of "self-affirmation," or even simply as the record of "lived experience," must also be considered as central to this literary tradition.

Other questions took up the professional and pedagogical dimensions of Warren's thesis. For example, one attendee suggested that we think about the implications of What Was African American Literature? for academic training. If the book signals a kind of paradigm shift that in a sense functions to differentiate a generation of more senior scholars from a younger cohort, then how do critics and teachers trained on the older model go about "authorizing" and "nurturing" this "new body of work"? In this regard, Holland pointed out that Warren's book provides us with an occasion to reflect on the history of the field and in so doing to consider anew our collective work as scholars and teachers--that is, to meditate on just what we mean when we say, "this is what it is" and "this is what it ought to do."

The session concluded with an incisive comment that functioned at once as a sort of summa of the conversation and an illuminating guide for how we might continue the discussion going forward. Acknowledging the anxiety surrounding the title of Warren's book, this participant perceptively noted the general tendency to emphasize the "was" when we pronounce What Was African American Literature? But what if we modified our inflection, both literally and metacritically, accenting not the verb's past tense, but other parts of the title--or none at all--and simply ask: "What was African American literature?" Such a shift in emphasis might ultimately enable us to see Warren's book not as an attempt to "erase" the tradition, but rather to "elasticize" it.

Approached thus, What Was African American Literature?--and the conversation it has ignited might afford us as scholars, teachers, and readers of this tradition the vital opportunity to reflect on the state of African American literary studies in this new millennium, a moment in which we would do well to ask: just where are we, and where do we go from here? It was this question that drove us to organize the roundtable. We hope very much that our attempt to translate it into print here will serve to provoke both additional reflection and further dialogue.

Our Mayan Prophecy

Adam Bradley

I don't know if you've heard the news, but the world is going to end later on this year.

For decades now, mystics and New Age-types have been telling us that the Mayan calendar prophesizes human extinction on December 21, 2012. I point this out not just to underscore the futility of holding a literature conference at the edge of the apocalypse, but also because I sense a similar--though admittedly more isolated--atmosphere of cataclysm surrounding Ken's book.

What Was African American Literature? That simple question and its verb tense would seem to spell the extinction of our very field. All of those years in graduate school, all of those survey courses taught, all of those refereed articles submitted, all of those MLA conferences attended, all in the name of something that no longer exists. It's not too much to say that Ken's book is our Mayan prophecy, letting us know that our time might just be up.

But like the Mayan calendar, Ken's book has often been misread. If you consult experts in Mayan script or if you happen to watch a documentary on the History Channel one Sunday afternoon, you'll learn that the Mayans were not predicting our extinction but rather our transformation, perhaps even our elevation of consciousness.

So too with Ken's book. Its provocative title incites a frenzied response that the substance of his argument does not merit. This is its problem, but also its power. Had Ken chosen another title--say, What Was Negro Literature?, as he had once considered--I doubt the book would have caused such a stir. I also doubt it would have the potential to affect the field in the way that I believe it does. I like to imagine Ken, maybe along with some ancient Mayan friends, having a good chuckle at our histrionics, knowing it's all part of the plan.

No, What Was African American Literature? is no extinction narrative. Instead, I read Ken's book as a kind of ritual cleansing of our literary past, a rebirth, and an opportunity to conceive of new ways of reading and teaching African American literature today. In that sense, the book--in keeping with the black folk tradition--is a call in need of a response. This is my response.

Reading Ken's book has convinced me of many things, but it has not convinced me to stop using the term "African American literature" to describe the writings of black Americans, both past and present. I revel in studying a body of literature that spans the distance between Phillis Wheatley and Elizabeth Alexander--or better yet, from Phillis Wheatley through Elizabeth Alexander to Lauryn Hill. These artists are united by race and nation, yes, but also by form and subject matter. Equally defining are their obvious divergences. African American literature relies upon both this unity and this diversity to find its shape.

Accepting the narrowest interpretation of Ken's argument would require me to admit a few things that I'm not willing to admit. First, it would mean agreeing that there ever was, as Ken terms it, a "collective project we recognize as African American literature" (7). I do not think literature written by black Americans during the era of Jim Crow is nearly uniform or unified enough to be termed a "collective project" or a "shared mission." I do, however, think it can be called a literature. I'm not aware of anything about the term "literature" that requires coordination among writers. Rather, like the word "tradition" and the concept of a "canon," the idea of "a literature" is a retrospective critical designation. In naming African American literature, we define our field and claim a space in which to teach these works to our students. In that way, the terminology of "African American literature" is much more ours (teachers, students, and scholars) than it is theirs (novelists, poets, and playwrights).

Second, in accepting Ken's thesis, I'd have to concede that African American literature can be bracketed by its response to Jim Crow and that, in the absence of segregation, African American literature expires. Though the demise of Jim Crow marks a momentous historical shift, it does not so radically transform the conditions of black writing as to necessitate a change in nomenclature. In fact, to render the term "African American literature" defunct simply because the external pressures of Jim Crow have lifted is to cede far too much influence to things outside of the writer's control. African American literature has always been far more than the sum of its response to oppression, far more than what James Baldwin once termed the "counter-thrust" to white supremacy (18).

A strict constructionist reading of Ken's argument obscures the dynamic nature of African American literature under segregation. Jim Crow itself meant different things at different times in different places for different people. As Ralph Ellison observed in his essay "Remembering Richard Wright," "Wright grew up in a part of what was the old Confederacy, while I grew up in a state which possesses no indigenous tradition of chattel slavery. Thus, while we both grew up in segregated societies, mine lacked many of the intensities of custom, tradition, and manners which 'colored' the institutions of the Old South, and which were important in shaping Wright's point of view" (Callahan 659). In other words, even Jim Crow wasn't always Jim Crow. Wright's and Ellison's disparate fictions would bear the marks of their particular experiences with segregation, but also of their imaginations and their mastery of craft.

If we listen to Ellison, we can't help but understand that the free range of aesthetic movement we take for granted with black artists today was not unknown to artists of earlier eras--even those artists who wrote under the yoke of state-sanctioned racial discrimination. A day at the desk of a black writer then would look more or less like a day at the desk of a black writer today. To underestimate the aesthetic freedom and the concern for craft of those under social pressure is to overlook the purpose and the power of fiction.

Finally, I resist Ken's assertion that "black writers made black literature only and precisely because they encountered circumstances they would not themselves have chosen" (18). Writers certainly respond to social and political circumstances through fiction, but they also respond to the demands of narrative, of character, of storytelling in all its many forms. For one example of this, consider Ellison's work on his never-finished second novel. He intended his follow-up to Invisible Man--his novel of segregation--to respond to the changing political circumstances of the 1950s and '60s. He wished to achieve what he called the "aura of summing up" the United States at the midpoint of the twentieth century (Graham and Singh 301). But what ultimately dogged him, and perhaps doomed the book to incompletion, was not the burden of circumstances beyond his control, but his failure to solve basic matters of craft.

I can't help feeling in reading What Was African American Literature? that literature is being held hostage by politics. If authors consciously craft protest fiction, like Wright, then they are "instrumentalists" leveraging literature for political change. If they do not, like Ellison, then they are conscripted as "indexalists," their literature reduced to a yardstick of racial progress. The works of authors--of whatever time, place, race, or circumstance--always have the potential to perform political functions, in accordance with or in spite of authorial intentions. Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle to expose the plight of immigrant laborers, but instead ignited a controversy over the unsanitary handling of meat that eventually led to the founding of the Food and Drug Administration. More often than not, however, literature is too imprecise a tool to be used reliably as a means of targeted social change.

So what are the implications of Ken's book upon the composition, consumption, and criticism of literature by black Americans, both now and in the future? The subtitle of this panel, "The State of the Field in the New Millennium," is a subject that Ken's book invites us to explore but does not explicitly address. With his polemical sights set squarely upon his claim of what African American literature was and what it now cannot be, Ken leaves open the subject of what we should make of our present moment. So the question remains, if the works by black American authors today aren't African American literature, then what are they? As Ken himself observes, "To insist that African American literature 'was' is to raise the question of what all of this ongoing production 'is'" (3).

