Transcendence and the Africana Literary Enterprise by Christel Temple

Abstract

Reviewed by: Transcendence and the Africana Literary Enterprise by Christel Temple Inte’A DeShields (bio) Temple, Christel. Transcendence and the Africana Literary Enterprise. New York: Lexington Books, 2018. 217 pp. ISBN 978-1-4985-4510-5. Paperback. Transcendence and the Africana Literary Enterprise ends with a discussion of James Baldwin’s Esquire article in which he introduces the notion of an “atmosphere of freedom.” Relegated to the periphery in the arts, media, and literature, this strategic exclusion of Blackness supports the necessity of a monograph that not only centralizes African American culture. It provides tools for the creation of an “atmosphere of freedom” and the “‘transcendence’ enabled by...Africana Studies critical approaches to literary criticism [and] literary phenomena” (191). Creating an atmosphere of freedom requires the deliberate consideration of the traumas—psychological, economic, and cultural—endured from the Maafa1. Specifically, the colonization of Africana people in the Global South and the perpetual enculturation of Eurocentric ideals reiterated ideological centrality and implied white neutrality. The result is a tug-of-war to rescue and reclaim people of African descent’s cultural, intellectual, and technological contributions. The effectiveness of Western enculturation is a testament not of the physical enslavement of Africans. Instead, it speaks to the educational and institutional obstructions imposed through the Constitution, anti-literacy laws, Jim Crow, Separate but Equal, redlining, continued underfunding of schools, vehement opposition to critical race theory and the truthful teaching of history, and relegating African American culture to the periphery of American identity. Transcendence and the Africana Literary Enterprise provides scholars of Africana studies, cultural studies, humanities, literary studies, and a range of interdisciplinary pursuits a survey of a dozen African American texts to demonstrate the value in applying Literary Africology to the exploration of culturally affirming texts. This book presents a multidimensional dynamism of Africana studies. It further encapsulates a “unique method and logic for layering ideas, concepts, theories, history, and data into usable narratives and tools to advance Africana experience as a model of the human capacity for renewal and regeneration” (Temple xxii). Thus, Transcendence presents a framework for “culturally grounded, agency-focused, transformative discourse,” and approaches to the analysis, critique, and pedagogical exploration of African American literature and creative production that is uniquely informed by Pan-Africanist sensibilities (Karenga 577). [End Page 284] The African American literary enterprise has birthed a range of literary traditions. Despite African Americans’ literary and creative contributions to American and international literary annals, the exploration and critique of these works have been largely sustained by scholars’ application of theories and methodologies. Though valuable, they are not born from culturally informed inquiry or bolstered by the invaluable perspective of informed-insider analysis and critique. In Transcendence, Christel Temple presents a manuscript demonstrating the necessity, feasibility, and enjoyment of engaging Africana literature and other cultural productions. The traditional canon of literary and textual analysis alongside traditional Africana perspectives and the audacious application of Black cultural mythology present an innovative framework for critical and comparative analysis of Black cultural and creative productions. Temple argues that effective literary criticism of African American literature cannot be achieved without proper consideration. She argues that for “understanding of how literature is a prism that reflectively signifies the cultures historical, social, political, psychological, linguistic, narrative, and conceptual realities.” She further encourages a culturally informed analysis of Africana texts and inspires the development of a literary imagination that is agentively Africanist (xvii). In Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Morrison explains that coming to terms with what makes American literature distinct is its “unsettled and unsettling population” (6). Morrison goes on to explain the literary imagination, as derived from Euro-American cultural and political consciousness, compels the American (white) writer to “talk about themselves through and within a sometimes allegorical, sometimes metaphorical, but always choked representation of an Africanist presence” (17). This too can be said of the African American, who either through constraints imposed by teachers or employers—or because of their own inclinations—is oppositional to a holistic portrayal and analysis of an Africanist presence. Temple provides a solution to the problem of reading and writing “with and through a language that can powerfully evoke and enforce...