African American Literary Criticism Research Articles

THE STRUGGLE OF BRIDE AND SWEETNESS AGAINST OPPRESSION IN TONI MORRISON’S GOD HELP THE CHILD

The aims of the study were to find out the types of oppression experienced by Bride and Sweetness and know the Struggles of Bride and Sweetnees in the God Help the Child. The researcher used the oppression theory by Iris Marion Young to determine the types of oppression experienced by Bride and Sweetness. The research applies African–American literary criticism to analyze woman oppression in Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child. This study used a qualitative descriptive method by looking at Bride and Sweetness struggle againts oppression. This study only focuses on the novel God Help the Child as the object of analysis, and as the subject of analysis focus on the main characters, Bride and Sweetness. The result mentions that there are five types of oppression experienced by Bride and Sweetness in different conditions. The types are exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism and violence. Another result is about Bride and Sweetness’s struggle to fight against their oppression. As they experience their own oppression, they have different effort. Bride finally overcomes her trauma and accepts her past, whereas, until the end, people don’t know Sweetness’s blackness since she never revealed it.

African American Canon and Criticism: Henry Louis Gates’s The Signifying Monkey

Henry Louis Gates in The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism (1988) examines the significance of the Signifying Monkey, a trickster figure in African folklore, and whose manner of speaking produces uncertainty and double meanings. He examines how the specific language usage of the Signifying Monkey is altered and appears in African American texts by analyzing the trope of the talking book in early slave narratives and contemporary African American literary works. Gates’s book is hailed as one of the most original and groundbreaking works, and critics’ responses in its twenty-fifth-anniversary edition show its continuing impact. However, it has also been criticized for an intertextual and apolitical reading of slave narratives and for reproducing essentialism of Black literature. Focusing on the trope of the talking book, I examine how Gate’s theory and related contentions reveal critical issues of the African American literary tradition and problems of canon formation, regarding the concept of distinctive and coherent African American aesthetics, elitism, and its relationship with African American readers.

Back to Black: African American Literary Criticism in the Present Moment

Abstract For more than a century, scholars of Black literature have sought to align a critical project focused on identifying and celebrating Black distinctiveness with a social project aimed at redressing racial inequality. This commitment to Black distinctiveness announces itself as a project on behalf of “the race” as a whole, but has always been, and remains, a project and politics guided in the first instance by the needs and outlook of the Black professional classes. Over the first half of the twentieth century, this cultural project achieved some real successes: politically, it helped discredit the moral and intellectual legitimacy of the Jim Crow order that in various ways affected all Black Americans; culturally, it placed Black writers in the vanguard of a modernist project predicated on multicultural pluralism. Since the 1970s the limitations of this project, culturally and politically, have become increasingly evident. Blind to the class dimension of their efforts, literary scholars continue to misrepresent the historical/political nature of the project of Black distinction as a property of cultural texts themselves. Overestimating the efficacy of race-specific social policies, these scholars disparage the universalist social policies that would most effectively benefit a majority of Black Americans.

INSTITUTIONAL RACISM IN ANGIE THOMAS’ THE HATE U GIVE

Yanti, N. R. and Fanani, Abu (2020). Institutional Racism in Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give.
 Keywords: racism, institutional racism, African American literary criticism.
 
 This article tries to analyze a novel written by Angie Thomas entitled The Hate U Give and focuses on the main character named Starr Carter. The purpose of this article is to know racism that occurs in the novel and the way Starr has to deal with it.
 The method used in this study is qualitative research or library research, it means the data are concerned with texts, written words, phrases or symbols. Primary data source of this research is taken from the novel while secondary data sources are taken from articles, journals, websites, and books that relate with this analysis. The collected data are analyzed by applying institutional racism theory in African American literary criticism. 
 As the result of the analysis it is found that there are three parts of institutional racism portrayed in this novel, those are ignorance toward Black Panthers’ Ten-Point Program, the shooting in license checking, and physical punishment in police patrol.

