The Black Aesthetic Unbound: Theorizing the Dilemma of Eighteenth-Century African American Literature (review)

April C. E. Langley’s The Black Aesthetic Unbound is an effort to discover just “what is African in African American literature.” Though Langley poses this question as one about African-American literature, it would be more precise to say that she is attempting to identify the foundational elements of a transatlantic black aesthetic, an aesthetic that links both African Americans and Afro-Britons to particular religious and aesthetic traditions of West Africa. It is an ambitious book, and Langley makes a number of very apt and interesting observations about how this black aesthetic has been transmitted and received to the present through her readings of a number of black Atlantic authors, particularly Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano. It is an interesting, though sometimes uneven book, as she dedicates a whole chapter each to Wheatley and Equiano, but only briefly addresses the writings of Lucy Terry, James Albert Gronniosaw, John Marrant, and Venture Smith in the final, crowded fourth chapter.

In order to get at the root of her question, “What is African in African American,” Langley makes three assumptions: first, to avoid the perception that only Europe and America count as the locations in which displaced African peoples acquired language and formed their identities; second, though African American identity is inextricably linked to Africa, we should not mistake African America as a stand-in for Africa, as “one is not the equivalent of the other”; and third, that the “distortions and romanticizations” of truth encountered in both African and white writing function similarly. Each of these assumptions serve Langley’s project well as the first point, among other things, directs the reader’s attention to the fact that there was a lived experience and treasured traditions transported along with the first generation of displaced Africans that continue to influence the language, religion, and writings of later generations of African Americans and Afro-Britons. It is, indeed, an unfortunate fact of history that for generations of scholars there was an assumption that very little, if any, of West Africa’s traditions survived the middle passage. Because this theory of catastrophism had so much influence in the way scholars approached the study of African American culture in general, Langley wishes to explicitly focus her attention to those unique African-influenced elements that contributed to an early, developing black aesthetic.

Indeed, Langley’s approach to her first assumption emphasizes the second mistake she wishes to avoid, which is the view that “Africanisms,” a term she attributes to Melville Herskovits, have survived in some static form. Rather, Langley emphasizes that the black aesthetic, though grounded in Africa, ought to be recognized as ever changing and dynamic, that she wishes to examine it as a process rather than a static object. Indeed, this is a good approach as it prevents the scholar from engaging in an all-too-easy romanticization of Africa rather than careful critical investigations of process, signification, and meaning as they shift and change over time to serve a function. Indeed, the third point of Langley’s assumptions is tied to the second in that an easy objectification of Africa and “Africanisms” can lead to a simple, unproductive inverting of the dominant binary paradigms of thinking both within the literature and in scholarship examining it.

Langley’s assumptions serve to undergird her principal theoretical apparatus of a “Senegalese poetics” integrating the West African Wolof taasu, Nigerian palava, African American Signifying and speaking in tongues, in addition to “other available symbolic structures of meaning such as Sankofa, griot, and Bird of the Wayside.” Most literature scholars are familiar with Henry Louis Gates’s theory of African American Signifying, which Langley uses throughout her study. The taasu is a form of praise poetry Wolof Senegalese women perform at family events that Langley adopts as a Senegalese way of knowing. Thinking in terms of taasu allows Langley to consider elements of English-language poems such as “the worlds it...