What is African American Literature?. Margo N. Crawford
rest dead. If something happens to me and you can’t tell me by my face, you can know me by this mark.”
Scared me so. All I could think of was how important this was and how I needed to have something important to say back, but I couldn’t think of anything so I just said what I thought. “Yes, Ma’am,” I said. “But how will you know me? How will you know me? Mark me, too,” I said. “Mark the mark on me too.” Sethe chuckled.
“Did she?” asked Denver.
“She slapped my face.”26
The move to is‐ness in contemporary African American literature is the refusal to continue the “marking of the mark.” The is‐ness is the trembling reading experience that is not always already marked by the black past; the is‐ness is the reverberation of the slaps (the sensory shocks) that new literary spaces of black feeling are creating.
Amiri Baraka delivers one of the most direct theories of “black feeling” as the core of African American literature. In We Are Our Feeling (1969), Baraka’s language becomes deeply experimental as he searches for the grammar that allows feeling to be the “is” of the black aesthetic. He begins this essay with a breaking down of the word “aesthetic” into “a theory in the ether” and then moves to a focus on black feeling as the alternative to the “theory in the ether.” As he struggles to show that feeling, an emotional experience, is the only way to answer his opening question “What does aesthetic mean?”, he finds the word “is” as he breaks out of standard English and hails the emergence of a literary tradition that will feel black. He writes:
We are our feeling. We are our feelings ourselves. Our selves are our feelings.
Not a theory in the ether. But feelings are central and genuine and descriptive. Life’s supremest resolution is based on wisdom and love.
How is a description of Who. So a way of feeling or the description of the process of is what an aesthetic wd be, (italics mine)27
Kenneth Warren, in What was African American Literature?, frames the was‐ness of African American literature through the idea of the “historical entity” (8). Warren writes, “[…] African American literature might be viewed as a ‘historical' entity rather than as the ongoing expression of a distinct people” (8). As a historical entity, African American literature would be mappable. We could determine when it begins and which writers are in the tradition, on the edge, and outside the tradition. But the mood of African American literature might show the limits of historicism. How can historicism explain black affect? Could it be that certain books feel black? What is this feeling? Is African American literature a “great realist project” that (in the full spirit of Fredric Jameson’s theory of realism in The Antinomies of Realism) is constantly “reinforced” and “imperiled” by the evanescence of affect? Jameson argues that affect “appropriates a whole narrative apparatus and colonizes it.”28 The “whole narrative apparatus” of African American literature has always gained its strange wholeness through the uncontainable vibrations of black affect. In “Reading for Mood,” Jonathan Flatley approaches mood as a “collective affective atmosphere.” He writes, “Mood is a concept that gives us a way to describe the feeling world of these readers, if we understand mood to name a collective affective atmosphere, one structured and shaped by social forces and institutions and particular to a given historical moment” (italics mine).29 African American literature is best understood as writers’ and readers’ co‐creation of a black mood, of a black feeling world.
Notes
1 1 Philip Gourevitch, ed. The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 2, (New York: Picador, 2007), 388.
2 2 Alain Locke, “Negro Youth Speaks,” in The New Negro, ed. Alain Locke. (1925; reprint, New York: Touchstone, 1992), 48.
3 3 Fred Moten, Black and Blur (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 85. Moten’s words are “acknowledging what it is to own dispossession, which cannot be owned but by which one can be possessed” (85).
4 4 Alain Locke, The New Negro (1925; reprint, New York: Touchstone, 1992), 48.
5 5 Jean Fagan Yellin, Harriet Jacobs: A Life (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2004), 122.
6 6 Walter Benn Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier: From 1967 to the End of History (Princeton, 2004), 113.
7 7 Gwendolyn Brooks, “Poets Who Are Negroes,” Phylon (1940–1956), Vol. 11, No. 4 (4th Qtr., 1950), 312.
8 8 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage Books, 1995 [1952]), 438.
9 9 Robert Stepto, in Afro‐American Literature: The Reconstruction of Instruction, argues that 1970s survey courses of African American literature use the literature as a springboard for a discussion of the “non‐literary.” He emphasizes “the simple, haunting fact that Afro‐American history and social science are being taught while Afro‐American language, literature, and literacy are not” (9).Dexter Fisher and Robert B. Stepto, ed. Afro‐American Literature: The Reconstruction of Instruction (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1979), 9.
10 10 Raymond Williams, The Sociology of Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1981), viii.
11 11 Michael Boyce Gillespie, Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film (Durham: Duke University, 2016).
12 12 Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, “We Are Always Crossing: Alexis Pauline Gumbs,” Bomb, 22 March 2018.
13 13 Fawz Kabra, “Interview with John Akomfrah” July 5, 2018. Ocula.com
14 14 Amiri Baraka, ‘Technology & Ethos” in Raise Rage Rays Raze: Essays Since 1965 (New York: Random House, 1971)
15 15 Alexis Pauline Gumbs, M Archive: After the End of the World (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2018), 51.
16 16 Ashon T. Crawley, Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 52–53.
17 17 Walker writes, “Cane was for Toomer a double ‘swan song.’ He meant it to memorialize a culture he thought was dying, whose folk spirit he considered beautiful, but he was also saying good‐bye to the “Negro” he felt dying in himself. Cane then is a parting gift, and no less precious because of that. I think Jean Toomer would want us to keep its beauty, but let him go” (65). Alice Walker, In Search of