"Hurry Up, Please. It's Time," Said the White Rabbit as S/he Followed Bre'r Rabbit into the Briar Patch

Abstract

When I received the invitation to write a commentary for this special issue, I was told that I need not respond directly to the papers themselves, that I was free to comment on what and how I wanted to. It was an invitation that I could not resist. But now that it is time to sit before my computer and produce a relevant response, resistance overwhelms me. Authorial liberty leads to ambivalence. I am inclined to expand a question I raised with some of these contributors during a conference session discussing the identity of the first African American woman writer. Then, I questioned the question and the questioners who focus upon racial identity and priority but who do not explain why these are relevant issues. I wondered then, as I wonder now, why these issues claim the front page and focus attention at some times and in some cases and not in others. Is there something about this particular cultural or intellectual moment that motivates our preoccupation in these areas? I argued then that Who was the first? may not be as significant a question to ask as whether there was a second or a seventieth; whether priority had a serious impact on readers then; and whether it is relevant for us as we excavate and create African American literary tradition. I speculate that the for first connects with our current involvement in Iraq and with the rise of queer theory, postcolonialism, and religious politics. Today, the use of DNA to identify ancestry has a prominent place in the media and in many of our personal quests to identify our roots. But, the human genome project has also proven race to be a social construct, so why do we continue to interrogate biological ancestry using race without qualification? I remember the 1970s, when scholars in African American literature often were diverted by questions of authenticity and authority: Can you prove that Frederick Douglass didn't know his birthday? Did William Craft or Ellen Craft or both or neither actually write that narrative? Can African Americans offer objective analyses of slavery? But, having read the articles for this issue, I find that other paths beckon. I am also inclined to follow up with questions about the denotations and connotations of race in nineteenth-century USAmerica for the readers and writers of the texts under consideration in this issue and for others like them. I want to consider race and identification as they evolved over time and as they were defined within and among various class, gender, region, and religious groups. I want to use this space to talk about issues the articles do not discuss, to complement and to expand their discourse on race, ambiguity, and ambition. I have been exploring the landscape of early African American print culture and especially the growth and impact of the press. I know that some writers' conclusions or generalizations would be revised had they known more about the readers, writers, and effects of the African American press before the twentieth century. When writers assume a readership that is primarily African American, they do not write about race, employ ambiguity, and identify referents in the same ways as when they assume a readership that is primarily Euro-American, or British, or something else. Reading accounts of weddings and other social events, articles on gender and sexual morality, stories of love and marriage, family and loyalty might motivate substitution of Afro-Protestant for Victorian. Considering African American dissertations on the roles and characteristics of African American literature might change the descriptions of some techniques from mimicking to appropriating, translating, or transforming. I also want to comment on the articles in this issue themselves, to praise what I like, to suggest additional examples to bolster their arguments, and to challenge some identifications and interpretations. I am not convinced by all of the arguments in these articles, but I am energized by their intensity and their general directions of inquiry. …