Bearing Witness to African American Literature: Validating and Valorizing Its Authority, Authenticity, and Agency

1. Double Consciousness as the Sign of African American Difference

@ 25 1 Double Consciousness as the Sign of African American Difference I The African American Jeremiad and Frederick Douglass’s Fourth of July 1852 Speech In 1991 I was flattered to be the only American scholar to receive an invitation from Professor Paul Goetsch, head of the Department of English, University of Freiburg, West Germany, to join his coeditor Gerd Hurm and my interdisciplinary former German colleagues with a contribution to The Fourth of July: Political Oratory and Literary Reactions, 1776–1876 (1992), a collection on the tensions between orality and literacy associated with the Declaration of Independence. The seeds for this invitation were planted during my appointment for a year in 1974 as an exchange visiting lecturer of American and African American literature between the Departments of English at Freiburg University and the University of Massachusetts where I was an assistant professor. I initially had some reservations and considerable anxiety about whether I was doing the right thing in culturally transplanting my reluctant wife and three athletic young sons from the Happy Valley of Amherst, Massachusetts, to the Black Forest area of southern Germany. But our gracious and generous reception by new acquaintances and previous exchange professors not only quickly allayed our anxieties but also exceeded our expectations for exciting cultural adventures. My intellectual style and interdisciplinary methodology also significantly benefited from lecturing at various 26 @ Chapter 1 teaching colleges and at the University of Heidelberg, where I first interacted with several young international scholars and critics, including Werner Sollors while he was completing his habilitation on Amiri Baraka. But two experiences had the most dynamic, valuable, and memorable impact on my pedagogy and research. The first was my introduction in enlightening academic and informal exchanges with students and colleagues such as Paul Goetsch, Herbert Pilch, Kurt Müller, Karl Müller, Gunter Jarfe, Willi Erzgräber, Rita Stoephosius, Jurgen Freund, and especially Berndt Ostendorf in cafés, classrooms , lecture halls, and dinner parties. The most intriguing exchanges focused on the reader-response criticism and reception theories developed at the University of Constance by Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser. The second were equally provocative exchanges about nineteenth- and twentiethcentury American and African American folk and popular culture, especially the global impact of blues and jazz. These cultural and interdisciplinary exchanges culminated in the publication of The Folk Roots of Contemporary Afro-American Poetry (1974), the early drafts of chapters of The AfroAmerican Novel and Its Tradition (1987), and the essay “The African American Jeremiad and Frederick Douglass’s Fourth of July 1852 Speech.” “The legend has it,” says an African American contemporary celebrant of Jubilee, “that a Negro got a mule in Washington and arrived in [each?] town on June 19th with the Emancipation Proclamation. So that July 4th is whites’ Independence and June’teen [is] Negro Independence Day.” Expressing his cultural dualism as an American of African descent, another celebrant states, “Well, as a patriot and a citizen I celebrate the 4th of July, but from a race standpoint I still like the 19th of June” (qtd. in Wiggins xii).1 Many African Americans in Texas celebrate the day that they call Juneteenth because General Gordon Granger landed in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865, and read a federal order freeing all the slaves in east Texas. “For a significant number of Afro-Americans, their particular local independence observance—whose date varied from region to region—was ‘the biggest day in the United States’ and held more cultural significance for them than July 4th. In 1863 Frederick Douglass called January 1 ‘the most memorable day in American Annals’ before concluding that—‘The fourth of July was great but the first of January, when we consider it in all its relations and bearings is incomparably greater’” (Wiggins xi). For postbellum Americans of African descent, January 1 was racially and ethnically more Double Consciousness as the Sign of African American Difference 27 @ significant than July 4. Whereas the latter marked the signing in 1776 of the Declaration of Independence by the legendary Founding Fathers of the nation, the former marked the promulgation in 1863 by Abraham Lincoln, the legendary Moses of black liberation, of the Emancipation Proclamation. That the primary purpose of this presidential act and document, which freed slaves in only the seceding states, was military rather than humanitarian is apparent in Lincoln’s issuance on September 22, 1862, of his preliminary proclamation. This document gave...