What is African American Literature?. Margo N. Crawford
is not felt when one gets on the train of historical determinist approaches to African American literature.
My emphasis on what is felt can make us rethink Robert Stepto’s dismissal of feeling (as a way of interpreting African American literature) during the late 1970s black literary theory attempt to break out of sociological and “non‐literary” approaches to teaching African American literature.9 In a key passage in Afro‐American Literature: The Reconstruction of Instruction (1978), Stepto makes the turn to “feeling” seem like the stale approaches to the literature that crush the art and make all study of African American literature a historical or sociological study of African Americans. He writes:
Those students who, as Ralph Ellison reports, persist in the illusion that they possess a ‘genetic’ knowledge of black culture, may very well compose yet another all‐purpose ‘black’ essay. Others will take the harder but more rewarding path delineated—and in fact demanded—by the multiple forms of literacy, not “feeling,” and draw from all their resources the requisite vision and energy to see author, text, and tradition alike. (15)
But the role of feeling in the is‐ness of African American literature can be a deep refusal of the impulse to reduce the art to history and sociology. Feeling is what matters most when we wonder what African American literature is within what Raymond Williams calls a “sociology of culture,” a “sociology of a new kind,” that makes room for culture as a “structure of feeling.”10
The is‐ness of African American literature is also a feeling of the present. In What is the Present?, Michael North wonders, “Does it make sense to think of the present as radically distinct from the time around it, from which it seems to emerge and into which it seems to blend?” The present “is‐ness” (the “new” and “contemporary”) of African American literature has been a recursive conversation. The contemporary (as proclaimed, in 1970s vernacular, as “what it is, what it is”) is, of course, restaged constantly. The New Negro movement of the 1920s and 1930s announced this newness in such an emphatic manner, the words “new breed” were mobilized during the 1960s and 70s Black Arts movement, and Trey Ellis’ 1989 essay “The New Black Aesthetic” anticipates all of the “newness” dramatized in twenty‐first century frames of the “new black.” The contemporary (the newness) is constantly evoked, throughout the twentieth and twenty‐first century, as black writing continues to be a way that people feel less shackled by “what was.”
Like Michael Gillespie’s approach to the “idea” of black film, I frame my questions around the “idea” of African American literature, as opposed to an approach that aims to identify texts that are in or outside the “fact” of African American literature.11 The idea of African American literature 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