What is African American Literature?. Margo N. Crawford
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 is the tension between the ideology that is written, solid, and known and sensation that can only be experienced in an ephemeral, evanescent manner. Baraka and Abernathy sustain this tension between black nationalism and black evanescence throughout the sensorium of this wondrously open book that is nevertheless given the subtitle of sheer pedagogy – “Some elements and meaning in black style.” In Our Terribleness ultimately teaches us how to feel the sensations (the nerve endings) that always existed with and alongside all of the impulses, in 1960s and 70s black nationalism, to collect and frame “black study” as an object.
In order to feel the difference between the nerve endings in African American literature and other literary traditions, we might lean into the difference between the depiction of the “black book” in Bernard Malamud’s The Tenants (1971) and In Our Terribleness. Malamud, in The Tenants, depicts two struggling writers (one white and one black) living in an abandoned building in New York City in the 1960s. Their initial friendship is torn apart by their battle to control the space of their creativity. The tension they feel in their shared, abandoned building is, ultimately, the tension between a literary aesthetic that claims a universalism and a literary aesthetic that announces its blackness. As Malamud approaches and then shatters the notion of a negotiated universalism (as they move from friendship to hating one another), the novel becomes a direct focus on the textual production of whiteness alongside the textual production of blackness. The characters, Harry Lesser and Willie Spearmint, type in their separate zones in the abandoned building and one of the texts, written by Willie, becomes Malamud’s parody of the aesthetic warfare that shaped the Black Arts Movement. Malamud’s re‐production of the experimental, performative texts that shaped the BAM can be read as a satire of BAM texts that aim to create distinctive black aesthetic space through the sheer constant repetition of the words “black” and “blackness.” But The Tenants becomes more than a dismissal of the BAM when we recognize that Malamud, consciously or unconsciously, captures the BAM impulse to create layers and depth out of repetitions that appear to be a superficial naming process. Malamud, at an earlier point in the novel, before the appearance of “Manifested Destiny,” includes a scene in which Lesser (the white writer whose point of view shapes the full novel) sees Willie “sitting naked at his table, his head bent over his manuscript” (166). Lesser thinks, “Maybe he compares his flesh to his black creation on paper? Or is he mysteriously asserting the power of his blackness?” (166). Malamud’s character is ridiculing the BAM‐inspired writer’s impulse to put black flesh on black paper and write a black world into existence, but this flesh/text tension profoundly shapes the is‐ness of African American literature.
Figure 1. Bernard Malamud, The Tenants (1971)
The two writers in The Tenants meet in an abandoned building. Lesser is a white writer who is a legal dweller and Willie is a squatter and intruder. Malamud makes Willie’s creative writing sound like the endless reproduction of 1960s and 70s Black Power rhetoric, but Lesser (the white, proper tenant) is depicted as the more visionary artist who makes the abandoned building become his space of literary abandonment. The idea of African American literature is the escape from the buildings, the structures, that crush black abandonment. In the space of abandonment, black writers continue to create more space for black abandonment. The stranded embodiedness of the literature is the most distinctive feature of the body of literature. As I explore the role of affect (such as blush, vibration, shiver, twitch, and wink) in the textual production of the black book, I argue that the is‐ness of African American literature is a collective nervous system. Each chapter, in this book, pivots on the affective exchanges that emerge as the idea of the black body shapes the idea of the black book. In the first chapter, Toni Morrison’s critique, in her last novel, of the idea of the always already marked black body sheds light on late‐style Morrison’s refusal of any impulse to make African American literature a body of trauma. Morrison, in God Help the Child, her last novel published while she was alive, makes us blush as we feel a rechanneling of the final words in Jazz: “Look where your hands are. Now” (229). In chapter two, I uncover the role of “mood books” in the production of the idea of African American literature. Chapter three approaches the is‐ness of African American literature through “vibration.” I argue that poetic vibrations push against the narratives that attempt to define African American literature. In chapter four, I argue that the body of African American literature has been touched by a diasporic flow of shivers that are frozen when we continue to naturalize either the “Americanness” of the literature or the non‐Americanness of the literature. I propose that the is‐ness of African American literature is stranded in a space of diasporic shivers. In the final chapter, the idea of African American literature’s eternal performance of the psychic hold of slavery is troubled by my focus on the difference between writers twitching from the hold of slavery and writers winking at the assumption that the theme of African American literature is, when it is all said and done (on the lowest frequencies), some version of the afterlife of slavery.
The is‐ness of twenty‐first century African American literature includes the current practice of the unmarking of blackness as writers become similar to Sethe’s mother, in Morrison’s Beloved, who refuses to pass on the marking of pain:
She picked me up and carried me behind the smokehouse. Back there she opened up her dress front and