A History of the African American NovelAfrican American Writing: A Literary Approach

A History of the African American NovelAfrican American Writing: A Literary Approach

Ghosts of the African Diaspora: Re-visioning History, Memory, and IdentityHow to Read African American Literature: Post-Civil Rights Fiction and the Task of InterpretationBlack Aesthetics and the Interior Life

Ghosts of the African Diaspora: Re-visioning History, Memory, and IdentityHow to Read African American Literature: Post-Civil Rights Fiction and the Task of InterpretationBlack Aesthetics and the Interior Life

The Evidence of Things Unseen: Experimental Form as Black Feminist Praxis

The Evidence of Things Unseen: Experimental Form as Black Feminist Praxis Shelly Eversley (bio) Few have read the novel central to this investigation of black women’s experimental writing. The imperative to feature this novel is motivated by the absence of black women’s creative and critical contributions to most conversations about experimental literatures, the avant-garde, and about the ways in which black women’s narrative innovations disrupt and challenge linear formulations of knowledge and history that shape the very notion of black humanity and black existence. Carlene Hatcher Polite’s novel Sister X and the Victims of Foul Play (1975) tells the story of Arista Prolo—Sister X—an African American woman, who, the novel’s narrator explains, is deceased and mostly unknown and unremembered: Does it necessarily mean that, because You or I have never heard tell of someone, that this same “someone” has no claim to fame? . . . You are absolutely right about Arista Prolo; that because You never heard tell of the likes of her by no means that You are dumb, a country hick, a super-square, unaware of a superstar-born-over-night . . . please allow me to introduce her posthumously, or to freshen your memories; so that our memories and thoughts are able to collectively move with the same quickness as those of her old friends, who are seated silently and certainly remembering when . . . . [End Page 378] Sister X was a dancer, an exotic dancer, a tiptop tappin’ past master of the art of “interpretive” terpsichore, the darling of the beau-hawg grind, a rubber sole, the chic of shake, Princess Yasmina, Lottie the Body, La Bombie, Broadway Rose, the China Doll, Little Egypt, Alberta, New Caldonia, Alabama Mama (shake it up, shake it down, shake it all over town), all rolled into one. Aw yeah, Good People, the Sister would be doin’ it, doin’ it to death, in fact. But that’s cold, hunh? I mean, considering the fact that she really is dead. (51) This introduction announces consciousness of an extraordinary life buried beneath a history that has obscured it. It calls attention to certain failures of knowledge and it insists that Arista Prolo’s unknown status does not undermine her relevance as a “superstar-born-over-night.” The narrator’s invocation to readers who subsequently join the protagonist’s friends, Black Will and Abyssinia, situates the reconstructed memory of the dead woman as a performance, one in which memories “move.” Initiating a dramatic shift in temporal perspective, the posthumous introduction takes “You” backward in time, to a moment readers do not know, in order to recalibrate their understanding of how the past exists within the present. Philip Brian Harper, in his analysis of abstractionist aesthetics in African American art and literature, describes “a muddled temporality” that ultimately compels the reader to “participate in that figuration” and to “recapitulate its distinctive grammatical engagement, acquiescing in the alternate semantic order that it thereby promulgates” (173). In this context, Polite’s narrative provides an alternative conception of narrative time, one that disrupts and muddles the epistemological stability of a known grammar, and in Harper’s terms, “recruits us to an effectively world-making activity” (173). In Sister X and the Victims of Foul Play, the storyteller positions the friends like mourners at a wake; “seated silently” they witness and participate in the dynamic memories of the dead black woman’s life. The “You” whom the speaker addresses, also shares the friends’ attentions. The narrator’s opening question invites the opportunity for an object lesson about a life to which individual readers, now [End Page 379] friends, become collective witness. “You” and “I” join, shifting from “your memories” to “our memories” that finally sync to the “same quickness” as Arista’s friends’ remembering. For readers, called to become spectators and participants, this remembering is a praxis—movements and positioning—that make Arista Prolo conceptually possible, as if her living continues beyond death. As an experimental form, Sister X and the Victims of Foul Play is far outside the critical expectations for black women’s creativity since African American literary criticism has been plagued by the imposition of realism as the necessary form for telling the...