The ongoing production of black authors today is, among other things, a reminder that African American literature has always inhabited a complex and conditional space. How do we categorize the fiction of Heidi Durrow, author of the acclaimed 2010 novel The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, who is the only daughter of a black American man and a white Danish woman? We categorize it the same way we would the fiction of Nella Larsen, author of the Harlem Renaissance classics Quicksand and Passing, who was the daughter of a black immigrant from St. Croix and a white Danish woman. Though one author published under segregation and the other did not, both Larsen and Durrow explore the common theme of multiracial individuals seeking acceptance in a world of racial binaries. Are Larsen's protagonists affected by segregation? Without a doubt. But Durrow's protagonist is also subject to the rigidity of racial caste. To read one of these works as African American literature and the other as not would be to impose a critical division as capricious in the aesthetic realm as Jim Crow was in the sociopolitical realm.

I am by no means suggesting that we ignore the dramatic differences between past and present. The black population of the United States is more diverse and more loosely unified today than at any other time in our history. Though organized racism persists, we lack the circle-the-wagons motivation for unity that Jim Crow racism, and slavery before it, provided. This diversity and divergence finds expression in the literature written by black Americans today, but rather than understanding this only as a break from the past, we might also take it as a new way of appreciating the complex experiences of our ancestors.

Admitting the messiness of the past makes us better equipped to confront the messiness of the present. The opposite is also true. Black writers today grapple with questions of race, class, identity, nationhood, love, death--the full range of human motion and emotion. From Paul Beatty's shit-talking, basketball-playing, poetry-writing protagonist to Victor LaValle's morbidly obese, schizophrenic black nerd, our literature today displays the diversity of our thirty-five million black voices. Why should we imagine any less for the generations that came before us?

I see no bars to using African American literature as a transhistoric term, as long as history itself is not effaced in the process. Certainly no one is calling for an end to Russian literature because the Tsarist era has come to a close. Few would claim that English literature is dead now that the sun sets on the British Empire. Designations of national and ethnic literatures are necessarily capacious and approximate. As long as we don't lose sight of history, why should African American literature be any different? Whether we call it Negro literature, black literature, African American literature, or something else entirely, the writings of black Americans bear an affinity that not only allows for but actually thrives upon the shifting currents of history. Our critical nomenclature can dilate to encompass all that writing by black Americans was, is, and ever shall be.

So where does that leave us? With imperfection, which is another way of saying with most everything that matters. "African American literature" is an imprecise designation, to be sure, but until someone offers up something better you'll find me teaching my "Introduction to African American literature" course every Tuesday and Thursday from 9:30-10:20. My students and I will be reading the works of Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes beside those of Edwidge Danticat and Kevin Young--not to mention those of Nas and Jay-Z, too. We'll be reading all of them together, not simply because of some pedagogical imposition of order, but because these works all want to talk to each other.

Every other day of the week, though, I'll be revising my lectures and recalibrating my assignments. I'll be rethinking the ways that I write about and teach this literature. That's in part due to Ken. Without interventions like Ken's, we might otherwise be able to escape as a field this necessary self-reflection. Ken's book provides the impetus for a change that we might not even have known we needed, but might not survive without.

Canals and Rivers

John Ernest

Ken and I have found ourselves together on, I think at least three occasions so far to discuss this topic, and I think the expectation has usually been that we are on different sides of some kind of fence--on his, he's presenting a clear argument about a body of literature obstructed by outdated ideological baggage, and I'm operating chaotically at the baggage claim office, arguing that the powers that be have found and shipped the wrong luggage. We also differ in that I think that African American literature existed in the first half of the nineteenth century, whereas he sees it as a post-emancipation phenomenon, but that's another story. Still, in all of these encounters, I ended up feeling that we were not so far apart--perhaps only on opposite sides of the track, both boarding the same train. After all, Ken claims for What Was African American Literature? that its goal "is to produce greater clarity around an area of cultural activity with the hope of helping us understand better where we are and how we got here" (148). In Chaotic Justice, I claim that I'm looking to African American writers to "provide us with the most useful of maps--not the kind that charts a course to the future, but rather the kind that enables us to determine our present orientation in the currents of history" (7). So we're both trying to figure out where we are, however the collective we is understood, and we both think that getting literary history right is key to that quest.

The difference between our projects, I believe, is not that I promote a narrowly ideological mission statement for African American literature--for I am in fact drawn to the messiness, ideological and otherwise, of the literary past. In my view, the difference between our projects has to do with how we envision the process of history. I don't want to simplify Ken's work, which I greatly admire, but even at the risk of doing so, I'll say that Ken relies rather heavily on a linear understanding of history. Even though he accounts for the force of memory, individual and collective, one still gets the sense that the vision of history that drives What Was African American Literature? is one in which events are at least roughly sequential, and one in which the past largely stays in the past, at least so far as defining frameworks for collective identity are concerned. I'm afraid I am nevertheless simplifying his argument considerably, though, for actually Ken uses some of the natural imagery often found in the chaos theory that I use to address the gradual, fractal process of literary history--as, for example, in this statement from his first page: "African American literature took shape in the context of this challenge to the enforcement and justification of racial subordination and exploitation represented by Jim Crow. Accordingly, it will be my argument here that with the legal demise of Jim Crow, the coherence of African American literature has been correspondingly, if sometimes imperceptibly, eroded as well" (2). This imperceptible erosion seems to me less dramatic and definitive than the title of Ken's book would lead one to expect--though one can't fault Ken for avoiding a title like Imperceptible Shifts in African American Literature, or maybe, What Caused that Gorge in African American Literary History?

Still, I think one could say that my major difference with Ken has to do with how we envision historical process, perhaps something like the difference between seeing literary history as a river and seeing it as a canal. For Ken, African American literature was a canal--deliberately constructed, designed to get people from one place to another, and purposeful from its conception. All of that makes sense, and Ken does an admirable job of showing the sense that it made and of arguing that the canal has outlived its purpose. Still, I've known rivers, and that's the literary history to which I'm most drawn.

Again, at the risk of simplification, our historical differences might be most productively examined by extending Ken's argument a bit--or at least by applying more broadly the provocative title of his book. One might ask, then, Is there an African American Church? And is the force of this question undermined by the fact that one can offer no simple or neat answer to it--Yes, many churches, with different notions of what it means to be black and what constitutes a black theology? Of course. But still. And are there African American communities? And is the force of this question undermined by the fact that these communities are diverse in practically every way imaginable? Of course. And yet. More broadly, Are there any social, political, economic, or educational contexts in which we might find it useful to reference the historically potent fiction of race when trying to determine an individual's opportunities or statistical chances in life? Ken is quite right to join such scholars as Saidiya Hartman, Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., W. Lawrence Hogue, and many others in working to dcconstruct, decenter, or otherwise complicate concepts of a singular "black community," but shall we throw out the baby with the bath water, history, with the myths that have emerged, usually with some reason, from that history? We somehow manage to use the term American literature as if we know what that means, and I imagine we can do the same with African American literature, accounting for a messy history with an overly neat designator.

I wonder too whether it might be productive to think of a book entitled What Was White American literature? The fact that white literature has rarely acknowledged itself as such and has almost never been studied as such doesn't change the historical process that leads, pretty clearly in my view, from Thomas Dixon's The Clansman to Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, or from Albion Tourgee's A Fool's Errand to Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird to Kathryn Stockett's The Help. Ken seems inclined to think that it is limiting to identify a body of literature as African American, but I'm inclined to think it is useful to distinguish this literary tradition from a body of literature, white American literature, that is truly limiting--narrowing our vision while proclaiming expansive philosophical vistas and universal truths. Obviously, I do think that there is a kind of struggle involved in African American writing, one that involves social justice, but I think that the struggle is really just the struggle to get history right, to represent the world around us, and to help readers think about and live in their worlds. The fact that some black writers fail to do this and some white writers succeed in doing this doesn't, for me, argue against the value of identifying a historically grounded literary tradition. Because African American literature was, and because white American literature was and is, I hope that African American literature still is and will be, even as we acknowledge that the canals we built deliberately have been flooded by the rivers that formed over time.

