What is African American Literature?. Margo N. Crawford

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.” Alain Locke, one of the prime theorists of black modernism, offers one way to understand Morrison’s gesture to the black modernist “more human future.” In 1925, as Locke thinks about the style of the young New Negro Movement poets, he muses, “Our poets have stopped speaking for the Negro—they speak as Negroes. Where formerly they spoke to others and tried to interpret, they now speak to their own and try to express. They have stopped posing, being nearer the attainment of poise.”² The difference between “pose” and “poise” is the difference between a state of identity, overdetermined by an external gaze, and a state of self‐possession (even if that possession is what Fred Moten describes as being possessed by dispossession).³ When Morrison, in the 1993 interview, insists that the idea of African American literature is edge work and profoundly modern, she gestures toward what Locke describes as the black modernist, New Negro art of no longer speaking to others and trying to interpret. For Locke, the is‐ness of African American literature emerges when writers stop “speaking for” black people and “speak as” black people (when they “stop posing” and approach the “attainment of poise”).⁴

      Are there formal lines (or wavy lines that seem more like vibrations) that separate African American literature that “speaks as black” and American literature at large? Is there anything distinctive about black literature that allows us to know this is what makes it black? Is the only distinctive feature the fact that the authors are black?

African American literature is a strategic abstraction. When literary scholars were convinced that Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was written by a white abolitionist, it was not framed as a foundational text in a tradition of African American literature. Now, its tropes are routinely used to help define a tradition. In the late 1980s, when it was established that Incidents was written by Harriet Jacobs, the book became a centerpiece in the architecture of African American literature. Proving the black authorship (and reading Harriet Jacobs’ letters that emphasize her desire to “give …[my story] from my own hand”) made it possible to read this slave narrative as a literal expression of the black desire to break out of white‐dominated space, and an expression of a desire for a black interior (and not only a desire for a literary transaction across a color line).⁵ It is easy to critique the equation of black identity and black book, but what if we let go of the very impulse to critique the limits of the equation of the blackness of the author and the blackness of the text, and lean into the is‐ness produced by the texts that, for better or worse, have been marked as “African American”?

When Walter Benn Michaels expresses frustration with the emphasis on feeling in reader response interpretations of literature, he unintentionally expresses the inexhaustible possibilities of “is‐ness” that animate this book’s “reading for feeling” approach. Michaels asserts, “it [literature] is made literally uninterpretable but also literally inexhaustible since how it is perceived—not only what it looks like but what it makes you feel like, what it makes you think of—must be a function not only of what it is but of who you are.”⁶ In What is African American Literature?, I am letting the “what it is” bleed into “who we are” (we people whose “quiet walk down the street,” as Gwendolyn Brooks mused, “is a speech to the people. Is a rebuke, is a plea, is a school”).⁷ I am re‐hearing Fred Moten’s words in In The Break: “What is needed is an improvisation of the transition from descent to cut […]” (70). The line of descent (the genealogy of an is‐ness of African American literature) is a cut‐up formation, a cut‐up blackness (blackness felt and lived by cut‐up people). The idea of the “transition from descent to cut” helps me arrive at an understanding of how the history of the African American literary tradition is cut up when we focus on the black feeling (readers’ and authors’) that produces whatever African American literature is (outside of historical determinism and inside black improvisation). Ralph Ellison’s famous musing, in Invisible Man, on what it means to be “outside of history” offers a way of understanding the unmappable nature of the is‐ness of African American literature.⁸ Just as Ellison’s unnamed narrator meditates on what it means to be “outside of history” as he stares at young men wearing oversized zoot suits as they wait on a subway platform for the train to arrive, I see the is‐ness of African American literature as the feeling of black excess (as the aesthetic edge that cannot be historicized because the is‐ness is what is felt as one waits on the platform and is pulled into the zoot suit). Ellison’s Invisible Man asks himself, “What if history was a gambler, instead of a force in a laboratory experiment […]?” (441). This question is reshaped when we imagine what African American literature is outside of its reduction to the cultural production of black people needing to write ourselves into a history that erased us. Echoing the Invisible Man’s question about the zoot‐suiters, on the subway platform,