A Darker Woods: African American Writers in the American Renaissance

Abstract

Henry Highland Garnet. From I. Garland Penn, The AfroAmerican Press, and Its Editors (Springfield, MA: Willeyand Co., 1891), S3 ■A Darker Woods: African American Writers in the American Renaissance JULIE CARY NERAD Students in my upper-division American poetry course are required to memorize and recite for the class a thirty- to fortyline poem by any published American poet. At the beginning of a recent semester, one student raised her hand and asked, "Can it be an African American poet, or does it have to be an American poet?" Another student admitted that, when one of her professors referred to "David Walker, the American writer," she did not for several minutes realize he meant David Walker, the African American writer. These two moments—and I believe them representative rather than unique—drive home to me the continued need to "reexamine" not only the American Renaissance but also the academic systems and discourses that define and delimit American literature on a broader scale. Despite the expansion of the canon over the past three decades , many students continue to associate the appellation "American Literature" with whiteness. This unremitting definitional centrality of whiteness in American literature has significant cultural implications that extend beyond the walls of university classrooms: failing to recognize the multiracial constituency of our national literature—and by extrapolation, our national identity—continues to promote racial divisiveness by normalizing whiteness and by marginalizing nonwhite contributions to national discourses. The desire to recognize such limitations is not, of course, ESQ \V.49\ 1ST-3RD QUARTERS | 2003 107 JULIE CARY NERAD unique to this special edition of ESQ; indeed, it fueled the call for diversification ushered in by the civil rights and women's liberation movements. Riding waves of cultural change, feminists , New Historicists, and scholars of African American, Latino American, Asian American, and Native American texts turned critical attention to a plethora of minority voices. Their work had a powerful impact on the shape and content of the canon—so much so that in 1988, trading on Sacvan Bercovitch's language, Frederick Crews offered a spirited critique of the young "dissensus critics" he called the "New Americanists."1 Crews argued: As the academy has come to dominate what is published and taught about premodern literature , the whole notion of making a diffuse "educated public" into an arbiter has become ever more implausible. The truth is that for any works written before the last seventy years or so, the most influential academics get to decide who's in and who's out. . . . Those who hold power are right by definition.2 Setting aside Crews's disdain for culturally based criticism, I agree partially with his assessment of the influence of "academics ." Such scholars as Hazel V. Carby, Claudia Tate, Robert Reid Pharr, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and all those who contributed to the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, among others, have published groundbreaking critical work on nineteenth-century African American writers. And their efforts have changed the canon dramatically enough for Michael P. Kramer to claim in 200I that our "contexts and canons have been revised, " "the war is over, " and "some may even prefer to say that the forces of light have beaten back the forces of darkness."3 In context, Kramer's line suggests that the "light" of diversity has overcome the "darkness" of white ethnocentrism. However, the racially charged language ironically allows an antithetical reading: the whiteness of the canon has triumphed over the invasion of "darker" voices. This second connotation 205 A DARKER WOODS is perhaps more accurate, especially with regard to the American Renaissance, an era many would identify as witnessing the birth of a distinctively "American" literary identity.4 That is, despite the recovery of many previously obscure texts and the publication of critical work on minority authors, our awareness of these authors' work as essential to nineteenth-century literature is not fully translating to our students. Black voices continue to circulate primarily at the margins of literature produced by white writers; thus, for many students, the term "American Renaissance" continues to refer primarily to a cadre of white, most often male, authors.5 In one sense, then, the "self-righteous" academics Crews accused...