African American Literary Tradition Research Articles

Shaping an African American Literary Canon

Shaping an African American Literary Canon Robert Elliot Fox The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay, general editors. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. Includes an audio companion compact disc with 21 selections. Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition. Patricia Liggins Hill, general editor. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. Includes an audio companion compact disc with 26 selections. The publication of these two massive anthologies—each is over 2,000 pages long—is a milestone in the history of African American Studies and testifies to the significance and strength of the African American tradition of literature. Many of us long have been aware of the Norton anthology project, initiated by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., which was in the works for a decade and was eagerly, even impatiently, awaited by those who recognized the importance of the venture. I first learned of the Riverside project, however, when I received an advertising flier about the book early in 1997. Though there inevitably is a good deal of overlap in terms of authors and works, it would be wrong to see the existence of these two anthologies as a case of redundancy. (Indeed, these are not the only African American literature anthologies currently available, but they are, by a longshot, the most formidable.) Certain ongoing skirmishes notwithstanding, by now there is widespread agreement on the merits of many of the works chosen or proposed for inclusion in the African American literary canon, but there is not the same sort of consensus regarding the inner dynamics of that canon, the logics of its unfolding, its possible unifying principles. We have here two lengthy takes on the very important and surely controversial topic of what we might term the shape (and the shaping forces) of the canon. For those who wish to keep score, the Norton anthology contains the work of 120 writers, of whom 52 are women. The Riverside anthology features over 150 authors, including more than 70 women. There will be (there already have been) complaints about the exclusion or inclusion of particular authors or works, a controversy of tastes, temperaments and allegiances that no anthology or anthology-makers can hope to avoid. (I’ll toss a few cowries of my own into this debate later in this review.) But this is a battleground for critics and partisans. Strictly from a pedagogical perspective, there’s little to detain us, since the two collections are, on the whole, so extremely rich. In any event, time constraints in courses in which these texts are likely to be utilized unavoidably require a good deal of selectivity, and many teachers will want to supplement any sweeping anthology with additional materials of their own choosing, so debates over what’s in and what’s out in the end have more to do with the politics of canon formation than they have to do with the practical business of conducting a course. The Norton anthology is organized rather straightforwardly into seven periods: The Vernacular Tradition; The Literature of Slavery and Freedom: 1746–1865; Literature of the Reconstruction to the New Negro Renaissance: 1865–1919; Harlem Renaissance: 1919–1940; Realism, Naturalism, Modernism: 1940–1960; The Black Arts Movement: 1960–1970; Literature Since 1970. The Riverside anthology is divided into six major periods of “African American History and Culture”: 1619–1808, 1808–1865, 1865–1915, 1915–1945, 1945–1960, 1960 to the Present. In keeping with the volume’s title, the internal organization of each of these divisions reflects the call and response patterns that the editors see as characterizing, not just black performance modes, but the evolution of African American tradition itself. For example, the second period has the heading, “Tell Ole Pharaoh, Let My People Go,” and is structured around a “Southern Folk Call for Resistance” and a “Northern Literary Response: Rights for Blacks, Rights for Women,” while the last section, dealing with literature since 1960, is called “Cross Road Blues,” and is structured around a “Folk Call for Social Revolution and Political Strategy” and a “Call for Critical Debate,” answered by “Voices of the New Black Renaissance, Women’s Voice’s of Self-Definition, Voices...

Poetic Justice: Sarah Forten, Eliza Earle, and the Paradox of Intellectual Property

THE most recent edition of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, edited by Henry Louis Gates, contains a poem by Ada, a young woman of color, entitled, LINES, Suggested on Reading 'An Appeal to Christian Women of the South,' by A. E. Grimk&. Grimke's abolitionist tract was serialized in the Philadelphia National Enquirer between 8 and 29 October 1836 and published in a condensed form in the Liberator of 8 October 1836; a verse response to it appeared in the 29 October 1836 issue of the Liberator. Attributed to Sarah L. Forten, daughter of wealthy African-American businessman James Forten and aunt of Civil War diarist Charlotte Forten Grimk6, the poem has gained significance within the African-American literary tradition and as a feminist articulation of cross-race sisterhood in the early nineteenth century. In that period, an era of pseudonymous authorship, the identities of abolitionist poets were often veiled, which severely complicates literary attribution. My own research has revealed that Eliza Earle, a little-known Quaker poet (and a white woman), composed this and many of the poems previously attributed to Sarah Forten.' This discovery vividly illustrates the importance