Филис Уитли в американской литературной истории и афро-американской критике

Филис Уитли в американской литературной истории и афро-американской критике

Critique Has Its Uses

Critique Has Its Uses Lee Konstantinou (bio) Is Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016) fake news? I haven’t been able to stop asking myself this question since the election of Donald Trump in November. Whitehead’s novel is, after all, constructed around an historical falsehood. As a kid, the author reports, he thought that the Underground Railroad was a literal subway slaves used to escape to the North. Many children who learn about the Railroad make the same mistake (as did Porsha Stewart in an episode of The Real Housewives of Atlanta). Taking his former confusion as a point of departure, Whitehead literalizes the metaphor. His protagonist Cora escapes from slavery in Georgia on an underground steam-powered locomotive. Fleeing the slave-catcher Ridgeway, she traverses a variety of states, each of which skews from the historical record in more or less dramatic ways. “Every state is different,” one character in the novel suggests. “Each one a state of possibility.” Historically informed readers will note that Whitehead’s novel incorporates anachronistic references to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, Nazism, as well as twenty-first-century modes of oppression (such as stop and frisk and mass incarceration) into his vision of the 1850s. My opening question is, of course, ridiculous. After all, everyone knows (or at least all literary critics know) that we don’t turn to fiction for a strictly factual report about the world. Philosophers and narrative theorists have long cautioned against asking whether fictional utterances are true or false. These are exactly the wrong questions to ask; the truth of fiction—whether in the mode of realism, magic realism, or science fiction—is in no case reducible to the truth status of its individual sentences. Meanwhile, almost everyone knows (and not just literary critics, this time) what fake news is. For the Macedonian teenagers in Veles who disseminated it, its purpose was to make them money. For those of us who consume it, fake news reinforces our political biases; it promises comfort, titillation, shock, delight. It helps us feel as if we’re reading the news—we are, after all, starved for real news—without having to confront the unwanted narratives of official media. The difference couldn’t be any clearer. On the one hand, Whitehead offers a fantastic world whose distance from our own is carefully staged as fiction, and which is meant to be interpreted as different from the historical record. On the other hand, disseminators of fake news offer an alternative world of ersatz facts designed to go viral on Facebook, which is meant to be mistaken, even if only briefly, for truth. And yet this distinction doesn’t wholly satisfy me. As a novel about slavery, The Underground Railroad arguably has a special place in US literature and culture. In the absence of more significant memorials or reparations, the neo-slave narrative has for decades been a major political staging ground upon which we have reenacted and reconsidered the history and consequences of our nation’s founding sin. And for a long time, Whitehead has resisted stepping onto this staging ground. His previous novels have addressed race, as many critics have noted, more obliquely. Indeed, I would venture an even stronger claim. Whitehead didn’t only avoid writing about slavery; his early fiction sought to resist the literary equivalent of what in the realm of criticism has come to be called the historicist-contextualist paradigm. As Mitchum Huehls argues, Whitehead has long approached race in a way that resists “representational forms of meaning-making.” That is, the novelist has rejected the view that how we represent race determines (or is, in an uncomplicated way, equivalent to) how race is lived. I read the author’s The Intuitionist (1999) as a satire of Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992). In her slim but influential book, Morrison argues that the American literary canon must be reread in light of what she terms a disavowed “Africanist presence.” Drawing on a powerful tradition of African American literary criticism, Morrison transforms the paint factory scene of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) into a critical credo. Playing in the Dark is...

The Changing Same: Recursivity, Reification, and <em>Reaping</em>

The Changing Same:Recursivity, Reification, and Reaping Ivy G. Wilson (bio) For one of its 1882 spring issues, the Southern Workman published a notice on the "Death of the Poet Longfellow." The encomium praises the aesthetics of Longfellow's "simple words," the "commonness of some of his verses," and the politics of his practice as a "poet of the people" (52). In this monthly periodical that was published out of Hampton University (then still Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute), the author evinces that "there is no class of people in this country who should cherish Mr. Longfellow's memory more tenderly than the freedmen should." Yet, the author begins the column by quoting Alfred Lord Tennyson's In Memoriam (1850): "If, as Tennyson beautifully says of him, he 'sings / To one clear harp in divers tones,' the tones are always those which echo in every heart" (52). As a transposition whereby Tennyson's lines—written for his friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died decades earlier in 1833—are presented as ostensibly for the recently deceased Longfellow, even this cursory quotation illustrates Daniel Hack's observation that "nineteenth-century British literature was woven deeply into the fabric of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century African American literature and print culture" (2). Indeed, "transposition" is part of the critical lexicon, including "engagements," "repurposing," and "recontextualizations," among other terms, that animates Hack's readings throughout Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature (2017) (21). The most important of these, however, is the "afterlives" of Victorian literature, an idea already symbolically signaled by the writer of this 1882 issue of the Southern Workman, and marked with the word "echo." [End Page 87] Hack's governing claim in Reaping Something New is that the centrality of Victorian literature to the production of African American literature demands that the latter be considered for how it functions as an "important archive for the study" of the former (2). In reading Reaping Something New, Victorianists will encounter subtle analyses of works, such as George Eliot's The Spanish Gypsy (1868), that have received comparatively little attention; African Americanists will be rewarded by Hack's exemplary archival research, particularly with questions around periodicals and print cultures. Informed by literary critics such as Laura Doyle, Elisa Tamarkin, and Elizabeth Young and their efforts to render the black and white, the English and American nineteenth centuries strangers no more, Hack is also indebted to Henry Louis Gates's signature scholarship culminating in The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (1988), whereby Hack's "reaping" amounts to a cognate of "signifyin's" repetition and revisionist impulses. He meticulously illustrates the ways in which African American writers took up the Victorians for the particular needs of their own political conditions as well as the desires of their aesthetic ambitions in different spaces if not times, a practice that Hack calls "close reading at a distance." In one respect, Reaping Something New is not dissimilar to the broader field of reception studies, which seeks to glean information about how the circulation and recirculation of previous histories and cultures—especially literary—are trafficked in the present, something that is evident, for example, in recent scholarship on black reception of the classics. Inasmuch as Hack is preoccupied with how African American culture has engaged Victorian literature, another latent concern that Reaping Something New stages is the problematic between time, genealogy, and history. Much of the book proceeds under the assumption that because nineteenth-century African Americans and English Victorians occupied roughly the same chronological time, they can be said to share similar cultural genealogies, even if their literary histories have often been understood as separate and discrete. In this sense, Hack assumes a diachronic approach to limn the possibility of a reconstituted history of African American and Victorian literatures that binds them as part of the same epochal moment, save for instances where he takes up the contemporary, as in the examples of the television show The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Percival Everett's 2001 novel, Erasure. What might be called Hack's binocular approach in Reaping Something New—with one eye visualizing the hyperlocal in the first half, and...

