Of Cain and Abel: African-American Literature and the Problem of Inheritance after 9/11

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In November 2011, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution traced the career of Republican presidential hopeful Herman Cain back to his college years in the 1960s at Atlanta’s prestigious historically black institution, Morehouse College. Assimilating Cain into the image of the race man most often conjured in relation to other Morehouse luminaries—Martin Luther King, Jr., Maynard Jackson, Howard Thurman, Benjamin E. Mays—the article presents Cain as evidence of the widening variance in social and political perspectives in post-civil rights black American culture, even as it firmly anchors him in a kind of modern black political masculinity. United Negro College Fund president Michael Lomax tells the reporter, for example, “The elements of what you see in Herman Cain today were seeds planted, developed and nurtured at Morehouse[. . . . ] He is vintage Morehouse, as far as I am concerned. Strong personality. Forceful. Engaging. A supercharged ego. . . . Those are all elements of Morehouse.” A current Morehouse student and black Republican tells readers, “So often we’re given this media stereotype of a black Republican as someone who is outside mainstream black America, but Cain’s run does away with all these stereotypes. . . . He was born in the South, went to Mother Morehouse . . . and is still very much so connected to Black America” (Suggs).

This news story mirrors the double impulse of black cultural production since 9/11: on the one hand, to normalize black conservatism; on the other, to claim black intimacy with global capital and its discontents as a legacy, as the inheritance, of the 1960s black social movements. Explaining Cain’s rise from the black educational mecca in southwest Atlanta to his career as CEO and member of the Federal Reserve Bank, the article concludes by writing Cain into the same genealogy of the black freedom struggle that produced King and Obama: “The civil rights movement was in full swing and Morehouse Men by the dozen were joining the cause. But it was also a time when a sharp graduate from the only black college in the country for men, could start thinking seriously about joining the white corporate world.” The reaching back into a history of black protest and the reaching forward into black intimacy with state apparatuses of capital management, government, punishment, and war: this is the double impulse of African-American literature in the Age of Terror. How do we read African-American literary production in a time that has not only normalized but also aestheticized black intentionality for, black agency for, and black intimacy with occupation, border policing, surveillance, and detention?

My current work in progress, “The Other Side of Terror: African American Literature After 9/11,” advances a central claim: that the meanings and uses of blackness have fundamentally changed since the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and that these transformations necessarily affect the meanings and uses of African-American literature. To understand these changes would require a historicist account of the context of contemporary African-American literature and a formalist analysis of the remaking of African-American literature over the past four decades, a remaking catalyzed, I would argue, by 9/11. The formal effect of the collision of public black patriotisms and black literary reinvention is a splitting of the text: torn, between allegiance to a postsegregation US state that demands complicity with racialized state terror and nostalgia for a black cultural past identified by its very distance from canonical national knowledge and cultural production, the African-American cultural text registers the new double-consciousness of the post-9/11 era in the poetic, narrative, and visual language of fracture. We can witness this fracture in texts across genres, like Alice Randall’s 2009 novel, Rebel Yell, or Spike Lee’s 2008 film Miracle at St. Anna. We can read the fracturing of black communal belonging by speculative capital in August Wilson’s 2007 play Radio Golf. And we can witness the splitting of subjectivity by the history of black protest and the future of national security in Nikky Finney’s...