What is African American Literature?. Margo N. Crawford

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СКАЧАТЬ us feel what Tracy Smith, in Life on Mars, sees as the edges that are too linked to feel like edges as opposed to curves. Smith, in the poem “Sci‐Fi,” hails an art that has “no edges, but curves” (7). A curve‐like edge is a way of understanding the precarious, shared edge produced by the twenty‐first century beyond the black book impulse, embodied in texts such as Percival Everett’s turn‐of‐the‐century novel Erasure and Claudia Rankine’s shiny, white book Citizen.

The Idea of the Black Book

      Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) may be the signature twenty‐first century text that has re‐energized the inseparability of the idea of American literature and the idea of African American literature. The shiny white cover and the shiny white and thick pages in Citizen literally perform the shift from the BAM idea of the black book to the twenty‐first century idea of the white book that can break out of a color line logic of African American literature.

      The white blank pages throughout Citizen make the white paratext and the white interior blend as the feeling of black words on white pages and the feeling of the absence of any black words on white pages make readers experience the everyday life of race as the tension between the constant reproduction of the color line and the constant pauses when the color line is disrupted.

The blank white pages become the pause when words do not only disappear; the narrative of whiteness also disappears as we feel whiteness as a color. The tint of this whiteness is so bright it overwhelms. Rankine creates the tension between whiteness as a racial identity and whiteness as a color that does not need to feel like an oppressive force, a dominant cultural force that erases the possibility of the black book. Citizen might be the textual production of a color line performance that makes the idea of a radical white book become the idea of a radical black book. Rankine’s inclusion of Glenn Ligon’s text paintings allows the texture of the radical black book to be felt in the midst of the shiny white pages. Ligon’s text paintings give words texture and make readers/viewers experience surface as depth. The depth of the surface of the shiny white pages, like the depth of the black pages with Ligon’s text paintings, is the surface depth that does not need the imagined interiority of a book. Citizen then becomes a textual production of a book that has no inner space, no post‐paratext structure that we could call a narrative on race and class in America in the twenty‐first century. Citizen’s fragmented form is a constant gesture to this narrative “on race and class in America in the twenty‐first century.” But Rankine never allows the gestures to settle into a master narrative.

      Why would African American writers, creating the new territory of twenty‐first century African American literature, want to write books that are multi‐edged, surface oriented, with no imagined interiority? Could it be that there is a desire to imagine community in formation as opposed to community as already formed? Could the depth of surface be the depth of the surface that the process of “in formation” becomes? Before any settling, the surface is where the tensions of potential community tingle. In Citizen, when the black words “Come on. Let it go. Move on” appear on the shiny white page, we may feel the tension between remaining stuck to a surface or feeling that there is a way to move on even as we remain stuck to that surface. Re‐reading these words, in Citizen, through the lens of this focus on the texture of the white pages, allows us to see how Citizen is the textual performance of a twenty‐first century unmarking of the black book.

In Percival Everett’s Erasure (2001), we see the performance of a novel within a novel and then the move to a third title page that is just an alternative title, not a novel within a novel within a novel. The third title page can easily be read as a surface that has no depth. The title “Fuck” signals Everett’s exhaustion with the entire publishing industry that makes the black book mean “black representational space.”¹⁸ Throughout the novel, Everett sets up a tension between the practice of representation and the practice of abstraction. Black representational space bores the character Thelonious Ellison, also known as “Monk.” Everett makes Richard Wright’s 1940 novel Native Son signal the type of black representational space that Monk sees as defining the idea of African American literature. My Pafology (the novel within the novel) is a satire of Native Son. Everett’s satire of Native Son is written in eye dialect. As readers sound out the unconventional spellings, the eye dialect seems as surface as the stereotypes that make black life seem like ongoing tragedy and pathology.

      When we remember the impetus of Wright’s autobiography Black Boy (1945), we gain a new way of understanding Everett’s satirizing of Native Son, this textual reproduction of Native Son. Wright was inspired to write Black Boy after feeling the tension of the color line as he gave a talk to an interracial audience, in 1942, at Fisk University. Wright remembered that tension in the following manner:

There was but little applause. Indeed, the audience was terribly still, and it was not until I was half‐way through my speech that it crashed upon me that I was saying things that Negroes were not supposed to say publicly, things that whites had forbidden. What made me realize this was a hysterical, half‐repressed, tense kind of laughter that went up now and then from the white and black faces.¹⁹

      Everett is frustrated with Wright’s production of African American literature. He moves to the production of a “tense kind of laughter” that would make Wright’s books Black Boy and Native Son lose their ability to frame black life for non‐black audiences. Everett’s reproduction of Native Son aims to recapture the tension that Wright was never attempting to destroy. With the overwhelming success of Black Boy, Wright made interracial audiences more comfortable hearing “things that Negroes were not supposed to say publicly.” Everett, in Erasure, is aiming to express “publicly” his frustration with what has happened between 1940 and now. Everett worries that the industry of African American literature has created a narrative that greatly limits what can be legible within black representational space.

Erasure, a deeply satirical novel, produces a laughter that might be similar to Wright’s description of the tension in the lecture room at Fisk University. Everett aims to disrupt the disturbing comfort that people might have when they read about the tragedy of black lives. Everett, in Erasure, searches for a way to dislodge the naturalized frames that made Native Son and Black Boy be read so widely and with so much acclaim. Through his use of experimental paratexts, Everett leads us to the question, can blackness be made into a critical edge of an aesthetic flow, not the critical center of an aesthetic flow? The play with paratext, in Erasure, becomes a play with the inside and outside of a text. Since the third title page, the title page with the word “Fuck,” has no text following it that is supposed to be the inside of “Fuck,” the pages before and after this floating title page dramatize the sense that this book is floating, unable to be read as a book in the way that we read a book like Native Son. We may read Erasure as Everett’s desire to unhinge African American literature. Genette describes the paratext as a threshold, and Everett uses paratext to produce the sense that we remain on the edge, as opposed to entering into a book.

The 1960s and 70s Black Arts Movement was the first cultural movement that directly staged the production of books written for ideal black readers. The meaning of African American literature, during the BAM, was black interior space. The textual production of this black textual inner space also led to the movement’s textual production and dramatization of the edge, the threshold between inner and outer space. This cultural movement worked surface for its deepest possibilities in a manner that was similar to the movement’s insistence on the substance of style. The BAM remains the first African American cultural movement that performed the production of books written specifically for black people. In order to gain a fuller grasp of the role of textual production in the creation of the specific literary traditions that СКАЧАТЬ