White Men’s Magic: Scripturalization as Slavery by Vincent L. Wimbush (review)

Reviewed by: White Men’s Magic: Scripturalization as Slavery by Vincent L. Wimbush Antonio T. Bly Vincent L. Wimbush, White Men’s Magic: Scripturalization as Slavery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Pp. ix + 294. Illus. Index. $35.00. “. . . There’s a whole heap of them kinda by-words . . . They all got a hidden meanin’, just like de Bible. Everybody can’t understand what they mean. Most people is thin-brained. They’s born wid they feet under the moon. Some folks is born wid they feet on the sun and they kin seek out de inside meanin’ of words.” —Zora Neale Hurston, qtd. in Wimbush, Magic, 1 (italics in original) Without question, books are full of Zora Neale Hurston’s “by-words”: those coded signs. And, as printed works consisting of bound-together pages, they are in fact a type of by-word within themselves. For well over four hundred years, books have represented a significant cornerstone in the development of the West. Since the invention of the Gutenberg press, words on paper have signified culture and civilization. The ability to read and write was identified with knowledge, power, and reason: books as avatars of art and science. By contrast, those nations without bookish traditions were deemed isolated and inarticulate, backward and primitive. Those who lacked literature and did not have letters of their own were considered people devoid of human ethos. In this setting, Vincent L. Wimbush’s White Men’s Magic revisits The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789), excavating in Equiano’s by-words, his coded text, a complex “spiritual story” in which the self-professed Ibo man wrote himself into being while exposing the hypocrisy of those who had once held him as a slave (9). (A recent study by Vincent Carretta has raised some doubts about whether or not Equiano was an actual native of Africa or of South Carolina; see “Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa? New Light on an Eighteenth-Century Question of Identity,” Slavery and Abolition 20 [Dec. 1999]: 96–105). The story recovered by Wimbush, Professor of Religion and Director of the Institute of Signifying Scriptures at Claremont University, is a nuanced and compelling one. Based largely on a close reading of the primary and secondary record, Wimbush’s analysis uncovers in Equiano’s life story a text full of by-words [End Page 318] in which the African author critiques the faith of his masters and denounces them as insincere. That insincerity, Wimbush explains, began long before Equiano was born, starting with the West’s exploitation of the Bible as a tool to justify a deep-seated racial bias. With the discovery of the New World, Europeans whitewashed the Scriptures as they struggled to determine to whom Christianity belonged: its Oriental forebears or its contemporary followers? In this process, the Bible became a fetish of power and Western ethnic nationalism. Within this new interpretation, all Europeans become homogenously white; all Africans were thought savage brutes (see 48–49; 59; 80–81; 107–8). Within this worldview—or, as Wimbush dubs it, “semiosphere”—reading books was mistaken as a form of a magic by Equiano and others who were unfamiliar with the Western technology; accordingly, writing represented a powerful symbol for determining one’s humanity. Identified with oral traditions, Africans and other ethnically different peoples were written out of culture—erased from the pages of the book (70–71). In this precarious environment, Olaudah Equiano learned not only how to read the book, but also how to write one of his own. In addition to writing himself into existence, to making the Western book speak back, Equiano used the Bible to frame his life story. (For a fuller account of the trope of the talking book, see Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism [1988], chap. 4, and his Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self [1987], chaps. 1–2.) In this appropriation, a literary strategy Wimbush characterizes as “scripturalization,” Equiano achieved two goals at once. First, he celebrated the presence of the African in the Western Bible, highlighting the cultural similarities between his...