Brothers and Keepers and the Tradition of the Slave Narrative

Beneath the riveting and empowering stories of successful flights to freedom told in the slave narratives that are foundational for the African American literary tradition are often discouraging stories of the silencing and effacement of their slave protagonists, under the well-intentioned guiding hands of ghost writers, editors, and supporters. In John Sekora's phrase, the narratives often turn out to be carefully wrapped in envelopes. John Edgar Wideman's first nonfiction book, Brothers and Keepers, shares many of the themes established by the founding genre of the African American literary tradition, the slave narrative--above all, its twin concerns with liberty and literacy. But while Brothers and Keepers deeply and variously parallels the thematic emphases of the slave narratives, Wideman, whether or not in direct response, in effect revises some of that genre's most salient conventions and its formative assumptions about black authorship, validation, voice, and narrative structure. (1) He does so by revising the compositional practices by which the slave narratives were most often constructed, practices which tended to muffle the protagonists' individual voices through the use of stylistic and structural features imposed by their sponsors' beliefs about African Americans and about the white readers' expectations, and their all-encompassing commitment to the abolitionist cause. The changes Wideman rings on the genre's conventions allow him to give a larger portion of narrative and compositional control to his book's second protagonist, his otherwise largely disenfranchised brother Robert. Considering Brothers and Keepers in relation to the slave narratives thus suggestively deepens its resonances while illuminating both the contemporary and the earlier works. His essay on Charles Chesnutt reveals Wideman's particular interest in the oral qualities of the African American narrative tradition. However, I will concentrate here on the relationship between Brothers and Keepers and the written life stories of slaves. Writing itself is a central issue for both Wideman and the slaves, and the written narratives explicitly foreground issues of emphasis, structure, verification, truthfulness, and collaboration that may only be inferable from the oral records, but that Wideman engages passionately and creatively throughout his book. Brothers and Keepers is the story of two brothers from the Homewood section of Pittsburgh. John, a Rhodes Scholar and novelist, was, when he wrote it, an English professor at the University of Wyoming. Robert, younger by about ten years, having tried, largely unsuccessfully, to establish himself on the street as a major drug dealer, had served several years of a life sentence for murder, the result of a holdup that went out of control. The book incorporates both brothers' perspectives and voices, as it tries to answer the questions compelled by their different lives, and to reconnect them to each other. In this effort, the book both uses strategies and devices familiar to readers of slave narratives, and addresses, directly or obliquely, the questions those conventional practices raise. Brothers and Keepers echoes and modifies several major characteristics of the written narratives of slaves: the presence of an editor, sponsor, or ghostwriter mediating between the narrator/protagonist and the audience, and the tendency to explain the process of writing or recording the story; the concern with truthfulness, and the incorporation of various forms of documentation and validation to guarantee it; the consequent presence of diverse genres of discourse; the presence of multiple voices (if only as a result of generic diversity, and notwithstanding the general paucity of genuinely oral elements); the incorporation of others' stories, so that the individual's story becomes representative; an explicit moral purposefulness, especially but not only in those narratives that predate the abolition of slavery; (2) and the themes of flight and literacy, of entrapment (both internal and by an external, dehumanizing system), of masking, of the lonely search for home, of the significance of names, of the need to establish a sense of self apart from others' expectations, and of the importance of family and family history. …

The music in African American fiction

Originally published in 1995, The Music of African American Fiction is a historical analysis of the tradition of representing music in African American fiction. The book examines the impact of evolving musical styles and innovative musicians on culture as is manifested in the literature. The analysis begins with the slave narratives and the emergence of the first fiction of the antebellum years and moves through the Reconstruction. This is followed by analyses of definitive fictional representations of African American music from the turn-of-the-century through Harlem Renaissance, the Depression and World War II eras through the 1960s and the Black Arts Movement. The representation of music shapes a lineage that extends from the initial chronicles written in response to sub-human bondage to the declarations of an autonomous black aesthetic and dramatically influences the evolution of an African American literary tradition.

