Reading Contemporary African American Literature: Black Women’s Popular Fiction, Post-Civil Rights Experience, and the African American Canon by Beauty Bragg (review)

An emerging field of inquiry in African American literature—with Gene Andrew Jarrett’s Representing the Race (2011) and Kenneth Warren’s What Was African American Literature? (2011) leading the charge—interrogates the foundations of black literary history and re-theorizes its advancement for the years to come. Beauty Bragg’s foray into black women’s popular fiction of the post-civil rights era is a timely addition to this shared conversation, reinforcing the importance of popular fiction despite its perceived lack of aesthetic sophistication. This perception is a direct result of the academy’s high/low cultural divide, which prioritizes aesthetic standards (the formal features of the text itself and its relationship to literary convention) over affective ones (the experiential or emotional responses a text evokes in its reader), resulting in the exclusion of popular fiction from anthologies and classrooms. Equally important to spotlighting institutional preferences over what constitutes a worthy piece of literature is Bragg’s desire to replace “monolithic notions of blackness” with more variegated concepts of racial identity and subject matter (32). After all, Gene Jarrett and others have put forth convincing arguments that the African American canon is designed to privilege black writers and texts that achieve a measure of aesthetic complexity and/or represent race in a presumably realistic or authentic manner. Bragg’s most valuable contribution is in transferring the above-mentioned arguments to the world of black female popular fiction, asking us what to make of gender and sexuality when we evaluate race.

By placing black feminist discourse within alternative popular aesthetics like post-soul, Bragg draws from Mae Gwen Henderson’s “Speaking in Tongues” (1989), an essay that cemented the viability of black women’s writing in “speak[ing] to and from the various social and aesthetic positions which have emerged in the post-civil rights era, enabling a critical project which makes legible the common goals and values of multiple discursive communities” (xiii). The inclusion of Wahida Clark’s Thugs and the Women Who Love Them (2004) and Terry McMillan’s The Interruption of Everything (2005) produces a new discourse that reflects on black experience during the particular historical circumstances of the post-civil rights generation. During this time, “black women wielded so much professional authority” and “the social norms and aesthetics associated with the black working class, as in the case of hip hop culture [were] widely assimilated into general culture” (41). The chapters following this historicization of black politics contextualize selected works in their moments of rapid cultural development for African American women. Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby (1981), for instance, set in 1977 and 1978, is analyzed against the archetype of the cultural mulatta and the economic situation of the post-civil rights era, when black women experienced unprecedented access to the social sphere. In later chapters, we follow the rise of black commercial culture and popular images of black women in the Girlfriend fiction of Tina McElroy Ansa’s The Hand I Fan With (1996) and Bebe Moore Campbell’s 72 Hour Hold (2005), unpacking figures like the crack mother, who came to represent the failure of black social progress, and the Buppie, the successful professional woman for which affirmative policies proved no longer necessary.

In the book’s strongest chapters, Bragg covers urban fiction of the 1980s and the rise of hip hop through works such as Joan Morgan’s When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost (1999) and Vickie Stringer’s Let That Be the Reason (1999). Drawing from Patricia Hill, whose Black Sexual Politics (2005) outlines public discourse and politics through the rise of drug/gangster culture, Bragg solidifies feminist discourse “as part of a black counter-public” (63). In a swift and successful response against the misogynic critiques of hip hop, she asserts that conservatism has prevented a nuanced exploration of its gender politics and that “keying on...