The Urge to Adorn: Generational Wit and the Birth of The Signifying Monkey

The Urge to AdornGenerational Wit and the Birth of The Signifying Monkey Houston A. Baker Jr. (bio) What ever the Negro does of his own volition he embellishes. His religious service is for the greater part excellent prose poetry. Both prayers and sermons are true works of art. The supplication is forgotten in the frenzy of creation. The prayer of the white man is considered humorous in its bleakness. The beauty of the Old Testament does not exceed that of a Negro prayer. —Zora Neale Hurston, “Characteristics of Negro Expression” (1934) It was, however, in a folklore molded out of rigorous and inhuman conditions of life that the Negro achieved his most indigenous expression. Blues, spirituals, and folk tales recounted from mouth to mouth, the whispered words of a black mother to her black daughter on the ways of men, the confidential wisdom of a black father to his black son, the swapping of sex experiences on street corners from boy to boy in the deepest vernacular, work songs sung under blazing suns, all these formed the channel through which the racial wisdom flowed. —Richard Wright, “Blueprint for Negro Literature” (1937) If Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston had not existed, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and his magnum opus, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism, would not exist.1 Wright and Hurston are signally brilliant elders who made Gates possible. In her canonical essay “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” Hurston offers an anecdote to illustrate an African American “urge to adorn.”2 She describes a room in a black residence of Mobile, Alabama, as follows: “an over-stuffed mohair living-room suite, an imitation mahogany bed and chifferobe, a console victrola. The walls were gaily papered with Sunday supplements of [End Page 831] the Mobile Register. There were seven calendars and three wall pockets” (1022). Hurston observes that to the jaundiced eye the scene may appear grotesque. But to the practiced eye of the African American cultural initiate, the room is the quintessence of beauty. Hurston sums the matter as follows: “We each have our standards of art, and thus we are all interested parties and so unfit to pass judgment upon the art concepts of others” (1022). Henry Louis Gates, Jr., offers personal testimony to his instruction in the linguistic adornment and grace of the black vernacular as follows: My fascination with black language stems from my father’s enjoyment of absolute control over its manipulation. My father has mastered black language rituals, certainly; he also has the ability to analyze them, to tell you what he is doing, why, and how. … It is amazing how much black people, in ritual settings such as barbershops and pool halls, street corners and family reunions, talk about talking. Why do they do this? I think they do it to pass these rituals along from one generation to the next. They do it to preserve the traditions of “the race.” (xxi) Vernacular adornment and adorned black talk, as Hurston notes, transcend summary judgments. In their deployment and effects both enhancement and verbal exchange are vehicles for the transmission of what Richard Wright calls “racial wisdom” (“Blueprint”).3 Such wisdom is spoken, inscribed, and performed in a genealogy of preservation and passage. Wright would refer to the adornment noted by Hurston and black verbal mastery recalled by Gates as “forms of things unknown.” For Wright, “unknown” signifies not absence, but a subtly ubiquitous presence of black initiation rites. The ever-morphing protocols of vernacular “forms” are all citations of African American tradition. They are anagrammatic whispers, street-corner boasts, and kitchen table corrections. Hurston’s astute characterization of the vernacular and Wright’s emphatic championing of the “forms of things unknown” secure their legacies as critical instruction. Their critiques mark a double-gendered and engendered wisdom of vernacular mother and father wit. Who has not been captivated by Hurston’s catalog of double descriptors such as “high-tall,” “kill-dead,” and “hot-boiling”? Who has not been drawn into the fictive world of Wright by his bald and skillful representation of vernacular speech? In wisdom and style, Wright and Hurston provide indispensable conditions of possibility for the [End Page...

From Writing the Slave Self to Querying the Human: The First Twenty-Five Years of The Signifying Monkey

