What is African American Literature?. Margo N. Crawford

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       Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data

      Name: Crawford, Margo N., 1969– author.

      Title: What is African American literature? / by Margo N. Crawford.

      Description: First edition. | Hoboken : Wiley‐Blackwell, 2020. | Series: Wiley Blackwell manifestos | Includes bibliographical references and index.

      Identifiers: LCCN 2020021084 (print) | LCCN 2020021085 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119123347 (paperback) | ISBN 9781119123378 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119123361 (epub)

      Subjects: LCSH: American literature–African American authors–History and criticism. | Affect (Psychology) in literature. | Slavery in literature. | African Americans in literature.

      Classification: LCC PS153.N5 C76 2020 (print) | LCC PS153.N5 (ebook) | DDC 810.9/896073–dc23

      LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020021084 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020021085

      Cover Design: Wiley

      Cover Image: African American woman, half‐length portrait, facing left, reading book by Fæ is licensed under Creative Commons CC0

Acknowledgments

      This book was greatly inspired by Cheryl Wall’s groundbreaking study Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition (2005). African American literary traditions (as Cheryl Wall taught us) are a worrying of lines (lines being understood as lineage, intertextuality, improvisation, and the elasticity of blackness).

      In these early years of the twenty‐first century, scholars of African American literature and theory have been gathering, at a wide range of conferences and other events, to begin to theorize the emergent forms, moods, and stories that distinguish twenty‐first century African American literature from earlier flows. These forums, looking at new directions in African American literature and theory, propelled the questions explored in this book’s reshaping of the title of Kenneth W. Warren’s What Was African American Literature? (2011) into the question of what it is (on the lower frequencies).

So many scholars make me hear these lower frequencies of black aesthetics. I thank Cheryl Wall, Eleanor Traylor, Hortense Spillers, Haki Madhubuti, Houston A. Baker, Dana Williams, Kokahvah Zauditu‐Selassie, Fred Moten, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Kevin Quashie, Candice Jenkins, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Soyica Colbert, Brent Edwards, Erica Edwards, Evie Shockley, L.H. Stallings, Jennifer DeVere Brody, Stephen Best, Yogita Goyal, Aida Levy‐Hussen, Carter Mathes, Badia Ahad, Howard Rambsy, Meta DuEwa Jones, Greg Thomas, Lawrence Jackson, Koritha Mitchell, Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Dagmawi Woubshet, Sharon Holland, Douglas Jones, Robert Reid Pharr, Mark Anthony Neal, George Hutchinson, and many more. I thank Richard Samson for his consummate work as editor. I thank the anonymous readers for their great insight.

Introduction: The Affective Atmosphere of African American Literature

      Stephen Colbert:

      “You have said you don’t necessarily like to be pigeonholed as an African American writer. What would you like me to pigeonhole you as? (Audience laughs) Because I have to categorize everybody. […] How should I just see you as a category? If you don’t want to be an African American writer, how should I think of you?” (italics mine)

      Toni Morrison:

      “As an American writer.” (Audience cheers) (2014)

When Toni Morrison insists, in a 1993 interview, that African American literature “pulls from something that’s closer to the edge,” she makes the idea of African American literature sound more like an energy force than an enterprise, marketing structure, or stable, mappable tradition.¹ Morrison’s emphasis, in this same interview, on the “more human future” of the idea of African American literature, clearly underscores the constant rewriting of what it means to be human in African American literature, but Morrison also gestures toward the idea of African American literature as that which is both “here” and “not yet here.” The interview unfolds as follows:

      MORRISON:

      I would like to write novels that were unmistakably mine, but nevertheless fit first into African American traditions and second of all, this whole thing called literature.

      INTERVIEWER:

      First African American?

      MORRISON:

      Yes.

      INTERVIEWER:

      … rather than the whole of literature?

      MORRISON:

      Oh yes.

      INTERVIEWER:

      Why?

      MORRISON:

      It’s richer. It has more complex sources. It pulls from something that’s closer to the edge, it’s much more modern. It has a human future. (1993)

For Morrison, what is modern about the idea of African American literature is its evocation of “a more human future.” СКАЧАТЬ