Response to Marlon B. Ross’s Review Essay

Editor’s Note:The letter below is a response to Marlon B. Ross’s “Kenneth W. Warren’s What Was African American Literature?: A Review Essay,” Callaloo 35.3 (Summer 2012): 604–612.

[Sent: Friday, December 7, 2012 1:18 PM]

Dear Charles

It’s been some years since we last spoke or corresponded. I was just out at Oxford in November for a conference on Alain Locke and learned that you were to be there shortly as well. I hope your trip was enjoyable.

I’m writing, however, as you see from the subject line, in response to Marlon Ross’s review of What Was African American Literature? in the most recent issue. It was my expectation upon publishing the book that I’d receive both sharply negative criticisms and strongly positive ones—and on both scores I’ve not been disappointed. But Marlon’s piece is—well—so irresponsible that to call it a review or “review essay” is to libel both genres. All his piece does is misstate the book’s argument and then devolve into little more than ad hominem critique. But lest you think I’m simply reacting to the typical kind of disagreement that often emerges between author and reviewer, I’ll lay out three objective errors that Marlon makes in his first paragraph alone before I turn to his major misstatement.

In his first sentence Marlon writes that I claim African American literature “dissolved in the 1950s by the legal abolition of segregation.” Then in the second sentence of the second paragraph he conjectures 1954 as a possible terminus date. My actual claim? After Jim Crow “was finally dismantled, at least judicially and legally, in the 1950s and 1960s . . . the coherence of African American literature has been correspondingly, if sometimes imperceptibly, eroded as well” (1–2). Indeed in the book’s second chapter, where I take up an article by Addison Gayle, I further specify the late 1960s as the “cusp” of the “historical divide” (76, 79) I am remarking. And in discussing Du Bois’s Dusk of Dawn I observe that the “literature of its moment was oriented by the effort to change or repeal the laws that significantly shaped black social and political life from the 1890s through the 1960s” (96). This may seem to be a small point, but it isn’t. When someone sets out to assess an argument about periodization, to willfully ignore the dates specified by the argument is inexcusable, especially in this case because central to my argument that it is black en masse reentry into the political life of the south in the 1960s that changed the basis on which domain of literary production articulated with black political life.

The second error Marlon makes comes when he seeks to arraign me for calling African American literature a “historical entity” instead of a “historical phenomenon” (emphasis his). He asserts:

The distinction between “phenomenon” (with its philosophical valence of subject formation, change over time, perspectivism, and contextualization) and “entity” (with its philosophical investment in metaphysical, ontological, and formal cohesion of intrinsic identity across time and place) is crucial here.

If one were to grant Marlon’s contention that the term “historical entity” somehow, despite the modifier “historical,” signals a commitment to “formal cohesion of intrinsic identity across time and place” (why not, then, say, “transhistorical”?), then it would be of crucial significance that I insist on the word “entity” and eschew the word “phenomenon.” The problem here? In the first paragraph on the first page of my book’s first chapter I write:

African American literature was a postemancipation phenomenon that gained its coherence as an undertaking in the social world defined by the system of Jim Crow segregation, which ensued after the nation’s retreat from segregation

(1, emphasis added).

Well, whoops. If you’re going to berate someone for not using a particular word, then presumably you’d make sure that that very word doesn’t appear in the book’s introductory paragraph. And if you want to believe that despite my use of the word “phenomenon” my concern is with...