Between a Failure and a New Creation: (Re)reading Yusef Komunyakaa's "The Beast & Burden" in the Light of Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic

If "saturation" is incomplete in a given work, and the poem is presumably complete (i.e., it makes sense), then it is somehow complete outside of the tradition, or the framework of Blackness. What, then, do we call such a work? Hybrid? Incomplete? A failure? A new creation?

—Stephen Henderson, "Saturation"

The question of the "essence" of the black experience has run like a rift through the body of African-American literary and cultural criticism ever since the beginning of this discipline. Already in the 1920s and 1930s W. E. B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston promote essentialism, as they emphasize the uniqueness of the black perception of reality, stress the originality of black creativeness, promote a belief in the "beauty of blackness," and reprove their fellow black writers for setting the white standards at the apex of their artistic aspirations.¹ In response to these harbingers of a Black Aesthetic, Richard Wright in "Blueprint for Negro Writing" complains that black writers cannot achieve artistic autonomy if they continue to separate themselves from the experience of the white majority. In Wright's view, only through "integration with the American scene" and the relating of black experience to the larger experience of the working class will black writers manage to fulfill "their roles" (52). Wright's approach, later labeled by Houston Baker as "integrationist," becomes the dominant paradigm for criticism of African-American cultural expressions in the 1950s. According to Baker, the integrationist paradigm owes its popularity mainly to the editors of the influential anthology The Negro Caravan, Sterling Brown and Ulysses Lee, who asserted that "black" and "white" literatures need to be judged by a "single standard of criticism" ("Generational Shifts" 182).

With the rise of the Black Arts Movement, the 1960s and 1970s witness yet another "generational shift," to use Baker's term, from the integrationist to the essentialist paradigm. Such critics as Larry Neal, Addison Gayle, Stephen Henderson, and Houston Baker (in his early writings) advocate separation, or at least "bifurcation," of the black aesthetic from the dominant white aesthetic on account of their essential disparity of experience, and promote the metaphysical concept of "blackness," which is not "a theoretical reification, but a reality, accessible only to those who can 'imagine' in uniquely black ways" (Baker, "Generational Shifts" 190).² One of the most peculiar of the Black Arts Movement theories is Henderson's theory of "saturation," a category through which a critic can measure the presence of "blackness" in a given literary text in the way that a hygrometer can measure atmospheric humidity.

In contemporary criticism, Black Aesthetic essentialism finds continuation in Afrocentric theory, promoted by Molefi Kete Asante and based on a belief in the existence of an essential, racial pan-African self. Like Henderson, Asante perceives "blackness" as an entity that to various degrees can be present within a literary text, and distinguishes two types of texts produced by authors who fail to include "blackness" in their literary creations: "the decapitated text" and "the lynched text" (13). Asante describes these two types of texts in the following way: "A text that is decapitated exists without cultural presence in the historical experience of the creator; a lynched text is one that has been strung up with the tropes and figures of the dominating culture. African-American authors who have tried to "shed their race" have been known to produce both types of texts" (13).

Although the divisions between "essentialists" and those who oppose the concept of essence still form the main point of conflict in contemporary criticism of African-American literature, it is now much more difficult to delineate the boundaries between particular "camps" than it was for Baker to delineate the boundaries between consecutive "generational shifts" in his 1981 article. Houston Baker and Henry...