“Black Is . . . Black Ain’t”: Ralph Ellison’s Meta-Black Aesthetic and the “End” of African American Literature

Kenneth Warren notes the diverse ways that Invisible Man (1952) and its author have been interpreted from within and without the African American community, with Ellison being alternately characterized as race traitor, “race man,” and “transracial messiah.”¹ Warren reads Invisible Man as perhaps the quintessential example of a strain of African American literature seeking to assert black humanity to a segregated society in which that humanity was very materially in question. He finds the novel to be a powerful reminder of this humanity, but he wonders “how much longer . . . such reminders [will] be necessary.”² Recent high-profile instances of institutional and interpersonal racism, such as the deaths of Tanisha Anderson, Mike Brown, Jordan Davis, Samuel DuBose, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, and others, along with the recent shootings in Charleston, “stop-and-frisk” law enforcement offensives, and the prison-industrial complex, might make it easy to dismiss Warren’s question as overly optimistic at best. However, we need to take seriously his claim that perhaps Ellison’s novel in particular, and African American literature generally, do not quite matter in the same way they once did.

Warren’s provocatively titled What Was African American Literature? (2011), derived in large part from his 2007 W.E.B. Du Bois lecture at Harvard University and building upon the arguments he makes in So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism (2003), has sparked a lively debate that has extended from the world of academics (a forum in PMLA and a special issue of African American Review growing out of a Modern Language Association roundtable) to more mainstream forums (a symposium in the Los Angeles Review of Books and a public online live chat between Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Warren sponsored by the Chronicle of Higher Education). Warren’s fundamental claim in the book, that “African American literature was a postemancipation phenomenon that gained its coherence as an undertaking in the social world defined by the system of Jim Crow segregation,”³ may seem primarily to be a question of genre and periodization. Certainly, some of the criticism of Warren’s argument has been along these lines. Gene Andrew Jarrett, for example, has argued that “[s]uch a narrow periodization overstates the role that constitutional or juridical events have played in race relations, while restricting the political awareness and activities of African American writers to discourses of de jure segregation.”⁴ Erica Edwards has additionally claimed that “[i]t was precisely with the post–Jim Crow creation of black literature classrooms, that African American writers and critics re-turned to and reinvented ‘African American literature,’ again and against history.”⁵ These sorts of debates have always been a piece of academic discussions around canon formation and the definitions of national and ethnic literatures, of course, but the volume and the vehemence of the response to Warren’s argument suggests that there is something more at stake than determining where Toni Morrison’s novels should be stocked in the bookstore.

Warren himself freely admits that racism still exists and clarifies that while he does claim American society to be “post–Jim Crow,” “as for postrace, I make no such claims.”⁶ Regardless, it is easy to see how, when he describes Jim Crow–era African American literature as “prospective” and post–Jim Crow literature written by African Americans as largely “retrospective,” many readers take it as a challenge to the idea that cultural and, by extension, political solidarity based on race remain practical bases for pursuing social justice in the contemporary moment.⁷ This is what inserts Warren, whether he would like it or not, into conversations around “post-blackness”⁸ and the utility of blackness as identity in the post–Civil Rights moment being carried on by pundits such as Touré, political theorists such as Tommie Shelby, so-called Afro-pessimist critics such as Saidiya Hartman, and those, like Fred Moten, who frame blackness in terms of performativity.⁹ At the heart of these conversations is a debate over the...