honestly can't remember the first time read Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism. Was it working on my undergraduate thesis in the basement of the library at the University of Kentucky? Maybe when arrived in my Americanist graduate seminars at Northwestern University? own a 1989 paperback edition of the text and can locate various and sundry photocopies of chapters in various and sundry file folders have collected over the years. But can't find the one read first, the original if you will, nor can locate in my memory the first time read it. But that's the interesting thing about The Signifying Monkey (something else had forgotten, but remembered on rereading the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition). On the one hand, the claims that Gates makes in it have so imbued the study of African American literature that many of them seem commonsensical, giving one something of the sense of I already knew that, but I'm not sure from where, almost like some things were so obvious that they didn't need stating (but, of course, in 1988, many of these things did need stating). On the other hand, this feeling for me was and continues to be coupled with another, paradoxical, but nonetheless true sensation--that every time have returned to this text, each time have repeated the act of reading it, including this last time, have learned something new. The Signifying Monkey is both what we (seem to) have always already known and also what we have yet to discover. This, in part, is what makes it the kind of book that generates both a twenty-fifth-anniversary edition and a roundtable on its anniversary in Early American Literature. In what follows, reflect on the past twenty-five years of this book's existence. first talk about what find most striking about this book for early African Americanists and early Americanists more broadly and also about what it has enabled--both in the classroom and in scholarship that has built on it. Then focus on a few trenchant and important critiques of Gates, the kind that even in disagreeing with The Signifying Monkey show how crucial it has been and continues to be to the development of the field. Lastly, hope to pose a few questions that signal places we can take The Signifying Monkey next. Scholars have discussed in the pages of this journal at exactly what point early American studies began to engage with ideas of race, racial identity, and the literary work of those considered racialized in the Americas. (1) I'm less concerned here with pinpointing exactly when that happened and more with celebrating the fact that the study of early American literature today is decidedly concerned with these issues and with recognizing the role that The Signifying Monkey played in that development. Although an important portion of the book focuses on Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Ishmael Reed, and Alice Walker, the lion's share analyzes early African and African American cultural production that takes place prior to 1835. This text clearly has been important in helping establish the field of African American literary study (usually in the diachronic version of Phillis Wheatley to Nikky Finney), but it also has been hugely important to the (somewhat more synchronic) field of early African American literary study and early American literary study more broadly. As Paul Gilroy blurbs on the back of the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition, this text remains an indispensable point of orientation for the study of African American and surely it does. But would add: just as it belongs on every PhD exam list in African American literature, The Signifying Monkey likewise belongs on every corollary list in early American literature. The Signifying Monkey must have a place in the training of our graduate students not because it shares a coincidental historical range but because it takes up a number of literary critical issues that resonate with similar issues in the wider study of early American literature. …

The Significance of Signifying: Vernacular Theory and the Creation of Early African American Literary Study

provocative difference one notices on the cover of the two editions of Henry Louis Gates's groundbreaking book The Signifying Monkey is the change in the subtitle from A Theory of Literary Criticism to A Theory of African American Literary Criticism, a change that the book helped to enact. In the twenty-five years since its original publication, The Signifying Monkey has earned its place as a classic work of and theory. As with any lasting scholarly work, moreover, it did not merely produce clones of its and method but enabled scholars in a host of disciplines in the arts and humanities and beyond to critique and push beyond its original borders. I still have my original copy from 1988, with the light blue (though frayed by now) book cover. In 1988, I had just learned that was a difference between literary criticism and literary theory and, its subtitle notwithstanding, The Signifying Monkey established that not all emanated from Europe, even as it framed my scholarly coming-of-age-in-the-academy story. To open the text and to realize that Africa had was revolutionary and it is good to have an occasion to reflect on how revolutionary it was. While the study of early African American today has expanded--necessarily and rightly--to encompass archival discovery, biography, and print culture, it began, I think, with Gates's concept of signifyin(g). First, two autobiographical digressions. My journey with early African American began with absence. The one black course at Wake Forest University in 1979 began with Zora Neale Hurston's 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. The prevailing sense was that was there--really. J. Saunders Redding in To Make a Poet Black (1939) had lumped everything before the Harlem Renaissance under the finely wrought phrase literature of necessity. What writing might have existed was utilitarian, functional, certainly to put on college syllabi or inspire analysis. I didn't question this at age twenty because it resonated with my own truncated family history growing up in the South. There was simply a point where was nothing back there and you learned to be content with absence and silence. In 1988, the year of the first edition of The Signifying Monkey, upon entering the Rutgers University library to do research for a paper on Spenser's Fairie Queene (1590), I encountered an entire wall of books on Spenser. On the way out of the library I stopped by the section and saw two shelves, half full or half empty depending on one's temperament, the books held in place by metal bookends. My subject had found me. I walked out of the library, into Murray Hall and Cheryl Wall's office, and announced that I wanted to write my dissertation on early black American literature. Of course, declaring Afro-American before 1865 as an orals area was also problematic, and I was told by the graduate director that was no such thing. After much reading and many visits to the Rutgers and Princeton libraries, I produced a five-page, single-spaced bibliography of slave narratives, poetry, novels, and essays by black writers before Emancipation and I was able to begin reading for orals. I use these two autobiographical touchstones as a way to reflect for a few moments on the significance of The Signifying Monkey to the creation of early African American (meaning pre-Harlem Renaissance) study. Gates's vernacular as an organizing principle within which to sketch--sometimes more successfully than others--an Afro/African American tradition reconfigured black texts away from biographical and sociological contexts to a consideration of the formal properties of African American intertextuality. Often accused by poststructuralists of creating a canon at the very juncture of the demise of the notion of canonicity, Gates did not achieve a construction of an undeconstructable canon so much as he precipitated a move that posited both an African American authorship and readership in one discursive swoop. …

