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  Being BlackThere Contemporary African American Detective Fiction Since , Walter Mosley, Barbara Neely, Eleanor Taylor Bland, Anthony Gar Haywood, Nichelle Tramble, and Valerie Wilson Wesley, among a number of other African American authors, have chosen to write not just one detective novel but a series of detective novels. In response to that ever-expanding list of authors and works, quite a few valuable essays and book-length studies of contemporary African American and “ethnic” detective fiction have been published in recent years.1 Yet for all the attention being paid to African American detective fiction, the reasons for its contemporary flourishing remain a mystery. Few critics have engaged the question why so many African American authors in the s and early s have turned to this particular genre. Paula Woods, a groundbreaking scholar of this type of fiction, has argued persuasively that the use of black detective-protagonists “lets readers know that African Americans are not just the victims or perpetrators of crimes but are also those who try to correct the balance that murder upsets.”2 In considering why so many writers are currently working in the genre, however, Woods only speculates briefly: “Perhaps as an outgrowth of the hunger Americans of all colors have developed for black writing, African American mystery writers have also begun to claim the spotlight.”3 Nicole King does get at the “when” in her analysis of several African American novels published in the s—a period, she asserts, that “called forth a resurgence of nostalgic affirmations of black community.”4 She concludes that her chosen novels, including Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress, show the period’s “desire to assert ‘blackness’ . . . as well as the virtual impossibility of representing it as wholly unified or stable.”5 Certainly, given the failure of s and early s black cultural and political nationalisms to establish forms of collective black identity that could be sustained beyond the era of Black Arts and Black Power, King’s argument seems to be on target. But as   BEING BLACK THERE compelling as it is, that argument does not take genre fully into account. Doris Witt perhaps comes closest to solving the mystery, arguing that the detective work of Blanche White, Barbara Neely’s serial protagonist, “is very centrally a decoding of contemporary United States body politics, as inflected by sexuality, gender, ethnicity, race, class, age, and (dis)ability.”6 Yet Witt’s argument applies not to African American detective fiction in general but solely to Neely’s novels and, even more specifically, to Neely’s novels in contradistinction to “the urban male-oriented writings of Walter Mosley.”7 Certainly, the Blanche White series—with its female detective, sometimes rural settings, and focus on Blanche’s children and lovers— does not fit comfortably into the masculinist “hard-boiled” subgenre of detective fiction that clearly includes Mosley’s Easy Rawlins series; yet the crime genre, more broadly conceived, serves some of the same functions for both authors.8 Mosley and Neely, along with a number of other African American writers , have chosen a past genre because it suits their literary and political— and inter- and intraracial—purposes particularly well. First, in writing crime novels, contemporary black writers, much like the antilynching dramatists in the s and Richard Wright and Ann Petry in the s, are enacting a strategic (literary) anachronism in order to comment on a distinct lack of progress regarding race within judicial and penal systems in the United States. If for Petry and Wright the Reform Era left Harlem and Chicago’s South Side behind, for Mosley and Neely the civil rights era and decades of “urban renewal” left Watts and Roxbury behind. In other words, contemporary black authors are using crime fiction as the ideal form through which to expose and narrate the still-lived experience of being “criminal by color,” particularly in poor and working-class urban settings.9 Despite the Easy Rawlins novels’ historically specific settings, then, the past will not stay in the past for Easy, and the series investigates and discloses just how much remains the same for him in Los Angeles, even across decades. For Easy, the “first minute of a new day” in Watts feels a lot like the first minute of yesterday and tomorrow. In other words, African American detective fiction since  signals an aestheticpolitical abandonment of the Black Arts and Black Power writers’ strategic presentism. Unlike the Dasein poets, Mosley’s protagonist finds that a Heideggerian philosophy of time just...

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