On Tradition

Soyica Diggs Colbert

One might argue African American literature is literature written by African Americans. Therefore, as long as African Americans exist and write, African American literature will too exist. Purposefully provocative, Kenneth Warren's What Was African American Literature?, while purporting to call for an end to the literature itself, actually demands an end to a specific tradition of African American writing that occurred during the Jim Crow era. As Warren clarifies, "my claim is that the mere existence of literary texts does not necessarily indicate the existence of a literature" (6). As it maps multiple ways of understanding African American literature, Warren's book challenges theories that the literature coheres as a set of practices that retain a connection to the African continent or a "prolonged engagement with the problem of slavery" (2). He asserts, conversely, that "African American literature itself constitutes a representational and rhetorical strategy within the domain of a literary practice responsive to conditions that, by and large, no longer obtain" (9). Warren's argument for the end of African American literature asserts a causal relationship that restricts a set of practices constituting the literature to the context of certain historical conditions, specifically Jim Crow segregation. So even if authors continue to deploy such practices, the historical shifts that have occurred in the aftermath of the Jim Crow era exclude the literature of African Americans from African American literature. What Was African American Literature? is not merely provocation; restricting the period of African American literature to the Jim Crow era, he argues, creates space to develop ways of analyzing literature written by African Americans in the post-Jim Crow era and "to understand both past and present," because in order to understand past and present, "we have to put the past behind us" (84).

In this response, I will engage with the conclusion that understanding late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century black literature requires a reconsideration of what makes the tradition cohere. Warren argues that a temporal focus, a focus on the past, distinguishes post-Jim Crow writing by African American writers from African American literature, which concentrates on the future. He contends:

 Another way of putting this is to say that despite the attention
given to
 the folk past and the artistic achievements of past greats whose work
had
 gone unacknowledged, African American literature was prospective
rather
 than retrospective. The past was indeed important, but primarily as a
way
 of refuting charges of black inferiority and only secondarily as a
source
 and guide for ongoing creative activity. In the main, writers and
critics
 tended to speak as if the best work had not been written but was yet
to
 come, and the shape of that work was yet to be determined. Indeed, if
 anything separates what African American literature is now from what
it
 was, that difference, ironically, can be summed up by quoting that
most
 American of American writers, Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Our age is
 retrospective." (43) 

Warren does not deny the multi-temporal focus of African American literature but instead makes a claim about proportionality. While many of the post-Jim Crow era writers Warren references seem to support his theory of a turn to the past as a mechanism to incorporate themselves within a history of writing, I contend that several black writers (Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, August Wilson, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Nalo Hopkinson, to name a few), writing in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, have an intense interest in futurity because their work imagines itself as participating in the pursuit of black bodily, civic, and social sovereignty, pursuits that also preoccupied the political movements of the Jim Crow era. Looking towards the future situates the juridical victories of the Jim Crow era as one phase of black freedom movements that aimed toward affirming black humanity, and continue to flourish in the present. What is and has always been at stake is a shift in the value of black people within a global context. Therefore, even Toni Morrison's purportedly most historical novel Beloved, a novel Warren excludes from African American literature, supports the point that "we have to put the past behind us" through the characterization of Sethe's daughter, Denver. The novel offers Denver's action as a mechanism to imagine a future for black humanity that defies the animalization, dehumanization, and degradation that the formerly enslaved Sethe suffers at the hands of her owner, schoolteacher, and his nephews, when they chart her human and animal characteristics and then brutally rape her.

In a scene that I discuss in The African American Theatrical Body: Performance, Reception, and the Stage, and that serves as one of the framing scenes of Eddie Glaude's In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America, Beloved describes the thought process that leads up to Denver's taking action that both saves her mother's life and enables a future for their family. In the scene, Denver, who has been essentially housebound for most of her life, must summon the courage to leave her home to solicit help for her dying mother. As Denver sits in her yard, she recalls a conversation with her grandmother, Baby Suggs, who warns that "there was no defense" in the world against white folks. Baffled, Denver questions, "then what do I do?" And Baby Suggs responds, "Know it, and go on out the yard. Go on" (244). A ghostly presence, Baby Suggs intervenes in Denver's present to enable the young woman to have a future. Baby Suggs inspires Denver to move past her fear and pain, to move past the social circumstances that circumscribe the efficacy of black women's social agency, past a legacy of disempowerment, and toward a future of uncertain possibility. Baby Suggs's call to action does not abandon the past; as she insists, knowing it makes the past livable, and thus enables Denver to act. The interplay between past and present propels Denver forward and endows Beloved with a story that may be passed on.

Mobilizing, or setting the lessons of the past in motion through future-oriented action, serves as a methodology that, I would argue, unifies the black literary tradition and black cultural production in the pursuit of freedom. In the twenty-first century, that pursuit requires an alternative relationship to the past, the archive, and to representation from the ones that dominated the Jim Crow era. In "Why the Humanities Matter for Race Studies Today," Susan Koshy frames the current crisis over racial representation with two arguments. The first, "that racialization has assumed new forms because of the co-optation of civil rights discourses and initiatives by conservative and neoliberal agendas but that the structural opposition between whites and nonwhites persists as does the central role of the racial state," is what I would call the neoliberalist, or Condoleezza Rice argument. The second, "that since most present-day racial tensions and conflicts involve 'ambiguous facts and inscrutable motives,' which are not amenable to legal remedy, we now inhabit a post-racial, or color-blind, society," is what I would call the racial ascendance or Barack Obama argument (1542-43). Based on the current landscape of racial politics, I want to emphasize, as does Koshy, that "we have entered a new conjuncture," which I believe requires black studies scholars to reexamine familiar archives, not to abandon them or to mark a complete break, but rather to rearticulate their continuities and discontinuities.

This is where I find a reconsideration of temporality instructive because it allows us to analyze modes of interrelation that may be lost in Warren's figuration of African American literature. What Was African American Literature? asserts a singular end marked by juridical and legislative processes, and ignores the artistic practices that sustain and continue to feed the literature as those practices contribute to the historical conditions that frame their creation. In his conclusion to The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha recalls Frantz Fanon's depiction of the black subject as suffering from belatedness. Fanon does not justify black subjects' belatedness through a consideration of the structural inequities that burden black people's lives so that the perennial sufferers of colored people's time might assimilate the structures and submit to the strictures of modernity. Instead, as Bhabha asserts, and Fanon shows:

 It is the function of the lag
 to slow down the linear, progressive
 time of modernity to reveal its "gesture," its tempi
, "the pauses
 and stresses of the whole performance." This can only be
achieved as
 Walter Benjamin remarked of Brecht's epic theatre--by damning
the stream
 of real life, by bringing the flow to a standstill in a reflux of
 astonishment. (253) 

Using the language of theatrical representation, Bhabha depicts how those troubled with belatedness reveal the modes of modernity's production. They interrupt the steady flow of progress, dragging it to a halt, exposing the cities of the dead (August Wilson's City of Bones in Gem of the Ocean, the Earthseed settlements in Octavia Butler's Parable of the Talents, and New Half-Way Tree in Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight Robber) that create friction in the steady development of modernity and reconfigure our understanding of past, present, and future. These places mark the relativity of developmental time, exposing how the socially dead are constitutive of modernity.