Print, Writing, and the Difference Media Make: Revisiting The Signifying Monkey after Book History

Print, Writing, and the Difference Media MakeRevisiting The Signifying Monkey after Book History Joseph Rezek (bio) Consider two familiar frontispieces. Phillis Wheatley at the table, chin in one hand, quill in the other, eyes turned away from us, fixed in a contemplative upward gaze (fig. 1). She is at work on a manuscript—piously, perhaps, or inspired by more secular muses—and an inkwell and closed book lay ready to hand. Clothed in the attire of a “Negro Servant,” as the surrounding border puts it, how different she looks from Olaudah Equiano, in ruffles and a great coat. “We see an African dressed as an English gentleman,” Vincent Carretta has observed of Equiano’s frontispiece, and one who defiantly stares at the reader (Equiano 280). Equiano holds an open Bible, and as he thrusts the printed book forward he invites us to consider its lessons as precedent and echo of his own (fig. 2). Contrasts between the two images are evident along the axes of gender, class, and social status; Wheatley demurs and remains enslaved, while Equiano, daring his readers, is nominally free. But one difference stood out for me after rereading Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism (1988)—ironically, in fact, because this influential book provides few conceptual tools for us to notice or understand it. Wheatley’s frontispiece dramatizes a scene of writing (quill, manuscript, inkwell), while Equiano’s signals the power of print—because traces of the press are part of its spectacle. In The Signifying Monkey, Gates explores rhetorical figures that turn on the tension between the spoken and the written word, a tension he places at the center of black vernacular discourse and the centuries-old literary tradition it inspired. And yet despite his sustained emphasis on the mediating nature of language, Gates conflates the medium of handwriting with the medium of print—the technology [End Page 891] of marking words with a pen on paper (once per iteration) and the technology of fixing impressions on paper with moveable type (over and over again). Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Frontispiece to Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (London, 1773), by Phillis Wheatley. The Library Company of Philadelphia. On the surface this difference seems trivial, especially for a literary study so deeply inspired by oral modes of verbal expression and linguistic play. The difference matters enormously, however, for the group of texts assembled in the chapter of The Signifying Monkey that has been most influential for those working in the early period, “The Trope of the Talking Book.” In what follows, I consider the implications of that chapter’s elision of the difference media make. I write as a scholar participating in a widespread effort to reinterpret African American literature from the perspective of media specificity, one grounded in a long tradition of editorial scholarship and animated recently through a number of conferences, symposia, and collaborative publications.1 My interest in the difference between [End Page 892] writing and print, encapsulated for the moment in the Wheatley and Equiano images, has been inspired by the fundamental questions this scholarly community has been asking about the early black archive—old questions, no doubt, about “black messages” and “white envelopes” (Sekora), and what Robert Stepto called the “medley of voices” in published slave narratives (10)—but with new answers invested less in racial authenticity than in the puzzling complexities of print culture. Revisiting The Signifying Monkey in this way admittedly leaves aside a number of interesting topics we might consider upon the publication of the book’s twenty-fifth-anniversary edition—namely, its role in helping to legitimize the study of African American literature, its controversial deployment of deconstruction in order to do so, and the scholarly allusions and disagreements Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Frontispiece to The Interesting Narrative (London, 1789), by Olaudah Equiano. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. [End Page 893] Gates’s early writings have inspired since the mid-1980s. Instead of asking how much The Signifying Monkey has meant to scholars in the past, this essay asks the perhaps more...

