Contemporary African American Fiction: New Critical Essays (review)

The appearance of Bernard Bell's impressive The Contemporary African American Novel (2004) has set the path for our consideration of African American literature since 1970. Bell captures the multiple, overlapping movements at work in the decades following the tumultuous 1960s. However, Bell's work, and that of many other critics, has failed to recognize the ways in which post-1970 African American literature has challenged, avoided, and reconceived its literary and critical predecessors. Therefore, the Dana Williams-edited collection, Contemporary African American Fiction, is a welcome guide. The collection is as ambitious in its scope as Bell's work, but not in its size. Instead of providing a literary history, this collection focuses its attention separately on more recent fare, claiming, as Williams does in the introduction, "I was somewhat surprised to find that no such collection as this one (which focuses specifically on fiction written and published from 1970 to the present) existed" (8). The absence of such work has left us with a discourse dominated by discussions of the criteria for authenticity, the possibilities of universalism, and the intricacies of gender/sexual relations. It is, perhaps, one of the major reasons that the conversation about post-blackness, in consort with the mainstream's desire for a post-racial America, has taken hold. The truth is, in the last four decades, there has been enough work written on authors, themes, or movements for critics to study this incredibly fertile period apart from previous moments. Too often, however, we view the works of contemporary writers almost solely through the prism of literary antecedents like Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison and the critical interpretations that accompany them. Most importantly, however, is the central and compelling question that Williams's introduction poses to its readers: "How Do It Free Us?"—a line taken from a Sonia Sanchez play. In the introduction Williams asks this seemingly practical question, which "highlights the need for clear connections to be made between general progress or achievement and communal and personal liberation" (1). Here Williams opens up the possibilities for African American literary study even as it demands a reappraisal of what the purpose of that study should be.

The first four chapters revel in the centrality of African American cultural tradition and experience even as they claim the authors' frequent rejection of traditional black literary connections. Williams strategically places Reggie Scott Young's "Theoretical Influences and Experimental Resemblances" as the first chapter, because it serves as a direct example of the warning shot she fires in the introduction. Reigniting the critical debate between Henry Louis Gates, Houston Baker, and Joyce Ann Joyce, Young casts a proverbial plague on all their houses because of their failure to address "the complexities faced by individuals attempting to cope with, much less master, multiple literacies" (12). Young uses the critical response to Ernest Gaines as an instructive example, particularly the insistence that Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison are important influences on Gaines's work despite the author's protestations to the contrary. Young's frustration is both palpable and understandable, particularly toward the intellectual calisthenics critics undergo to situate Gaines into a literary discourse that misses the cultural traditions that caused Gaines to be virtually ignored until the popular and critical success of A Lesson Before Dying (1993).

Young's advocacy for black oral and cultural tradition, what Gaines has called the "Leadbelly tradition," finds a willing and recognizable partner in Jennifer Jordan's coolly persuasive chapter on Ishmael Reed, "Ideological Tension." Smartly weaving her way through Reed's novels, Jordan pays significant attention to his famously complex relationship to the Black Arts Movement. Jordan celebrates Reed's "inconsistent response to black nationalism" believing that "reflects the history of the African American literary tradition" (57). Jordan deftly attempts to balance Reed's rejection of the aesthetic control that Black Arts Movement critics attempted to enforce with his acceptance of the socio-political ideology that embraced forms and traditions based on black cultural perspective.

Jordan...