What is African American Literature?. Margo N. Crawford

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СКАЧАТЬ Arts literary texts was often black. The founding of black‐owned publishing houses was a vital part of this production of the black book. Dudley Randall founded Broadside Press in 1965, when he created a broadside of his poem “Ballad of Birmingham” that responded to the 1963 church bombing that killed four young African American girls. Third World Press (which remains the largest independent black press) began in Chicago in 1967, when Haki Madhubuti, Carolyn Rodgers, and Johari Amini created the first publication with a used mimeograph machine.

      How did the BAM understand the idea of the black book? The black books, produced by the BAM, were the textual performance of the anti‐text, the performance of writing and producing books that would be too action‐oriented to be held as a precious object of highbrow capital. During the BAM, “Black” is bound as the unbound. The Black Arts impulse to make art that defied the dominant norms was tied to the impulse to make art that was too excessive to be contained in books. The dreams of artists to find more room to breathe within oppressive structures made them yearn to break out of the rules that defined painting, murals, sculpture, poetry, drama, and prose.

The movement imagined the black book as a black public space where ideal black readers meet.²⁰ One of the movement’s most dramatic examples of the hailing of ideal black readers was the textual production of Amiri Baraka and Fundi (Billy Abernathy)’s In Our Terribleness (1970). The book begins with a full‐page mirror image that demands that readers see their face, and the title “In Our Terribleness” inscribed on the face, as readers enter this “long image story in motion.” As Baraka’s words interact with Fundi’s photographs, there are “spirals” of words becoming more concretely visual and photographs gaining more abstract dimensions. The text itself becomes the idea of the black book, bursting at its seams, trying to simultaneously create a sense of black embodiment and a release of blackness from any single frame.

A literal “Black Book” was published, in 1974 (one of Toni Morrison’s productions while she was an editor at Random House). It matters that The Black Book is published as the Black Arts Movement is ending; the Black Arts Movement created space for the idea of the black book. The Black Book is a collection of words and images that explain the historical trauma and the cultural production of African Americans. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has aptly referred to it as the “the ultimate treasure chest of the black experience.”²¹ What matters most about The Black Book is the framing of a specifically black book as a book that contains an archive, that creates that “treasure chest” effect described by Gates. The Black Book is a surreal collection of slave auction ads, folklore, music lyrics, photographs, minstrelsy posters, a huge range of newspaper stories, color photographs of quilts and other examples of art created by enslaved Africans, and many other texts and images. In the preface to The Black Book (the original preface that also appears in the 2009 new edition, Toni Morrison begins with the words “I am The Black Book” and ends with the words “I am not complete here; there is much more,/ but there is no more time and no more space… and I have journeys to take,/ ships to name, and crews.”²² With these last words, Morrison channels the words of the slain Black Arts movement poet Henry Dumas. Six years after his murder (by a white police officer), Morrison makes his poetic words the beginning and the end of The Black Book. His words are not only the last words in the preface; they are also the final words framing (on the last page of the book) an untitled, undated photograph of an elderly African American man, wearing a tattered suit, sitting on a porch chair, and looking at the camera’s lens with an expression that is difficult to read. Is it contempt, expectancy, or simply unknowable? The unreadability of this facial expression performs the lack of closure of The Black Book. Morrison’s prefatory words linger, “I am not complete here.” The Black Arts movement “Black Book” also has this lack of closure. Consider the final words in In Our Terribleness: “Now get up and go.”²³

How Do You Bind Nerve Endings?

In In Our Terribleness, Baraka troubles the framing devices of slave narratives, that include the signature of the former slave certifying that she or he has written the text. Given the illegality of black literacy during slavery, the powerful mission of the slave narratives is the force of people literally writing themselves into a legal existence. At one moment of pause in In Our Terribleness, Baraka signs his name. The signature, as Derrida argues in “Signature, Event, and Context,” testifies to the presentness of the text but also the past.²⁴ The signature may cling to the past anterior in a way that all of the other words in In Our Terribleness cannot. Before the signature, Baraka writes, “And now the contact is broken,” as he performs the role of the hypnotist who is leading black people to the discovery of the black gaze, black aesthetics, and a black world. When the signature appears, the “contact is broken” and the state of ecstatic trance breaks. Baraka searches for a counter‐literacy that cannot be rendered legitimate by a signature of the author. He places the signature in the middle of the book, not on the first page. When we consider Baraka’s signature as a riff on the framing of slave narratives, the frames “written by himself” and “written by herself,” in the paratext of slave narratives, are dislodged as if it is no longer possible to know how to separate the content of African American literature from the frames that create the content. This signature pause (a moment of textual suspension and dramatizing of the tension between handwriting and typing) is felt most acutely when one reads the typed manuscript pages of In Our Terribleness in the Moorland‐Spingarn collection of Baraka’s papers (at Howard University). One reads the handwritten signature differently from the typed words. The reading of the signature feels different from the reading of the typed words in the rest of the manuscript.

^{The German physiologist Johannes Müller described nerve energies in the following manner: “sensation is not the conveyance to consciousness of a quality or state of an external object but rather the conveyance to consciousness of a quality or state of our nerves, brought by an external cause.”25 In Our Terribleness is a deeply experimental word‐and‐image text that calls attention to sensation as a way of understanding nerve energies without letting external objects and causes get in the way. Baraka shapes this entire book around the tension between ideology and nerve energies. In Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1969), the tension between ideology and the hailing of individuals as subjects emerges from the simultaneity of the “existence of the ideology” and the “hailing or interpellation of individuals as subjects.” Althusser insists, “But in reality these things happen without any succession. The existence of ideology and the hailing or interpellation of individuals as subjects are one and the same thing.” In In Our Terribleness, Baraka performs this simultaneity of the ideology that already exists and the process of hailing that which does not exist yet. And as he and Abernathy make the entire book a sensorium, the hailing of blackness becomes the hailing of a black collective nervous system that is constantly on the verge of solidifying into the ideology that exists alongside the nerve endings of a black radicalism that is too open to serve the pedagogical functions of ideology.}

      The mirror on the first page of this book is the first performance of this tension between the solidity of ideology and the openness of black radical style. The mirror has the words “In Our Terribleness” engraved in the center. Readers enter into this text by looking at a reflection of their face and the words “IN OUR TERRIBLENESS” projected on their face (or in their face). A black mirror stage is performed. The words “IN OUR TERRIBLENESS,” in their engraved form in this opening mirror page, have a texture that creates the feeling of words being projected into skin or onto skin. This tension between writing on skin and words that touch and press against the skin СКАЧАТЬ