Mother Tongues & Masters of Words: Callaloo Across the Atlantic

Mother Tongues & Masters of WordsCallaloo Across the Atlantic Salamishah Tillet (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Salamishah Tillet Michael K. Taylor © 2013 [End Page 557] For whom are we doing what we do when we do literary criticism? I can only speak for myself. But how I write and what I write is done in order to save my own life. —Barbara Christian, “Race for Theory” When the late Barbara Christian penned this famous essay, she did so with the urgency of the moment. In the late 1980s, the canon wars were raging; multiculturalism was seen either as a belated gift or imminent threat; and African American literary studies had the growing pains that came with its legitimacy in the American academy. Even our beloved Callaloo was only a mere decade old. But, I always read Christian’s words as not just for her time, but also as a harbinger for things to come. It reveals the long-standing concern, even angst, amongst those of my generation who continue to do African American literary criticism. Though there is certain circularity to this tension between formal politics and literary criticism, it is also inescapable. For whom are we speaking? In what languages do we write? And to what end? Those questions stayed with me after I left last year’s Callaloo Conference titled “The Transatlantic, Africa, and Its Diaspora” at Oxford University and Goldsmiths, University of London. A sentiment I do not share lightly because it was sparked as much by the insights of the conference participants as it was by the interruption of a single audience member. Perhaps, I should not use this space to think about his disruption. For those who attended the conference and experienced the successive series of his verbal assaults firsthand, we left feeling that this one person—whose name I sadly never learned—took up too much of our time and intellectual energy. But, I think his comments, our responses, and the eventual outcome of our exchange reveal the limits and the power of African American literary criticism itself. Language is the battlefield. It can be the tool of conquest and the sword. —Ngugi wa Thiong’o It did not have to be a strained moment. The panel, “Europe and the UK: Transatlantic Studies” featured a conversation about imagining new cartographies, or as geographer Pat Noxolo noted, new ways of seeing and recognizing creolizations, the in-between-space, that pushes us beyond the Atlantic. Likewise, literary critic Jean-Paul Rocchi posited the African Diaspora as “the possible space of recreation and reinvention,” always contingent [End Page 558] on “multiple identifications and multiple points of intersections.” Within this context of thinking through new circuits and the context of black diaspora studies, it was strange when a graduate student in the audience (from the United States but now studying in Paris) asked the panel about a debate that seems to plague some of us in the American academy: what is the role, if any, of the critic as public intellectual? The lines were quickly drawn. And the African Americanists primarily gave the responses: one panelist said the critic is the interpreter and disseminator of ideas to the outside world; another senior critic proffered that we should differentiate the public intellectual from publicity intellectual, the scholar from the pundit. In both cases, the emphasis was on the performance of translation—that delicate dance between the critic and our various publics. So, when the next question came up, it did not belie the contentiousness that would later take us off course. It started off innocuous enough, but it landed with a punch: “I am not sure why you all speak the way you do. Without passion. Without love.” Upon first blush, this audience member’s move is not so unfamiliar. Joyce Ann Joyce’s postulation that “Black creative art is an act of love” in 1987 was so bold that Sharon Holland would later call the ensuing debate between Joyce, Houston Baker, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. about the role of post-structuralism within African American literary criticism as so heated and important that it was “a revolution that should have been televised” (Joyce...

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

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. …

African American Literary Criticism and a Promised Land of Possibility in the Twenty-first Century

African American Literary Criticism and a Promised Land of Possibility in the Twenty-first Century

From Gospel to Gates: Modal Blending in African-American Musical Discourse before the Signifyin(g) Monkey

Despite its origins in the literary realm, Henry Louis Gates The Signfiyin(g) Monkey: A Theory of African-American literary criticism has become a standard methodological text for the study of African-American music. Those who embrace the theory accept as the foundation of their argument an apparent link between African-American linguistic and musical realms. This short paper locates the origin of this type of modal blending in research into the rhetorical practices of Gospel services in the United States during the early 1970s. It posits that this body of work established a consensus in the field of Cultural Studies over the affinity of linguistic/musical practices in African-American culture and demonstrates that this understanding was used to justify the application of Gates theory to musical analysis in the 1990s. The ubiquity of Gates theory in the study of African-American music today is therefore shown to be the result of interdisciplinary collaboration rather than the legacy of any one particular individual.

From Gospel to Gates: Modal Blending in African-American Musical Discourse before the Signifyin(g) Monkey

Despite its origins in the literary realm, Henry Louis Gates The Signfiyin(g) Monkey: A Theory of African-American literary criticism has become a standard methodological text for the study of African-American music. Those who embrace the theory accept as the foundation of their argument an apparent link between African-American linguistic and musical realms. This short paper locates the origin of this type of modal blending in research into the rhetorical practices of Gospel services in the United States during the early 1970s. It posits that this body of work established a consensus in the field of Cultural Studies over the affinity of linguistic/musical practices in African-American culture and demonstrates that this understanding was used to justify the application of Gates theory to musical analysis in the 1990s. The ubiquity of Gates theory in the study of African-American music today is therefore shown to be the result of interdisciplinary collaboration rather than the legacy of any one particular individual.