What Was African American Literature? locates a historical rupture, occurring with the end of Jim Crow, that puts African American writers in the position to overcome "the very condition that gave one's own existence meaning" (Warren 18). The depiction of historical development is progressive and unilateral and does not leave room for the traces of history that continue to contribute to the historical conditions within which African American writers write even with an end to de jure segregation. As Bhabha explains, "When the dialectic of modernity is brought to a standstill, then the temporal action of modernity--its progressive, future drive--is staged, revealing, 'everything that is involved in the act of staging per se'" (253-54). Following Marvin Carlson, if the theater the general locale, but certainly not the only one for "the act of staging"--can be understood as a fundamentally ghosted space, then one may argue that the "temporal action of modernity--its progressive, future drive" leaves a trace locatable in the repertoire and archive of black culture production. That trace may orient current and future practices, but it does not relegate those practices to the past. The trace enables the pragmatic, future-oriented drive to "Go on" in the midst of all encouragements to the contrary.

Nevertheless, Warren's critique of artists and critics hailing the past as a mechanism to make legible a literary tradition that is no longer in the service of a socially distinctive group establishes a basis upon which to call into question both black studies and race-based political coalitions. Especially considering the ways that racial and gender inclusion function as markers of the fulfillment of American democratic ideals in the twenty-first century, we must ask how race and gender function as trapdoors that limit black freedom movements. In raising this line of inquiry, I do not seek to mark the end of the tradition, but at the same time I cannot deny the cultural signs that Warren examines. These limited occurrences of social inclusion call attention to how the racial identifications function differently in the aftermath of formalized Jim Crow. To deny that race operates differently in the twenty-first century than in the nineteenth century would be absurd. Doing black studies in the twenty-first century then "forces us to articulate discourses of cultural and political linkage only through and across difference in full view of the risks of that endeavor," to quote Brent Hayes Edwards (12-13).

In Warren's text, the shift to a post-Jim Crow era emphasizes the class distinctions that always distinguished African Americans but did not overshadow racial affiliations because of the legal enforcement of the color line. In the post-Jim Crow era, according to Warren, class trumps race. Yet race remains as labile and as elusive a category in the twenty-first century as it was in the nineteenth. Consequently, I concur with Nikhil Pal Singh's accounting of the saliency of race as a political category. Recalling the shifts in W. E. B. Du Bois's politics throughout his life and career, Singh reminds us that "Du Bois rejected both the liberal and Marxist faith that racism and race relations would disappear as the category of race lost the force of official sanction and political reference, and he anticipated (correctly) that race and race relations would be the terrain on which a wider array of social and political conflicts were mediated, interpreted, resolved, and displaced" (89). The current political crises that disproportionately plague black people (poverty, rates of incarceration, unemployment) did not emerge in the post-Jim Crow era, and thus must be understood as a part of a long history of social and political conflicts that African American literature challenges.

While Warren engages with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s theory of repetition with a difference as one way to distinguish African American literature, What Was African American Literature? concludes that Gates's theory does not account for the sea change that occurs with desegregation. Contrary to Warren, however, I do believe a set of formal practices of revision enables African American literature to cohere even in the aftermath of Jim Crow. The Black Women Writers' Renaissance of the late twentieth century, for example, is fundamental to the process of revising, reforming, and perpetuating African American literature. To situate this writing as a part of the African American literary tradition, Cheryl Wall uses the metaphor of a line that stands for literary tradition and lineage. She explains that:

 Scholars have set forth competing theories of African American
literary
 tradition, for which the line is a fitting metaphor. Whether one
 perceives texts as responding to their precursors or as signifying on
 them, tradition constitutes a theoretical line in which texts produce
and
 are produced by other texts. These intertextual connections may be
 thematic or mythic, rhetorical or figurative.... I maintain that
 nonliterary texts, such as blues, sermons, and recipes for conjure,
 insert themselves in African American tradition and worry this
literary
 line. (11) 

Black women's traditions, as Wall and others have shown, differ significantly from those of their male counterparts, but women's writing still demonstrates a self-conscious search to imagine a future predicated on "a rebellious and successful Afro-American female literary precursor" (Awkward 6-7). To search for our mothers' gardens, a trope Alice Walker develops in her recuperation of the work of Zora Neale Hurston, does not relegate the political practices imagined in the writing of black women's texts to a past that no longer coheres. Rather, it relates the writing to a tradition with distinctive periods both "broken and sporadic," as Hortense Spillers writes, worried and disjointed but nevertheless an indelible line (qtd. in Gates, Reading Black 6).

Trains, Planes, and What Was African American Literature?

Russ Castronovo

How does What Was African American Literature? by Kenneth W. Warren travel? In asking this question, I want to consider how Warren's book travels to two incommensurate but not exclusive sites--the public sphere and ethnic American studies. The mobility of any book is a material matter: books can be tomes, too heavy or rare to lug around, but they can also be convenient objects, easy to hold in the hand and graced with ample margins that invite commentary and dialogue. This artifact falls into the latter category. Mobility is also metaphoric, suggestive of the portability of ideas and their applicability to other crises and contexts. To think about how Warren's book travels, then, is to treat What Was African American Literature? at once as a physical object with multiple copies and as a polemic whose charge is not limited to the ostensible topic of African American literature. The question also carries potential implications to other fields of cultural production.

In keeping with these twin purposes, I will first discuss the general interest in this book as a salutary indication of how literary history can become both an academic undertaking and a public issue. Next, I want to take up a second series of considerations that might trouble this initial assessment to ask if Warren's literary history, one in which the reaction to Jim Crow serves as a prime mover of aesthetic output and achievement, overdetermines the prohibitive force of the state with respect to other literatures. To put this query in specific and perhaps more pointed terms: could we imagine a cognate title such as "What Was Asian American Literature?"

As it reaches out to zones where academic discussions of race intersect with informed public intellectual discussion, Warren's book has traveled quite well. The blogosphere, book review sections of major newspapers, and panel discussions have all featured the book, and these are indicative of the book's transit to the public sphere. Its title throws down a gauntlet that has been taken up in several public forums, including a symposium in the Los Angeles Review of Books and in a live and lively online discussion, hosted by the Chronicle of Higher Education, between Warren and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. In these exchanges, Warren and others refer to the book as an "essay," which is appropriate since its thesis is something that readers are meant to try out. An educated public is encouraged to experiment with an argument about racial redress while academics, for their part, are pressed to consider whether the study of literature fails to address social justice if that study focuses solely on racial group identity.

The practical compromises of travel can illustrate Warren's argument. Airline seating remains segmented by an unforgiving economic calculus, loading and seating passengers with respect to a single metric that does not take into account varying heights, sizes, or (in my case) levels of impatience. In what often seems a ritual designed expressly to humiliate and shame, passengers in the main cabin slowly file past those already seated in first class, witnesses to the luxury that they presumably are not entitled to enjoy. There is perhaps no corporate phrase more unforgiving than "economy class." Sitting at the back of an airplane in 2012 is not the same thing as sitting at the back of the bus in 1955, the year Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man. The particularities of airline seating are not inherently discriminatory or, at least, are no more discriminatory than the supposed fairness that is endemic to capitalism as a whole. Such arrangements may be unpleasant for someone who is six feet, three inches, in much the same way that the storied bed of Procrustes proves incommodious for sleepers who do not fit its dimensions. Charles Chesnutt in The Marrow of Tradition (1901) translates this myth to the arbitrary divisions of a Jim Crow railway car, describing how a black medical doctor feels slighted and out of place when he is forced to ride with black laborers. Warren discusses this scene as well, noting the "patent absurdity of imposing the same classifications and restrictions" on the elite as the underclass regardless of race (108). In other words, Chesnutt's doctor would be quite at home with the purely economic divisions of airline travel but not with the segmentations that were a fact of everyday transportation under racial segregation. In Warren's view, we misrecognize and underestimate economic structures when we hold on to "a problematic assumption of race-group interest" so fixedly that we reify symptoms of contemporary inequality without debating the "type of social change that would make a profound difference in the fortunes of those at the bottom of our socio-economic order" (110, 117).

