What is African American Literature?. Margo N. Crawford

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СКАЧАТЬ is different from the “structure” of African American literature (that which Henry Louis Gates, in such a generative fashion, uncovered in The Signifying Monkey in 1987 as the field of African American literary criticism was set in motion). Gates brilliantly studies intertextuality in order to unveil the structure of African American literature. I focus on affect (the blush, the shiver, the vibration, and the twitch and wink) in order to unveil the limits of historicizing approaches to the “idea” of African American literature. African American literature is an archive of feelings, the tradition of a tension between individual affect and historical structure. As Alexis Pauline Gumbs writes, “Breathing seems individual but it is also so profoundly collective.”¹² I approach the collectivity of African American literature as acts of breathing in charged air. The notion of charged air opens up a new dimension of literary tradition, a sense that “tradition” could be re‐felt as the sensuous, atmospheric experience of texts. At this late date in the unfolding of African American literary studies, we need more room for an understanding of African American literary flows as the circulation of affective energy against and within the structures of history. Whatever the shared flow is, it is a flow of feeling created as books are read alongside each other (what John Akomfrah calls an “affective proximity”).¹³

Amiri Baraka conveys the idea of tradition as atmosphere when he begins his 2005 poetry volume The Book of Monk with an epigraph that includes the words “the air running in and out of you.” The practice of African American literature often makes the shared atmosphere of affect matter as much as the themes of black life that are often viewed as the private property of African American literature. Lauren Berlant, in Cruel Optimism (2011), foregrounds the “shared atmosphere” of affect. She writes, “[A]ffective atmospheres are shared, not solitary, and […] bodies are continuously busy judging their environments and responding to the atmospheres in which they find themselves” (15). Approaching African American literature as an affective atmosphere changes the women studies’ paradigm of “writing on the body.” When we think of African American literature as a shared atmosphere, we arrive at “writing with the body.” In the essay “Souls Grown Deep” (2006), in which Amiri Baraka directly focuses on the “is‐ness” of African American literature, when he refers to the “creative is ness of what are” (Razor, 394), he describes writing with the body through formulations such as the “poet is an organ of registered flesh” and “a real cry from a real person.” And, in “Technology and Ethos,” Baraka makes writing with the body gain full shape when he imagines the “expression‐scriber” (alternative typewriter) that involves the entire body, not only fingertips. He writes:

A typewriter?—why shd it only make use of the tips of the fingers as contact points of flowing multi directional creativity. If I invented a word placing machine, an ‘expression‐scriber’, if you will, then I would have a kind of instrument into which I could step & sit or sprawl or hang & use not only my fingers to make words express feelings but elbows, feet, head, behind, and all the sounds I wanted, screams, grunts, taps, itches […]¹⁴

In M Archive: After the End of the World, Alexis Pauline Gumbs imagines that fingertips can do what Baraka needs the entire body to do. She writes, “they attended to their fingertips” (51). As Gumbs describes the intensity of the “pulsing fingers” and “muscle memory” (and the “channeling” of memory “into hands”), she, like Baraka, foregrounds the process of writing with the body.¹⁵ The body of black literature is produced by the tension of the flesh that has been named the “black body.” The tension is the “open system of nervousness” of African American literature.¹⁶ As Ashon T. Crawley theorizes about the breath of black aesthetics, he presents this idea of the “open system of nervousness,” and leans on Susan Buck‐Morss’ insistence that “the nervous system is not contained within the body’s limits” (Crawley 52‐53). An open system of black nervousness (an open system of black feeling) distinguishes African American literature from other literary traditions.

      Jean Toomer links the words “emotion” and “Negro” in a letter, written in 1922, to Waldo Frank. Toomer states, “The only time that I think ‘Negro’ is when I want a peculiar emotion which is associated with this name” (131, Modernism and Affect). We can easily read this confession as Toomer’s internalization of a racialized primitivist notion of black passion, but this confession might also push us to re‐read Toomer’s Cane as a classic example of how the practice of African American literature often becomes the practice of working narrative for its most affective possibilities. When we read Cane through this lens of affect, the opening image “Her skin is like dusk / on the eastern horizon/ O cant you see it” is a striking image of black blush. The most striking image of affect as uncontained intensity and as a way of understanding the interaction between the personal and the impersonal may be the opening words in Toomer’s “Fern”: “Face flowed in her eyes.” The loss of the definite article signals that this aesthetic flow is the transmission of affect, not the transmission of the “definite article” of literary historicism that disciplines affect (that makes an archive of feelings become an archive of who is definitively within or outside “African American literature”).

Alice Walker, in In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens (1983), advises that “we” (those of us who are invested in the ongoing tradition of black aesthetics) keep Cane and let Toomer go.¹⁷ But how could we ever hold the aesthetic of evanescence that shapes the opening affect‐laden portraits in Cane? Fred Moten, in The Feel Trio, writes, “Cutting around corners puts me in mind of jean toomer, I think I’ll change my name to gene tumor. I want to be a stream tuner, unfurled in tongues that won’t belong in anybody’s mouth, mass swerving from the law of tongues.” The practice of cutting pivots on an alternative kinship that can hurt and make one feel like “gene tumor,” or make one feel like a “stream tuner,” a creator of streams of feeling. As Brian Massumi explains, “[F]eelings have a way of folding into each other, resonating together, interfering with each other, mutually intensifying, all in unquantifiable ways” (1). In What is African American Literature, I’m cutting around corners and feeling this flow of feelings that creates a literary tradition built on disruption, surprise, and contingency.

      Gérard Genette writes, ‘‘More than a boundary or a sealed border, the paratext is, rather, a threshold’’ (Paratexts, 1–2). The idea of African American literature is the idea of entering into a black book. These words “black book” are used during the 1960s and 70s Black Arts Movement (BAM) as a way of thinking about the textual production of an entrance into a black interior. After the BAM production of black books, the idea of African American literature remains a generative surface, a frame that remains a frame, not a threshold into an understanding of interiority that is the antithesis of surface. The practice of sharing a critical edge makes literary tradition become less of an historical entity and more of an unmappable conversation, what Felice Blake refers to (in Black Love, Black Hate: Intimate Antagonisms in African American Literature) as the town hall meeting of African American literature (the town meeting that cannot meet anywhere else). African American literature is the performance of the shared black edge of a conversation.

In Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition (2005), Cheryl Wall thinks of literary tradition as a line that is worried. She writes, “In using the line as a metaphor for ‘literary tradition,’ I do not intend to imply a strictly linear progression. A worried line is not a straight line” (13). A shared edge is a way of thinking about the crooked lines, in the twenty‐first century, that are making the word “tradition” become what Dionne Brand, in the novel In Another Place, Not Here, calls СКАЧАТЬ