The Hammers of Creation: Folk Culture in Modern African-American Fiction

In The Hammers of Creation, Eric J. Sundquist analyzes the powerful role played by folk culture in three major African American novels of the early twentieth century: James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, Zora Neale Hurston's Jonah's Gourd Vine, and Arna Bontemps's Black Thunder. Sundquist explains how the survival of cultural traditions originating in Africa and in slavery became a means of historical reflection and artistic creation for modern writers. He goes on to illustrate and compare how the three representative novels use aspects of African American culture, including the folklore of slavery, black music from spirituals to jazz, black worship and sermonic form, and African American resistance to slavery and segregation. The Hammers of Creation focuses on the unique narrative form of each of the three novels - Johnson's fictive autobiography, Hurston's ethnographic commentary combined with personal narrative, and Bontemps's historical fiction based on Gabriel's slave rebellion - to illustrate the range of fictional strategies black writers have employed. Through their attempts to gain cultural integrity, Sundquist explains, these writers were able to recover and preserve vital aspects of African American history. Sundquist argues that by incorporating vernacular culture and the oral tradition into their works, Johnson, Hurston, and Bontemps challenge the primacy of written narrative while creating an African American literary tradition that links the world of African ancestors and antebellum culture to the world of contemporary letters.

"A Man's Story Is His Gris-gris": Ishmael Reed's Neo-HooDoo Aesthetic and the African-American Tradition

The story is the gris-gris is the self: this equation by Raven Quickskill, fugitive poet of Flight to Canada, lies at the heart of this attempt to locate Ishmael Reed within the African-American literary tradition. Superficially, Reed's metafictional and satirical novelistic techniques2 seem to ally him more closely with the postmodern mainstream than with the lyricism and search for community which has characterized so much recent AfricanAmerican literature. My contention here, however, is that this superficial dissimilarity is precisely what places Reed firmly in the African-American tradition. His aesthetic could be called as subversion, in that it takes the superficial forms of a dominant culture and transforms their meaning while leaving the forms themselves intact: a polemical approach which has been fundamental to African-American writing since its inception. Reed's formulation for this transformation of meaning is Neo-HooDoo,3 in which the story, the gris-gris, and the self become equated in a way that accords with the African understanding of the nature and function of art, but which redefines this understanding in a North American context. Since Neo-HooDoo has its origins in Voodoo,4 this examination of Reed's linguistic acts of subversion will begin in Haiti, or, more specifically, with a brief consideration of the nature and function of Voodoo art as it influences

Who is Nettie? and What is She Doing in Alice Walker's 'The Color Purple'

Alice Walker's The Color Purple has become justly famous not least for being a successful modern version of the epistolary novel and for bringing off the feat of letting an illiterate woman, born and bred in rural Georgia, tell most of the story in Black English. Apparently The Color Purple is unique in the African-American literary tradition as an epistolary novel.1 The entire work consists of three series of letters: Miss Celie's letters addressed to God, often very brief but making up about three fifths of the total number of letters, the rest of the text being covered by Celie's and her sister Nettie's correspondence to-not with-each other. Until mid-way into the book we are dependent on Celie's version for our knowledge of her world. Her many letters to God are more of a diary than letters designed for an addressee who is expected to reply in some form or other, and through them we acquire an intimate knowledge of Celie, her feelings and attitudes, her experiences and her vague hopes. We become involved in her life and her development, from an abused, downtrodden slave to an independent woman who is aware of her worth as a human being. Celie, and especially the friend and lover that she finds in the flamboyant blues singer Shug Avery, are the novel's heroines and bearers of its philosophy, and their love for one another,