When we try out this essay, we are not making literary determinations so much as literary-historical ones. As Warren commented in the online forum with Gates, "My argument is of most significance to those who teach and write about African American lit. It's not meant to be prescriptive for writers at the current moment.... The significance of my argument goes to literary history and how we teach it" ("Live Chat"). Publics have long been interested in literature. We know this because people read. But rarely do so-called ordinary or general-interest readers respond to crises of periodization such as the one created by Warren's contention that African American literature was defined by conditions of de jure segregation that ended with civil rights. In short, by asking "what was African American literature," Warren's real question may be: "what is African American literary history and criticism?" Because this book travels, it suggests how literary history might become not just a matter of public import but of public policy. The distinction between literature and literary criticism is no small one, given Warren's sobering reminder that many consumers of contemporary African American literature do "little more than to summon the past as the guarantor of the altruistic interests of current elites" (116). For everyone seated in first class, African American literature provides an allaying fantasy that reading minority literature somehow constitutes a meaningful social act. The literary-historical project--and it is Warren's use of "was" that makes this project historical at an essential level--interrupts this roseate vision: the battles that many readers think they are fighting have likely already been won, leaving them unconcerned with enduring conflicts still in need of social redress.

As I have suggested, it is significant that this argument has migrated from academia to spheres of public intellectual discussion. But the public sphere is neither a smooth, undifferentiated terrain, nor even a single formation. So if we think about What Was African American Literature? entering the public sphere, we have to consider which public sphere that is. Let me start with the social geography that I inhabit. What does it mean for me to travel with this conveniently portable book to libraries, coffee shops, and yes, on an airplane to an academic conference? What does this book perform when it is carried by a white man? And now imagine this white man en route to Arizona, a state where school districts have recently mandated the end of Mexican American studies, articulating by the very baggage he carries (so much baggage!) that African American literature is also a relic of the literary-historical past.

In broader terms, we might wonder if it means the same thing to ask about the end of African American literature in places, not where ethnic studies has succeeded, but where it is still fighting for a toehold. Warren is quite clear that his interests lie in thinking about the strained connections between literature and social justice, and only a grievous misreading of his book could adduce an argument to deny others recognition. Still, this book about how the grounds of African American literary production have changed with the fading of Jim Crow, like any book, cannot fully or adequately anticipate its own travels, including to terrains where administrators, policymakers, and pundits, with no thought of social justice anywhere in their minds, might welcome the pronouncement that African American is "was."

The masthead of W. E. B. Du Bois's The Crisis proclaimed a journal of "the darker races" and this call shows up in his Dark Princess (1928), which features a lot of travel and spiritual movement between Pan-Asia and Pan-Africa. Speaking to a black man who finds his way to professional advancement barred, an Asian woman expresses solidarity and sympathy: "I see that you American Negroes are not a mere amorphous handful. You are a nation!" (Du Bois 16). This transnational expression raises questions about how the particularity of Warren's argument may or may not fit the broader geography of the color line. Can we travel with Warren's title to understand ethnic literatures in global contexts, the writing of the darker races? In short, what are the implications of asking, "What Was Asian American Literature?"

Following Warren's approach that posits the collective endeavor of African American literature as a reaction to legal forms of inequality, we might be tempted to suggest that Asian American literature likewise has its origins in juridical forms of racial discrimination, dating back to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Indeed, according to the literary history that Warren gives us where "a course in Af-Am lit would begin in roughly 1890 and end somewhere in the 1970s" ("Live Chat"), Asian American literature would actually predate African American literature. And it might endure longer, too, since it was not until 1988 with the passage of the Civil Liberties Act that the U. S. government apologized and paid reparations of $20,000 to each of the Japanese and Japanese Americans interned in places like Heart Mountain, Topaz, and Manzanar. (For the record, $20,000 does not buy an endless supply of first-class airplane tickets.) This last site is, of course, the setting for Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's memoir, Farewell to Manzanar (1973), whose child narrator remembers that among the thousands relocated to the camp stood the wife of a Japanese man, a woman "taller than anyone in the camp," who "wore an Aunt Jemima scarf around her head." Houston writes, "But this woman, I realized much later, was half-black, with light mulatto skin, passing as a Japanese in order to remain with her husband" (Houston and Houston 37). The historical lens of black/white segregation does not fully register the complexities of different shadings of color during Jim Crow. As Leslie Bow asks, "where did the Asian sit on the segregated bus?" (1). Was/Is she an Asian American literary subject since Executive Order 9066 seems to shape her identity more dramatically than the legal apparatus of Jim Crow? Or was she an African American literary subject who would return to black/white segregation once the camp closed in 1945?

The answer is not either/or, since this woman represents a highly mobile subject, moving across and within color lines while taking part voluntarily in the forced movement of Japanese and Japanese Americans to the California desert. This half-white, half-black woman living provisionally as a Nisei spouse travels well, fluidly but no doubt painfully finding her way to hybridity and solidarity. She may travel better, in fact, than What Was African American Literature? if only because her serial performances of black identity, imprisoned citizenship, and Asian American kinship are ongoing, never fully encapsulated by the perfective past of "was." While the state's inscription of subjects may never completely subsume the complexity of identity, its commands are also never confined to a single register. This mixed-race woman from Farewell to Manzanar is not fully constrained by either internment or Jim Crow, although she does experience both in ways that are as uneven as the different degrees of agency and volition she exhibits within each regime. So too might we wonder whether state-mandated forms of inequality can ever sum up the motivations that inspire literary undertakings.

Yet lest some notion of aesthetic plenitude provide a too-quick excuse for identifying (and celebrating) a zone of human striving that escapes interpellation, Warren argues that "black elites" engaged belles lettres in a world where horizons were drawn by "constitutionally sanctioned segregation" (51). African American literature may have been a function of the Jim Crow past, but, according to the title of a recent book by Michelle Alexander, we are also living in the era of "the New Jim Crow." Books and people are not the only things that travel. The state also proves highly mobile and adaptive, updating racial discrimination to the point where it no longer seems racialized. "We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it," Alexander contends (2).

It is difficult to conjugate a question like "What Was Asian American Literature?" when we cannot agree on basic terms like "was." The project becomes still more difficult when some would object to the question itself. In The Way We Argue Now, Amanda Anderson writes that "a narrow understanding of selfhood and practice results from an overemphasis on sociological, ascribed, or group identity" (4). Anderson urges a return to what deconstruction threw under the juggernaut of identity politics--critical distance and communicative reason--as though these markers of intellectual habitus were not already bound up with a history of subject positions and entitlement. But that redesign is the topic of another prospective essay: "What Was and Remains White Literature That Is Invisible to Itself."

Leaving WAS Behind

Sharon P. Holland

Because what WAS is one thing, and now it is not because it is dead.--William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (1936)

Civil Rights

Warren's narrative of black letters is a rich and thoroughgoing--albeit, implicit--critique of our post-racial moment. But his point here is not to convince us that we are past something, or even that, to rift off of our Mr. Faulkner, WAS is. Instead, I locate Warren's critique of our post-Obama moment in the concluding chapter of the book, in the middle of explicating Michael Thomas's 2007 novel Man Gone Down. Paraphrasing a particularly melancholy moment in the text, Warren observes: "Or to put it more prosaically, with the struggles of the civil rights era now in the rearview mirror of history, the policies and programs resulting from that time seem, in the eyes of the narrator, to have gone awry" (131). In essence, Warren notes, like Adolph Reed, that black bourgeoisie children of the hipster generation both applaud the opportunities afforded to black bodies in this post-civil rights era and look back upon segregation and its suturing of black community as necessity with some nostalgia. The next generation wants to have its cake and eat it too. But when it comes to this post-Jim Crow and, by extension, post-civil rights world that is so remarked upon by bloggers, activists, critics and professors of black life and letters, I wonder if we occupy the same world at all. In brief, I wonder if instead of thinking about the world, that I am witnessing the creation of a world.

