Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History

CONCLUSION: Covenants and Communities: The Demands of African American Literature

242 c o n c L u s i o n Covenants and Communities The Demands of African American Literature “he’s so worried about the history of the future.”—overheard during a walk on campus, west virginia university, April 28, 2008 In an essay published originally in 1996, Mae G. Henderson explores the tensions between Black Studies (which emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s) and Black Cultural Studies (which appeared during the late 1980s and early 1990s). She begins by noting the similarities between the two projects. Black Cultural Studies “continues the Black Studies project in that it takes as its object of investigation the consequences of uneven economic, social, and cultural development.” Moreover, “like Black Studies, cultural studies challenges received and conventional disciplinary paradigms in the construction of knowledge through its multidisciplinary and cross-cultural focus.” Both schools, too, privilege “the study of vernacular and mass culture.” In short, “many, if not most, of the central concerns of black cultural studies have been anticipated by the Black Studies project and the challenge it brought to the academy two decades ago” (95). So what is the problem? “The problem,” Henderson explains, “is that the emergence of black cultural studies threatens to re-marginalize a field of study that has become central during the Black Studies movement. The voices and experiences of the objects of investigation —namely, African Americans—are subjected to interpretation by scholars and theorists who draw on paradigms not grounded in African American history and culture” (98). As this statement suggests, Henderson is concerned about points of intellectual departures and arrivals, about “intellectual space” and “institutional space” (98), and about the sites “of historical struggle and contestation ” (100) that not only shape the theoretical and methodological C o n C l u s i o n 243 approaches to problems but also determine what might be identified as a problem worthy of study, sites where both the problem and the means toward a solution might be located. Working from the “community-based” discipline of Black Studies, itself “rooted in community culture,” Henderson argues for an approach that looks “not only . . . to Birmingham, England, but to Birmingham, Alabama” for its definition of purpose and methodology (100). Henderson recognizes the value of transatlantic perspectives , but she is still concerned about the shift away from scholarly frameworks that emerged from the social struggles that produced the U.S. Black Studies movement. Accordingly, she cautions us to think carefully about the historical and cultural groundings of the frameworks and methodologies we bring to this work. “We need not only ask,” she concludes, “‘Where, by the way, is this train going?’ We need also to ask ‘where has this train been?’” (101). The train, it seems, was transformed into a ship on the Black Atlantic destined for a cosmopolitan planetarity and was last seen sailing into the shadows of deep time. Within the academic realm, Black Studies, to be sure, still exists, but it has been rather forcefully marginalized and is generally treated as a suspect field carrying the perceived taint of the most prominent voices of Afrocentrism. Black Cultural Studies has developed considerably, though often in the very ways that so concerned Henderson in the mid-1990s. African American literary scholarship sometimes operates in various associations with these wider fields but has also become a reservoir of possibilities for scholars more broadly interested in American literary and cultural studies. Many of these developments are the result of the dismissal of race as a valid category of analysis, discussed in this book’s first chapter—a dismissal often depending on the most vocal and simplistic examples of racialized logic associated with Afrocentrism, race politics, and popular culture. Addressing the “irrational rationalities, elisions , and performances” that emerge from “racial discourse,” Paul Gilroy argues: In the resulting world of racial and ethnic common sense, it does not matter that all demands for the recognition of supposedly absolute difference presuppose extensive transcultural knowledge that would have been impossible to acquire if cultural divisions always constituted impermeable barriers to understanding. Appreciating the paradox of discrepant ontologies provides a chance to approach the problem of multiculture from a different angle and consider C o n C l u s i o n 244 instead why the alibis that derive from the cheapest invocations of incommensurable otherness command such wide respect. (Postcolonial 8) Gilroy speaks for many who, in effect, argue that race has...