In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Sent From Afric Shore
  • Sarah Meer (bio)
Preaching the Gospel of Black Revolt: Appropriating Milton in Early African American Literature by Reginald A. Wilburn. Duquesne University Press, 2014. $58. ISBN 9 7808 2070 4715

Questions of tradition have formed a major theme of African American literature and its literary criticism since at least the eighteenth century. Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects (1773), published twelve years after a Boston merchant purchased her as a child from the cargo of a slave ship, includes an encomium to Maecenas, patron of Virgil and Horace. In it Wheatley notes that Terence ‘was an African by birth’, but frets that he may be her only black model:

But say, ye Muses, why this partial grace,To one alone of Afric’s sable race?1

For many black writers, the primary creative anxiety has not been of influence, but of unknown ancestry. In an article for Ms. magazine in 1974, Alice Walker asked where to look for ‘artistic great-grandmothers’ in the history of slaves, lamenting the creativity suppressed while ‘for most of the years black people have been in America, it was a punishable crime for a black person to read or write’. She noted Virginia Woolf ’s call for a ‘Room of One’s Own’, but asked what then ‘to make of Phillis Wheatley, a slave, who owned not even herself?’2 Where Woolf resorted to imagining a forerunner, Judith Shakespeare, Walker noticed the quiet domestic channels into which the dammed self-expression of her mother’s generation had been diverted: quilts, gardens, song.

Many of the major works of African American literary criticism have sought to offer not only an account of a tradition, but a theory of it. Successively, critics suggested that the animating force of African American [End Page 373] letters was the history of the struggle against slavery, or oral or folk culture, or a recovered African heritage. Robert Stepto’s 1979 From Behind the Veil pressed the case for the twin themes of literacy and freedom in African American narrative; in 1984, Houston Baker argued that the ‘distinctive, the culturally specific aspects’ of African American literature and culture could be traced to or described as a ‘blues matrix’ (Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature); Henry Louis Gates Jr. argued that its presiding spirit was a creature from African American folklore, the rhetorical trickster the Signifying Monkey, which Gates argued was cognate with a Yoruba deity, Esu-Elegbara (The Signifying Monkey, 1988). The predominant analogies for the relationship between African American traditions and individual talents have been musical – Cheryl Wall’s 2005 book about black women’s writing, for instance, was called Worrying the Line, invoking blues alterations of pitch, stress, or word order that emphasise, clarify, or undermine. A more unexpected turn was to blackface minstrelsy, in whose racist mockery Houston Baker read the prototype for a kind of strategic deference to white traditions which he calls ‘the mastery of form and the deformation of mastery’ (Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, 1987, p. 15).

Implicitly, of course, many of these books were themselves addressing racist traditions of denigration or neglect; academia’s own civil rights movement took on Jim Crow by asserting the existence of a black cultural genealogy, and then advocating its distinctiveness and worth. But the combination of those racist traditions and the peculiar horror of transatlantic slavery have made lineage questions specially and painfully contentious in relation to African American literature. What the anthropologist Melville Herskovits called in 1941 The Myth of the Negro Past was for a long time an academic commonplace: that the circumstances of the Atlantic slave trade had so thoroughly and completely severed transported slaves from their original cultures that nothing survived into the New World. The view was most famously articulated by E. Franklin Frazier, in The Negro Family in the United States (1939): ‘Probably never before in history has a people been so nearly completely stripped of its social heritage as the Negroes who were brought to America’ (p. 21). Frazier was the most distinguished African American sociologist of his generation, but as Herskovits argued, this view was ‘one of the principal supports of race prejudice in...

pdf

Share