"God Hates Fa(n)gs" (1)

The world I live in is punctuated by a dream deferred. Each day I wake up and know that before the day is over, I will be reminded that marriage--an institution I care little about as a '70s feminist is between a man and a woman, and across the roadways in my county I can still see a sign or two that reminds me that "God hates fags"--a kind of retroactive blasphemy (who gets to speak for God anyway?) now appropriated for political purposes by religious groups like the Westboro Baptist Church. Post-civil rights? Are we kidding ourselves? At my job I am the only out, visibly black woman in the college--when I remind colleagues that I am integrating the university but have no National Guard to help me do so, they are both surprised by the fact of my uniqueness and puzzled by my recourse to that history to drive home my point. Queers have long since been cautioned to stay away from the use of the moniker "civil rights," but because of my racial blackness, I choose to embrace both at moments and am reminded in the visages of my colleagues how nonsensical such togetherness really is. To whose body does this history truly belong? During my first and last Pride march, I was shocked to see that the overwhelming majority of anti-gay protestors who came in carloads from as far away as Charlotte were people of color. In this regard, if black struggle is to get its hearing in the pages of black fiction--or at least its novel tradition--then that struggle has been defined in the narrowest of terms, and for the profit of a few. Which, I think, is Warren's point here, a point driven home both by the critique leveled against the myopic turn of a literature and by example.

There are several opportunities in Warren's study to think through the racial project's several commitments. While his focus here is to demonstrate that our literature's political commitments are marked by a past that makes the contemporary field a post-African American literature field, it is worrying to find the racial so lonely, outstanding in its field, so to speak. If a literature can be and is defined by what it is not, then the racial project must drag sexuality, gender, and even a biologically bankrupt sex into this orbit of blackness. What would WAS be, given this new constellation of attributes? But I think this constant leaving behind marks the territory of black literary criticism's high art. For without such leave-taking, we would be beyond our racial comfort zone, we would be in another terrain of the literary, yes?

little black girl

To drive these earlier points home, I want to return to Warren's critique of Michael Thomas's novel. I was struck by the following observation:

 His older son, Cecil, who prefers to be simply "C," is
dark-skinned and
 for that reason has already been subjected to racist remarks by his
 private-school classmates, who have teased him for being "brown
as poop."
 The younger son, Michael, who goes by the initial "X,"
looks just like
 his father except with skin so white he could pass. And then there is
his
 little girl, who is never named
 but whose brown eyes suggest she
 is more like her older than her younger brother. (128-29; emphasis
added) 

This is a profound and telling redaction, as it places black femaleness in nascent, infantile relationship to black maleness, while it holds off the possibility of her patrimony for substantiation through filial lines, rather than patronymic ones. While I am grateful that Thomas's unnamed sister escapes the scatological fate of "C," I do wonder how that little black girl is going to grow up so unhinged to both race and place. In thinking through the trajectory of African American literature, I wonder what images appear in that rearview mirror on the road already behind us.

Only Human

In an earlier explication of Richard Wright's Black Boy, Warren notes that he "recalls that the white waitresses with whom he worked in Chicago... lived on the surface of their days; their smiles were surface smiles, and their tears were surface tears. Negroes lived a truer and deeper life than they' " (24). While Warren doesn't go on to speculate about the gendered nature of Wright's comment, I think this observation is pivotal to our continued understanding of what the black literary project is for. We are all used to the better-than-human argument for racial blackness by now. What I am interested in here is, first, the way in which Wright's project can and does speak to Frantz Fanon, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, and more recently Sarah Ahmed and Jay Prosser; and second, the way in which the contestation here is set between black men and white women--a battle in which the signifying presence of black femaleness is absented, a condition Hortense Spillers once remarked upon as being vestibular to culture. (2)

I believe that the contrast outlined above is still prevalent today. Black literature cares not for the black female body as much as it cares deeply for the preservation of its iconographic wholeness--a unity completed in the embodied presence of a signifying maleness through which the call-and-response to black community can be absorbed and understood by a wider body politic. This has always been the case, mostly because we tend to become uncomfortable when "racial blackness" strays from the human, a critical imperative that has not allowed critics much of an opportunity to question the category of the human, into which we must inevitably fall. Creating our own destiny is not a matter of, pace Tavis Smiley's Covenant, reproducing the terms of our own predicament. Rather, it is a matter of taking as an object of inquiry our collective destiny under the rubric "human." It means asking whether or not we believe that human aspirations count above everything else that matters in our particular corner of the universe. My call here echoes that of Paul Gilroy in Against Race. It is time to think of our humanity not solely in racial terms, but in the terms in which it is constituted--through gender, sexuality, sex, and yes, perhaps, the biosphere. Once we make this move to unite our warring selves, maybe we might take a bit of time to think about how this "self" draws its very understanding of its being from the work of others, leaving little doubt that the stuff of blackness is part and parcel of the world that beckons--literally sometimes--at our feet.

Notes

(1.) I take this subheading title from the title sequence to Alan Ball's True Blood (HBO Productions). Ball's image on signboard is meant as a rift on the Westboro Baptist Church banners used during their anti-LGBT pickets.

(2.) I list these authors because all have a stake in phenomenology, to some extent, with the exception of Jay Prosser, whose text, Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality (New York: Columbia UP, 1998), provides an interesting parallel to Warren's text in that it tries to unpack the central and signal part transsexuality has to play in queer studies.

Response

Kenneth W. Warren

I would be remiss if I didn't begin my response by thanking Melissa Daniels and Greg Laski for organizing this forum; Adam, Russ, Soyica, John, and Sharon for taking their time to engage with my work; and Nathan Grant and Aileen Keenan at African American Review for publishing these essays. Notwithstanding the questions I have raised about African American literary study at the present moment, there is no denying that the capacity of scholars in a field to meet serious critique with serious response is a measure of that field's vitality, and I think the responses here are very well considered ones. My only regret is that I don't have the space to address all of the questions and issues raised by my interlocutors. I have reorganized my remarks from what I delivered at the MLA forum to take into account revisions that my respondents have made in preparing their texts for publication.

It is the case that all of my respondents agree only partially with the argument of What Was African American Literature?. They temper their shared sense that the book has performed a salutary intervention in discussions of African American literature with various demurrals that while the terms in which we constitute African American literature might need to be interrogated anew, African American literature itself can never quite be a "was" because at least some of the conditions that brought it into being in the first place cannot yet, and may never, be spoken of in the past tense.

They raise this objection in several ways. For example, Sharon notes that from the standpoint of LGBTQ individuals the current moment is not yet a "post-civil rights" moment. Her point has merit. Although there are no laws or regulations excluding Sharon from teaching at the campus where she teaches; although her university would be subject to punishment if it made Sharon's gender, race, or sexuality the basis for refusing to employ her; and although her university has diversity officers and programs devoted to trying to make her campus welcoming of people from a variety of backgrounds, including her own, she is correct to note that many of the issues still confronting LGBTQ individuals are matters of civil rights. To label the current moment a "post-civil rights" moment would be--unless doing so were accompanied by several qualifications--a mistake. Adam suggests that if we see the political past as having been as "messy" as the political present, we will come to understand that a shared complexity links the Jim Crow era and our own. Soyica takes exception to my characterization of the literary posture of current black writers as "retrospective" in contrast to the "prospective" orientation of African American literature (i.e., black writing during the Jim Crow regime), arguing that post-Jim Crow writing remains "future-oriented" in a way that "unifies the black literary tradition" that exists "as a part of a long history of social and political conflicts that African American literature challenges." Russ suggests that variegations in contemporary social and material conditions that enable ethnic studies to be relatively secure in some locales while being embattled in others, along with Michelle Alexander's contention that mass incarceration represents a "New Jim Crow," indicate that in some way the conditions of the previous moment still prevail in some places even now. John frames his differences with me by way of an extended metaphor about the differences between rivers and canals.

