Twenty-First-Century African American Literary Studies as <em>Movement</em>

Abstract

Last year, an e-mail appeared in my inbox that encapsulates an insouciant, friendly disregard for American literary studies that increasingly gets under my skin. This one happened to be penned by a senior comparative literature major eager to take my graduate course, although, as became clear after several exchanges, she had no background whatsoever in the field. The course, African American Literary Criticism, Past and Present, incorporates critical writings by literary and cultural critics dating back to Frances E. W. Harper and Anna Julia Cooper and ending with Meta DuEwa Jones's The Muse Is Music. In a course that is focused on critical writing about literature and its relationship to American expressive culture, one would expect that students would have some familiarity with canonical texts. That the young woman had no such experience but believed that somehow a course in Francophone literature might be adequate preparation speaks volumes, and is a consequence of some of the concerns voiced by Gabrielle Foreman, Nellie McKay, and Barbara Christian. Of interest just now are the assumptions undergirding this request, which calls to mind Barbara Herrnstein Smith's observation that questions of value are manifest whenever literature becomes a focal point (177). In this instance, we are led to ask how American literature is valued in relation to other subfields in literary studies. There are several avenues one can take that arrive at such a destination. First, studying such literature can be understood as an exercise in the study of identity politics, which means that devoting attention to issues of methodology is beside the point. All that is necessary in such a circumstance is an opinion about whether black life and writing is of interest to non-blacks. Second, we might consider that this request occurred during what has come to be known as the post-racial era, when issues of racial discrimination and injustice have ostensibly been nullified by the election of Barack Obarna; claims that black progress is blocked by discrimination and animus are thus deemed spurious because the election represents irrefutable proof of racial progress. A final conjecture might be that the success of those such as Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison indicates that American literature has achieved a measure of respectability because there exist--finally!--black writers whose work is sufficiently complex and challenging to merit attention from mainstream critics. It is clear that students are the target of such thinking, not the source. Hence, those of us who work in American literary studies may unknowingly have contributed to this state of affairs by making our courses repositories of indexical practice. That is, by emphasizing the usual suspects, we reify American literature by foregrounding works that are unequivocally canonical. …