A Tinker's Damn: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and The Signifying Monkey Twenty Years Later

When Charles Rowell, founder and editor of Callaloo, telephoned me in September 2007, asking that I write an essay that provides some insight into my thoughts on Henry Louis Gates's The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (1988), twenty years after its publication, I imagined the voices of my friends and foes asking, "Why would she [meaning me] continue that old, painful, and shameless subject?" I believe that Rowell, like Ralph Cohen, editor of New Literary History, respects the academy's need to pursue unsettled, unsettling, historical literary discussions. The following thoughts are an extended version of the essay Rowell invited me to present at Callaloo's celebration of its thirtieth anniversary in Baltimore, Maryland, in October 2007.

Having read numerous references to what is most frequently described as an angry, inappropriate skirmish, I continue to ponder why the dialogue in New Literary History is perceived as different from the historical responses to William Stanley Braithwaite's views of African-American literature, from Du Bois's negative critique of Zora Neale Hurston's and Richard Wright's work, from Wright's responses to Hurston's work, and more recently from the negative responses to the nationalistic perspective of writers of the Black Arts Movement. A major—perhaps the major—difference is that I, a black woman, without intended disrespect, took center stage in "speaking my mind."

In Liberation Memories: The Rhetoric and Poetics of John Oliver Killens, Keith Gilyard presents the details and the background for a literary skirmish that I detail here as one historical framework for the dialogue, instigated by my essay "The Black Canon: Reconstructing African-American Literary Criticism," which appeared in New Literary History. It is common knowledge now that this essay was accompanied by responses from Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Houston A. Baker, Jr., though Gates's ideas were the central focus of my essay. In his analysis of the life and works of John Oliver Killens, Gilyard presents a sustained account of the varying opinions of the function of and audience for black literature at the 1966 black writers' conference whose theme was "The Image of the Negro in American Literature." Killens is now as well noted for his organization of writers' conferences as he is for his dynamic novels that explore race relations, such as Youngblood and And Then We Heard the Thunder.

The discussions of African-American literature at the 1966 conference demonstrate not only that the dialogue on subjects, audiences, and methods that heated up the pages of the winter 1987 issue of New Literary History had historical sources, but that the stakes, by 1987, had become more politically charged and ironically gender specific. Gilyard, who cites David Llorens, explains that both Killens and his friend William Melvin Kelly sat on a panel titled "The Novel and Its Social Relevance to the Negro Revolution." While Killens asserted, "[. . .] our literature should have social relevance to the world struggle and especially to the struggle of black Americans," Kelley "declared that 'the task of the Negro writer should differ from that of the white writer in that, among other things, he should be addressing himself to the Negro'" (Gilyard 121). What is most valuable about Gilyard's rendition of the events at this conference is his recording of the internecine battle between Melvin B. Tolson, who was sympathetic to Killens, and Robert Hayden, who was an outlier at the conference. Gilyard's details are transfixing. He painstakingly explains:

Perhaps the most inspirational, strategic, and consequential articulation of the identity politics most promoted at the conference was voiced by Melvin B. Tolson. Tolson served partly as a counterpart to the thought and presence of Robert Hayden, the distinguished poet who was a professor at Fisk during Killens's tenure. The relationship between the two faculty members was contentious at best because of institutional decisions and openly expressed disagreements between the two about literary politics. Hayden had been at Fisk for twenty years, had been continually saddled with a heavy teaching load that hampered his poetic productivity, and had...