To respond metaphorically, I don't have any real problem with John's claim that I view literary history as a "canal," if by that he means primarily something constructed by people working through institutions at a particular time and place for particular reasons--something that, depending on circumstances, may or may not continue to be needed for the ends that led it to be dug in the first place. He might, however, be a little surprised to hear that I don't thoroughly object to his metaphor of literary history as a river--provided of course that, as he makes this comparison, he does something like imagine himself in Cairo, Illinois, standing at the confluence of two great flowing bodies of water, and concede that to "see" one of these bodies of water as the Ohio River, and to "see" it ending at that spot only to be swallowed up by a larger flowing body called the Mississippi River, is a matter of the way history, politics, and culture have now made it seem natural and right to term the flowing body of water south of Cairo the Mississippi River instead of the Ohio River or, indeed, instead some other, third name. In fact, he might note that history, politics, and the conventions of mapping and navigation have determined that this river remains the Mississippi River even after other rivers intersect with it.

I don't want to persist overly long with this metaphor and risk obscuring my point more than I may have illuminated it, but since John gave the trope to me, I thought it might be useful to torque it a bit to emphasize that literary histories and categories are made, perhaps most especially so when these categories, histories, and (if we must) traditions, appear to us most natural. And I don't think that any of my interlocutors would disagree that the task of the literary historian, at least in part, entails the responsibility of inquiring into the conditions that have given rise to the literary categories we use, while trying to account for the cultural, intellectual, and political work that those categories do, or have done.

Now before going on to address these points severally, I want to observe that to the extent the panelists raise objections or suggest qualifications to my argument, they do so largely on political grounds. In noting this I don't mean to say that the only issues are political. I take it that underwriting John's contrast between rivers and canals is a desire to highlight differences between aesthetic and political accounts of literature and literary history. But if this is not quite right as a full paraphrase of John's critique, it does describe the complaint that Adam raises straightforwardly in worrying that in my argument "literature is being held hostage by politics." While I readily agree that literary texts are much more than fancily dressed-up political arguments or demonstrations, what's crucial to see here is that, unless you have a definition that insists that black people inherently produce literature differently from other people, any credible definition of African American literature as a whole entails at some level a political (or at least, sociological) dimension. This holds for Adam as well, who despite insisting that literary criteria ought to define African American literature, nonetheless links Heidi Durrow's recent novel with Nella Larsen's Harlem Renaissance novel on sociopolitical themes and grounds rather than aesthetic ones, arguing that both authors explore "the common theme of multiracial individuals seeking acceptance in a world of racial binaries" and that racial caste in the early twenty-first century shares a lot with de facto racial segregation of the twentieth. So, it doesn't count as a serious objection to my book to say that its account of African American literature privileges political matters, because if you have a coherent account of African American literature, it must rest on a justification that is at least partly political. Even someone like Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who has for decades now championed a tropological or figurative definition of African American literature, cannot for all of his attempts to do so hide the sociopolitical dimensions of his account. The Signifying Monkey begins by citing ongoing de facto segregation and high rates of black unemployment as securing the black vernacular's "singular role as the black person's ultimate sign of difference" (xix). Indeed, Gates's arguments never effectively demonstrate that the tropes he deems definitive of African American literature are pervasive to the texts he includes in the category in any way that usefully distinguishes them from texts from other literatures. A sincere objection to my argument thus cannot be that I have a "political" account of African American literature while others don't. Rather, it is either that I have a different political account than my critics do, or that they adduce other unspecified criteria (e.g., Bradley's claim that black texts "bear an affinity" or "want to talk to each other") to mask the historical/political aspects of their literary/historical categories.

It may help, then, to explore further some of the differences laid out by my colleagues. Although Russ is not quite right in saying that in my version of literary history "the reaction to Jim Crow serves as a prime mover of aesthetic output and achievement," I can't fault him for putting the matter in this way, because it seems a fair construal of various phrases from my book, such as "African American literature itself constitutes a representational and rhetorical strategy within the domain of a literary practice responsive to conditions that, by and large, no longer obtain" (9). My point in What Was African American Literature?, however, is not that all African American writers were moved to become literary authors because of Jim Crow. In fact, most became authors in spite of the strictures of Jim Crow, while any number of black Americans were deterred from authorship by the repressions of that regime. The key issue is that, however varied were the motivations that provoked black Americans into literary authorship, what gave their work collective salience--that is, what made it seem imperative to see all of this individual writing as something to be considered collectively as a literature for the race--were the political and social conditions created by Jim Crow. So in returning to Sharon's response, while I agree with her in a qualified way that post-civil rights is something of a misnomer for the current moment, the operative terms for me are not civil rights and post-civil rights, but Jim Crow and post-Jim Crow. African American literature was a phenomenon of a Jim Crow society. Although we live now in a society that is highly and even dramatically unequal, it is, for all of that, a post-Jim Crow society. As Jane Dailey has helpfully observed,

 Jim Crow did not draw its strength from segregation and should not
be
 viewed as synonymous with it. Jim Crow's power over African
Americans
 came from exclusion: exclusion from voting booths; from juries; from
 neighborhoods; from unions and management positions; from higher
 education; from professions; from hospitals and theaters and hotels.
The
 "southern way of life" of racial hierarchy and segregation
was backed up
 by white economic and political control and secured through the
police
 power of the state. (xiv) 

While one might note that some features of that old order are more than a little responsible for present conditions or that, say, the Republican Party is currently acting to limit access to the ballot in ways that disproportionately affect people of color, the system we exist in now is not the one that prevailed over the South and shaped politics in the North for some sixty years or so. My book describes how the idea that imaginative and belletristic writing by black Americans constituted a separate, collective undertaking took hold during the period when the systematic exclusion that was Jim Crow was being expanded and consolidated. The embrace by black writers and readers of the belief that the future prospects of the race demanded a separate and distinct literature was, if we consider the dramatic uptick in the numbers of calls for such a literature beginning in the 1890s, a feature of that moment when the political silencing of the vast majority of the nation's black population, the charges of racial inferiority upon which justifications for segregation, exclusion, and disfranchisement turned, gave black literary production something that it could do. Under Jim Crow, the success of any member of the race, in any arena of endeavor where she could demonstrate her capacity for human excellence, could plausibly be seen as undermining the Jim Crow order. For this reason, the production of highly artful, even seemingly nonpolitical works of literature was as important as producing literary works that made compelling arguments against Jim Crow society.

When Sharon asserts that "Black literature cares not for the black female body as much as it cares deeply for ... the embodied presence of a signifying maleness," she acknowledges that one cannot simply assume that an attack on Jim Crow automatically entailed an attack on all forms of injustice and inequality affecting black Americans. For this reason, her response is less troubled than the others by what it means to see African American literature as a literary period rather than a contemporary phenomenon. Adam, too, makes note that multiple aims complicated Jim Crow-era black politics, but uses this observation to deny any coherence to either the political moment or the literature produced within it, asserting that "literature written by black Americans during the era of Jim Crow is [not] nearly uniform or unified enough to be termed a 'collective project' or a 'shared mission.' " However, the situation I describe does not impute or assume uniformity across the aims of black writers and texts during Jim Crow (and on this point Adam's assertion that some "affinity" is present throughout all of black writing signals a commitment to a collectiveness that far outstrips anything implied by my argument). Rather, my inquiry points out, first, that the idea of African American literature emerged from beliefs that by virtue of what writers might accomplish aesthetically and argumentatively, black imaginative literature could collectively play a central role in dismantling Jim Crow; second, that the conditions of Jim Crow made these beliefs about the political efficacy of literary production plausible. Accordingly, I see Soyica's intervention as an attempt to up the ante on the political claims associated with literary production by invoking what she sees in the present as "black freedom movements," and the "pursuit of black bodily, civic, and social sovereignty" as bases for a contemporary African American literature. Her contention is that there is still, politically, a great deal yet to be done, and that contemporary black writers and scholars have an important role to play in getting it done. What she never makes clear, however, is why something called African American literature is necessary to do all of this. That is, while it may often be a good thing when scholars and writers take an interest in social justice, it does not follow that one needs to adduce the existence of a contemporary African American literature for the pursuit of social justice ends--unless one has in mind a particular kind of political project.