A MELUS Interview: Paule Marshall

following interview was conducted in Ms. Marshall's apartment living room in Richmond, VA, May 28, 1990. room is tastefully appointed with no excesses, like Ms. Marshall's fiction. One wall is lined with burnished wood shelves filled with books and art objects; on the opposite wall hangs an oil portrait of the wistful girl who appears on the cover of Brown Girl, Brownstones. Ms. Marshall smiles comfortably and talks warmly as she tells about her life's work; she relates information about conceiving and writing Brown Girl (1959) with a freshness that belies how long ago her first novel was published. One gets the singular impression that the ideas and plans for all of her fiction, retained or discarded, remain vibrantly alive in her thinking and imagination to animate her conversation as she recalls planning and researching content or selecting concepts and images to covey her ideas. fiction of Paule Marshall - Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959); Soul Clap Hands and Sing (1961); Chosen Place, Timeless People (1969); Reena and Other Stories (1983); Praisesong for the Widow (1983); and Daughters (1991) - is distinct in African American literary tradition for its attentiveness to the necessity of cultural continuity for blacks of the African Diaspora. Ms. Marshall's rare vision encompasses the impact of the peculiar history of people of African descent and discerns that a spiritual return to their source represents their best chance for survival. Interviewer: There are very clear pictures of the Caribbean in your fiction. Would you talk about its importance to you and to your work? Marshall: Well I think the importance of the West Indies in the work started even before my first visit which took place when I was nine years old. It predates that because as I quoted in that essay of mine, The Poets in the Kitchen, one of the things that was talked a lot about among the women was the whole nostalgic memory of home as they called it, home. It was very early on that I had a sense of a very distinct difference between home, which had to do with the West Indies, and this country which had to do with the United States. For a while it was a little confusing because to me home was Brooklyn and by extension America, and yet there always was this very strong sense in the household of this other place that was also home. I think that it began then, an interest in this place that was so important to these women and that I began to sense it was important in whomever I was going to discover myself to be. So when I started thinking about such weighty topics, not until much, much later in my life, twenties or so, the other home seemed important to me in order to answer certain questions about myself. Really in a sense that's what the work is primarily about; it's my trying to find answers I'm always putting to myself. Interviewer: Were you aware of intraracial conflict growing up in Brooklyn? That theme is minimally present in Brown Girl, Brownstones. Marshall: I was made aware of the fact that I certainly was Afro-American growing up on the mean streets of Brooklyn, and at the same time there was this other component, this other very strong dimension which was Afro-West Indian. I didn't see any contradiction or difference or problem with the two until I was made aware of some of the conflicts between the two groups. This was very painful for me because I saw myself belonging to both. A conflict would almost suggest that there were parts of myself that were in conflict with each other. Then to reinforce the whole West Indian aspect there was the trip that my mother took us on when I was nine and my sister was thirteen to visit our Grandmother in Barbados. My mother had come into some money from a brother of hers who worked at the Panama Canal; and he had died there, as so many of those men from the West Indies working in the swamps and jungles of Panama didn't make it out. …

Facing Tradition: Revisionary Scenes in African American Literature

African American literary theory's quest for a distinctly black criticism implies the task of determining the contours and character of African American literary tradition. This task is, in fact, at once external and internal to that tradition, which arises in the very act of questioning its own possibility. African American literature deploys a topos for this simultaneous theorizing and enactment of tradition: the scenario of facing, wherein a protagonist experiences a pivotal moment of self-discovery by catching his or her reflection in the visage of an other (father, mother, master, etc.). Examples from Frederick Douglass to Alice Walker demonstrate the rhetorical and thematic nuances by which African American literature's facing motif establishes black tradition as a variegated scene of vision and revision.

The Ancestor as Foundation in Their Eyes Were Watching God and Tar Baby

restorative power of folklore is a recurring theme in African-American literature. In novels like James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), Jean Toomer's Cane (1923), and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), folklore is a powerful spiritual and artistic resource. Conversely, cultural orphanage is associated with spiritual malaise, a loss of creativity, and a variety of psychic disorders. It is the price African-Americans pay for upward social mobility in a racist society. In novels like Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977), Toni Cade Bambara's Salt-Eaters (1980), and Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow (1983), folklore is perceived as the repository of a complex culture of survival. Reconnection with folk culture is the key to psychological and spiritual reconstruction in a hostile and culturally alienating environment. In The Art of Fiction Ralph Ellison speaks explicitly to the importance of folklore to an ever-expanding African-American literary tradition. Ellison looks to folklore to discover What in our background is worth preserving or abandoning:

Afro-American Writing: An Anthology of Prose and Poetry

Call and response: the Riverside anthology of the African American, Volume 2 the Riverside anthology of the African American literary tradition, Patricia Alveda Liggins Hill, Bernard W. Bell, 1998, Literary Criticism, 2039 pages. CD contains: Rare and historic performances compiled from the Archives of Smithsonian/Folkways Records, and allows readers to hear a number of the texts from the anthology in.