Everybody’s Protest Narrative: Between the World and Me and the Limits of Genre

The question of genre in the African American literary tradition is as old as the tradition itself. The earliest known writing of a black person in North America remains Lucy Terry’s “Bars Fight.” As best we can tell, Terry was born in Africa and sold into slavery in Rhode Island some time around 1730. Not published until 1855, “Bars Fight” tells the story of the slaying of two white families by “Indians” on August 25, 1746. It is not clear whether the poem was designed to be sung or if it was indeed a successful attempt at poetry and traditional literature. Its rhymed tetrameter couplets suggest the latter. Nevertheless, “Bars Fight” was passed down orally, thereby muddying the waters of genre (at least in relation to the question of the oral in literature). Notably, the tradition’s second conflicted genre also raises questions about the primacy of orality. In 1770, James Gronniosaw’s A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince, as the first published full-length autobiography by a black person, ushers in the tradition of what comes to be known as “the slave narrative” and one of its attending tropes, the talking book. Having seen his master read a book aloud, Gronniosaw claims to have believed that books could talk. Metaphorically, which is how we should assume he meant to invoke the trope, Gronniosaw was right. Books can talk—to and for you. Early African American authors modified the tradition of the autobiography to birth a new genre—the slave narrative—as a means of having books talk, of having them protest the inhumanity of enslavement. More contemporarily, Gayl Jones highlights the tendency of the African American novel to transcend the limits of long fiction as genre in its more traditional iterations. In “Re-Imagining the African-American Novel: An Essay on Third World Aesthetics,” the text, which “presumes to be written by the novel itself,” writes:

I am a novel of the Third World, and so you would expect me to be different from those other novels [or “novels of the Other”], to have a different aesthetics, to revise (or rewrite) genre, characterization, style, theme, structure, viewpoint, values, and so I do. Paradox and ambivalence may be seen in the margins of this marginal text, and may be read in and between these lines. . . . depending on who you are, I may be full of contradictions. . . . I may contain every sort of implication: political, economic, sociological, anthropological, historical.

(508; original brackets)

In important ways, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me enters this conversation of the limits of genre—in this case the epistolary memoir as protest—for writers attempting to explore the political, economic, sociological, anthropological, and historical honestly, as Jones’s self-reflexive novel suggests. In a conscious nod to James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, which contains two essays, “My Dungeon Shook—Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of Emancipation” and “Down at the Cross—Letter from a Region of My Mind,” Between the World is structured as Coates’s letter to his son in the wake of a series of state-sanctioned violent assaults against black people, from Marlene Pinnock to Tamir Rice to Eric Garner. The book was met with near unprecedented success. It was easily among the most talked-about and widely reviewed books of 2015; it won the National Book Award for nonfiction; and Coates received a MacArthur Fellowship not long after its publication. But as much as Between the World and Coates were celebrated, segments of the black intellectual community also expressed well-placed critical concern about the book and Coates’s corresponding meteoric rise. Cornel West, for example, in a Facebook post, lamented Coates’s silence about the resistance movements that emerged in wake of the violence that informs the book’s ascent, among other things.

Coates’s fear-driven self-absorption leads to individual escape and flight to safety. . . . Coates can grow and mature, but without an analysis of capitalist...