Recapitulating the Yam: The Promise of African-American Literary Studies at History's End: A Response to Frances Smith Foster

We frequent silos of the known and preferred. We have greater access and more choices, but we see less and know little about the perspectives of others even as we proclaim inclusiveness and comprehensiveness. Our present-day perspectives too often lead to amazing bloopers and misleading omissions in and out of the classroom. Teachers explicate "I Yam what I Yam," a statement in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man . . . as an allusion to Popeye the Sailor Man.

Frances Smith Foster

The 1998 mainstream science fiction film Deep Impact launches its viewers into what I would call apocalyptic time as a meteor hurtles toward Earth heading straight for the Atlantic seaboard. After an American space team fails to destroy the meteor with nuclear warheads, the film begins counting down the weeks, days, hours, and minutes until the end of chronological time, marking the end of history with text: "Time to impact: 4 weeks 2 days"; then, "Time to impact: 2 weeks 3 days"; then, "Time to impact: 5 days"; and finally, "Time to impact: 10 hours 37 minutes." In a televised address following the space team's failure, a US president played by African-American actor Morgan Freeman warns the American people of their eventual destruction and begins his earnest work of salvaging a national future: "Hello, America. It is my unhappy duty to report to you that the Messiah has failed. . . . What do we do? You have a choice. We have a choice . . . right now." The film proceeds, in the apocalyptic temporality of the "right now," to save the country—indeed, the planet—through the restoration of the heterosexual nuclear dyad, storing away a righteous remnant of humanity in an underground shelter called "Noah's Ark" and tracking a survival-of-the-fittest race toward a new world, which is miraculously "re-given" with a black president at the helm by the end of the film. I am offering this précis of Deep Impact as a metaphor for the apocalyptic temporality of the contemporary university—for we seem to be constantly counting down to our own end and scrambling for "survival of our species as human beings and humanities scholars," as Frances Smith Foster writes—and as a beginning point for my brief meditation on the possibilities of African-American literary studies in such a time of economic, environmental, social, and political crisis.¹

The institutionalization of African-American literature over the past 40 years has, despite the earnest efforts of specialists, trended toward periodicity, with graduate apprenticeship focused on movements, problematics, and genres that conform to a taxonomy of historical periods that we generally accept and teach: early, modern, postmodern. Of the 53 dissertations in African-American literature filed in 2007 and 2008, for example, an overwhelming 49 treated twentieth-century authors and thematics, and a mere three defied the tendency to observe emancipation as a dividing line between periods.² (As a point of confession, I should admit that the historical context for my own 2006 dissertation was the "long" twentieth century in African-American culture and politics, beginning with Reconstruction and stretching through the early 2000s.) College-level and K-12 curricula, too, largely conform to this periodization of African-American literature, with the pedagogies of the early period largely cohering around slave narratives and the oral tradition, and the twentieth century adhering to a succession of movements suggested by the widely taught Norton Anthology of African American Literature (now in its second edition and adopted at over 1,200 colleges and universities): Literature of the Reconstruction to the New Negro Renaissance, 1865-1919; Harlem Renaissance, 1919-1940; Realism, Naturalism, Modernism, 1940-1960; the Black Arts Era, 1960- 1975; and Literature since 1975. The curriculum at my own institution is exemplary of this now-institutionalized periodization of African-American literature that views either emancipation or the New Negro Renaissance as definitive ruptures in black literary history: there is English 138A, "African American Literature to the Harlem Renaissance," and English 138B, "African American Literature since the Harlem Renaissance...