The Politics of Black Fictive Space

Abstract

Historically, for Black writers, literary fiction has been a site for transforming the discursive disciplinary spaces of political oppression. From 19th century slave narratives to the 20th century, Black novelists have created an impressive literary counter-canon in advancing liberatory struggles. W.E.B. Du Bois argued that all art is political. Many Black writers have used fiction to create spaces for political and social freedom-from the early work of Harriet Wilson's Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859)-to the enduring works of the Harlem Renaissance (Toomer, Hurston, and Schuyler)-to the great revolutionary Black literature after WWII (Wright, Baldwin, Williams)-to contemporary Black writers (Toni Morrison, Edward Jones, Samuel Delany)-Black fictive space continues to be a necessary site for resistance. Black literary fiction is a vast counter-canon to mainstream literature which unquestioningly reinforces global white supremacy, capitalistic political oppressions, and the dominance/subordinance relations upon which they depend.