Waking Up to the Sound

1. Post-Civil Rights Sounds

At a recent party celebrating a friend’s eighty-second birthday, his “smart” television, running the Pandora app (rather tech-savvy, this octogenarian), played Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes’s “Wake Up Everybody” from the album of the same name released by Philadelphia International Records in 1975. This mid-tempo R&B classic—opening with piano glissandos, punctuated by guitar plucks and strums, and propelled by dynamic strings—displays the talents of the songwriting team of Gene McFadden and John Whitehead with Victor Carstarphen, the ingenuity of producers Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, and the powerhouse vocals of Teddy Pendergrass. The song opens by alerting listeners—of all races, presumably, women as well as men—to national and world problems: “hatred, war, and poverty.” Its chorus expresses dissatisfaction with the status quo and the passive acceptance of it—“The world won’t get no better / If we just let it be”—even if the song does not argue for a reworking of social, political, and economic structures. Rather than call out those in positions of power, each verse calls on a category of workers—“teachers,” “doctors,” “builders”—perhaps asserting the ability of those addressees and of individuals to make a difference in their local communities, the nation, and the world: “We got to change it, yeah / Just you and me.” Hearing the song triggered memories of my inner-city childhood during the 1970s, including a sense of solidarity in the black community, an awareness of the challenges facing us linked to a confidence that we were all working together as best as we could to confront them.

Rhyme’s Challenge: Hip Hop, Poetry, and Contemporary Rhyming Culture. David Caplan, Oxford University Press, 2014.

Imagine the Sound: Experimental African American Literature after Civil Rights. Carter Mathes, University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing. Anthony Reed, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014.

The historical era from which “Wake Up Everybody” dates, the decade following the legislative gains of the modern civil rights movement, is significant to recent studies of US literature. In 2011, Kenneth W. Warren argued that African-American literature was conceived as a literary tradition and a collective effort on the part of African Americans in the late-nineteenth century in order to combat racial segregation, but “with the legal demise of Jim Crow, the coherence of African American literature has been correspondingly, if sometimes imperceptibly, eroded as well” (2). Responses to Warren have been “at best lukewarm and at worst harshly critical” (Santamarina 399). In response to the claim that African-American literature is exhausted as a category following the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Rafia Zafar contends that instead of “retiring” the category of African-American literature, we should “further contextualize, periodize, and particularize its currents in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries” (402). Recent literary criticism by Carter Mathes, Anthony Reed, and David Caplan performs the work that Zafar describes, implicitly and explicitly responding to Warren’s arguments as well as suggesting related questions. For example, what are the social and political movements of the post-civil rights era and our own twenty-first-century moment with which black writing is concomitant? What does the “black” in “black writing” mean, to paraphrase Stuart Hall, especially when we consider the African diaspora outside of the US as well as differentiations of economic class, gender, sexuality, and generation (for starters)? And what exactly counts as “literature” anyway, and why?

The studies under review here, particularly Mathes’s and Reed’s, also respond to Warren by representing the beginning of the post-civil rights era, from which “Wake Up Everybody” dates, and thereafter as an era of black utopianism, by which I mean the critical analysis of existing structures (social, political, economic) as well as the conceptualization of and insistence on alternatives in the cultural products of the African diaspora.¹ This utopianism suggests that black writers have seen the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts as milestones in US racial history but not as an endpoint. “Post-civil...