Here is where what Soyica terms "class distinctions" and what Russ refers to as "material conditions" come in to play. On this point one does, however, have to tread carefully. Part of what Russ means in mentioning material conditions is that in considering my arguments, readers should take into account the fact that although I may teach at an elite, private university where the field of African American literature is not currently embattled, my book may be read, and possibly put to use by "administrators, policymakers, and pundits, with no thought of social justice anywhere in their minds," and with the idea that we might all be better off if African American literature were not taught at all. Whatever the likelihood of misappropriations of my argument, the most powerful--and it seems to me, the correct--response is not to tout the putative role of African American literature in furthering social justice in the present, but rather to observe that African American literature is a vital part of the literary history of the United States and of literature more broadly, and that any claim to know these topics (and to know U. S. history as well) requires that one know something about the literature that emerged during a decisive period in the history of the United States. In truth, administrators and politicians who are intent on dismantling ethnic studies programs aren't too particular about the arguments they make. They are just as likely (perhaps more so?) to object to the study of African American literature in response to claims that it is implicated in current political struggles as they are to dismiss it because it is only part of our literary past. The upshot is that it would be a mistake to trim the sails of our research and our arguments to fears about what people who are hostile to the enterprise as a whole might do.

I will conclude my response by taking up the observation that I may have construed my argument too narrowly. In Adam's and John's estimations, I appear to be refusing to grant to African American literature the same leeway and imprecision we commonly allow ourselves in discussing other literatures. In Adam's words, "Few would claim that English literature is dead now that the sun sets on the British Empire," while John observes, "We somehow manage to use the term American literature as if we know what that means." For John and Russ, there is the additional fear that to remove contemporary writing by black Americans from the domain of African American literature risks a failure to acknowledge and challenge the way that a white American literature from Thomas Dixon to Kathryn Stockett has shaped, and is shaping, our views of history and truth. And finally, on this point Russ wonders whether or not the strength or the validity of my argument rests on the extent to which it can or cannot help answer such questions' as, "What Was Asian American Literature?"

Regarding this last point, I do know that in the fall of 2011, Professor Colleen Lye of the English department at the University of California-Berkeley did teach a seminar, "What Was Asian American Literature?," the title of which was explicitly a paraphrase of the title of my book. I don't know what answers Professor Lye and her students came up with, but I suppose the course itself counts as some evidence that the argument of my book, for good or for ill, has traveled beyond its explicit point of focus. To be sure, as I wrote What Was African American Literature? I was well aware that subtending my inquiry was a potentially broader interrogation of the problem of how literary scholars articulate the relatively circumscribed domain of literary production with broader social and political phenomena, such as social group and national identities. It does strike me that what we now do habitually and without much thought could stand some rethinking, and that we shouldn't automatically feel comfortable with the ease with which we refer to various literatures. I indeed suspect that all of my respondents were moved to study African American authors, in part because they were uncomfortable with all that had been left out of traditional notions of American literature. Of course, one possible outcome of inquiries of this sort is that we might decide that there are instances where the present tense is appropriate, and some instances where it isn't. Clearly Russ's and John's concern about a putatively "white American literature" is that such a literature continues to be produced, notwithstanding what I've said about African American literature, and that to leave it unchallenged is to allow some form of white racial domination to continue unchallenged. But this is a thesis statement and not an axiom, and it strikes me that insofar as literary scholarship is concerned, beginning in the early 1990s there emerged of set of literary works including Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark, Eric Sundquist's To Wake the Nations, Shelley Fisher Fishkin's Was Huck Black?, Henry Wonham's Playing the Races, and my own Black and White Strangers, that persuasively demonstrated that "white" American literature was anything but.

One way to think about the political efficacy of the kind of literary intervention that Russ and John are calling for is to consider that over these past twenty years, intellectual challenges to the "whiteness" of American cultural production have done more to reshape the way we think and write about literature perhaps than at any point in the nation's history, but that during this same period economic inequality has increased dramatically. If, as literary historians and critics attuned to the racial dimensions of cultural production and inquiry, we were hoping to intervene in contemporary inequality, then perhaps we have had our eyes on the wrong target. This is not at all to say that the questions we have been addressing over this period have not been worthwhile. In truth, I think much of this work has enriched American literary history immeasurably. Rather, it may be that, beguiled by the political successes, real and perceived, of an earlier literary moment, we've overstated or misconstrued what challenges to race within the precincts of literary study can do for us, in light of the problems our society faces at the present moment.

It is worth reiterating that what makes misconstruals of this sort common is the class dimension of literary work. Like our white counterparts, African American scholars and perhaps, to a lesser extent, literary authors, make up part of a professional managerial class (PMC) that also overlaps significantly with a black political class consisting of those who hold political office, belong to professional organizations, play leadership roles in civic organizations, and the like. (It is also useful to recognize that for many white scholars working in the field, their association with their African American colleagues and students may be among the most visible ways in which they connect their literary scholarship to social justice issues.) There are two features of this status that bear on the current discussion. The first is that the forms in which the "legacies of the past" manifest most identifiably in our lives are through instances of bias and discrimination, and through attacks on affirmative-action policies that have made possible the diversification of the institutions in which we work. The second is that the perceived political and social legitimacy of the black professional managerial class as a class rests largely on assertions that its successes fulfill the aims of many a thousand gone, and that its interests and concerns extend to those of black people generally, for whom it speaks authoritatively and knowledgeably.

Given these two features of PMC status, the impulse to assert an equivalence between, on the one hand, confronting the bias that still exists within such institutions as corporations and universities, and on the other, reversing the deepening economic inequalities that afflict those portions of the black population most directly affected by our carceral society are certainly understandable, and perhaps in some ways, unavoidable. Both can plausibly be understood as part of the same black freedom struggle, and there's no denying that the populations of both groups at times intersect. Somewhat ironically, however, Michelle Alexander's argument about a new Jim Crow--an argument that Russ sees as putting significant pressure on my claim about the pastness of the past--reveals the problem with assuming that addressing one issue automatically addresses the other, because what motivates Alexander's book is a concern that black politicians and civil rights leaders have allowed the civil rights movement to devolve largely onto an agenda centered on protecting affirmative action and insisting on more robust enforcement of existing civil rights laws. As a result, Alexander alleges, so-called black leaders have largely overlooked what she wants us to see as "the most damaging manifestation of the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement," namely the mass incarceration of young black men (11).

Although Alexander describes the problem as a failure on the part of civil rights leadership, what she is actually tracking, without fully knowing it, is the tension between what Preston Smith has termed "racial democracy" and "social democracy." In Smith's terms, advocates for racial democracy during the Jim Crow era pursued a vision that focused on eliminating racial disparities, but accepted some measure of class stratification as compatible with racial democratic ideals. Meanwhile, advocates for social democracy recognized that "simply removing racial barriers" would not meet the needs of working-class and poor blacks, for whom justice would require some version of an anticapitalist agenda (Smith xii). Because Jim Crow articulated the exploitation of labor with forms of racial segregation and political exclusion, demands for racial democracy and social democracy could often appear isomorphic. It is this overlap and this perception that the ends of racial and social democracy were the same to which Alexander appeals when she declares "that mass incarceration is, metaphorically, the New Jim Crow" (11). But as she acknowledges elsewhere in her book, one does not need the metaphor of Jim Crow to make the case that the incarceration of millions of our citizens is a travesty and a crime. One does need it, however, if the goal is, rhetorically, to align the upper echelon of black America with the vast number of incarcerated people of color. It takes but a small stretch of the imagination to see why the idea of an ongoing African American literature is part of this rhetorical alignment. To be sure, it makes sense to believe that having prominent black voices speak against the injustice of mass incarceration will help to turn the tide against this system it certainly can't hurt. But to believe that a politics centered on removing the barriers of discrimination that may still hinder the advancement of, say, blacks in Wall Street financial firms, is the same as a politics fundamentally interested in a more egalitarian redistribution of wealth is a mistake that at least some of us can no longer afford.

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