What is African American Literature?. Margo N. Crawford
article signals that this aesthetic flow is the transmission of affect, not the transmission of the “definite article” of literary historicism that disciplines affect (that makes an archive of feelings become an archive of who is definitively within or outside “African American literature”).
Alice Walker, in In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens (1983), advises that “we” (those of us who are invested in the ongoing tradition of black aesthetics) keep Cane and let Toomer go.17 But how could we ever hold the aesthetic of evanescence that shapes the opening affect‐laden portraits in Cane? Fred Moten, in The Feel Trio, writes, “Cutting around corners puts me in mind of jean toomer, I think I’ll change my name to gene tumor. I want to be a stream tuner, unfurled in tongues that won’t belong in anybody’s mouth, mass swerving from the law of tongues.” The practice of cutting pivots on an alternative kinship that can hurt and make one feel like “gene tumor,” or make one feel like a “stream tuner,” a creator of streams of feeling. As Brian Massumi explains, “[F]eelings have a way of folding into each other, resonating together, interfering with each other, mutually intensifying, all in unquantifiable ways” (1). In What is African American Literature, I’m cutting around corners and feeling this flow of feelings that creates a literary tradition built on disruption, surprise, and contingency.
Gérard Genette writes, ‘‘More than a boundary or a sealed border, the paratext is, rather, a threshold’’ (Paratexts, 1–2). The idea of African American literature is the idea of entering into a black book. These words “black book” are used during the 1960s and 70s Black Arts Movement (BAM) as a way of thinking about the textual production of an entrance into a black interior. After the BAM production of black books, the idea of African American literature remains a generative surface, a frame that remains a frame, not a threshold into an understanding of interiority that is the antithesis of surface. The practice of sharing a critical edge makes literary tradition become less of an historical entity and more of an unmappable conversation, what Felice Blake refers to (in Black Love, Black Hate: Intimate Antagonisms in African American Literature) as the town hall meeting of African American literature (the town meeting that cannot meet anywhere else). African American literature is the performance of the shared black edge of a conversation.
In Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition (2005), Cheryl Wall thinks of literary tradition as a line that is worried. She writes, “In using the line as a metaphor for ‘literary tradition,’ I do not intend to imply a strictly linear progression. A worried line is not a straight line” (13). A shared edge is a way of thinking about the crooked lines, in the twenty‐first century, that are making the word “tradition” become what Dionne Brand, in the novel In Another Place, Not Here, calls “not rip enough.” The ripped up textual conditions of possibility is what some writers are discovering now as they make 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,