The Contemporary African American Novel: Its Folk Roots and Modern Literary Branches

Notes

389 Notes Memoir: On Becoming an African American Scholar Activist 1. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Dial Press, 1963), p. 119. 2. According to the introduction to political theorist Antonio Gramsci’s Selections from the Prison Notebooks, “organic intellectuals are distinguished less by their profession, which may be any job characteristic of their class, than by their function in directing the ideas and aspirations of the class to which they organically belong.” Gramsci writes: “When one distinguishes between intellectuals and non-intellectuals, one is referring in reality only to the immediate social function of the professional category of the intellectuals , that is, one has in mind the direction in which their specific professional activity is weighted, whether towards intellectual elaboration or towards muscular-nervous effort. This means that, although one can speak of intellectuals, one cannot speak of nonintellectuals , because non-intellectuals do not exist. . . . Each man, finally, outside his professional activity, carries on some form of intellectual activity, that is, he is a ‘philosopher’, an artist, a man of taste, he participates in a particular conception of the world, has a conscious line of moral conduct, and therefore contributes to sustain a conception of the world or to modify it, that is, to bring into being new modes of thought. . . . In the modern world, technical education, closely bound to industrial labour even at the most primitive and unqualified level, must form the basis of the new type of intellectual.” Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. and ed. with an Introduction by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), pp. 4, 9. 3. For the anthropological meanings and significance of rites of passage, see Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1960), chap. 1; and Victor W. Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1974), chap. 3. 4. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cornel West, The Future of the Race (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), pp. 18–19. 5. Floyd B. Barbour, ed., The Black Power Revolt: A Collection of Essays (Boston: Collier Books, 1968), p. 42. 6. Joseph E. Holloway, “The Origins of African-American Culture,” in Africanisms in American Culture, ed. Holloway (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 1–18. 7. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (New York: Crest Books, 1965), pp. 17 and 55–64. David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868– 1919 (New York: Owl Books, 1994), p. 143. 8. Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro (New York: Atheneum, 1968), pp. 3, 4, 15; and Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), p. 228. 9. The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 3614. See also Houston A. Baker Jr., Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American 390 Notes to On Becoming an African American Scholar Activist Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 2; and Barbara E. Johnson, “Response,” in Afro-American Literary Study in the 1990s, ed. Houston A. Baker Jr. and Patricia Redmond (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 42. 10. “The Blues reflects earlier developments of an African-American speech and continuing musical experience now given new forms as reflection of the post–Civil War African-American culture that was no longer limited as severely to religious reference or the social restraints of slavery. . . . By the nineteenth century the diverse Africans had become African Americans and the Blues, from spiritual and work song, through hollers and shouts and arhoolies, jumped out to celebrate black entrance into a less repressive, less specialized world—less harsh, more uncertain, but still tragic and depriving in too many ways.” Amiri Baraka, “The ‘Blues Aesthetic’ and the ‘Black Aesthetic’: Aesthetics as the Continuing Political History of a Culture,” Black Music Research Journal (Fall 1991): 101–2. 11. Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference (New York: Routledge , 1989), p. 6. 12. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 3. 13. I have adapted this term from Stephen Soitos’s neologism “Euro-Americentric” in The Blues Detective: A Study of African American Detective Fiction (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996). 14. Randal Johnson, “Editor’s Introduction: Pierre Bourdieu on Art, Literature, and Culture,” in Pierre Bourdieu, The Field...