Editor’s Introduction: New Registers for the Study of Blackness

For any scholar who has followed the controversy surrounding the publication of Kenneth W. Warren’s What Was African American Literature? (2011) in the pages of such noted journals as PMLA and at various conferences, the July 13, 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman for the death of Trayvon Martin might be used as fuel for the idea that Jim Crow still exists in the US. Even walking alone in one’s own neighborhood with Skittles and an iced tea can be construed as “deviant” or “criminal” behavior if one is black. As Gene Andrew Jarrett argues in his discussion of Warren’s book, then, “we should resist the constriction of Jim Crow to the first half of the twentieth century” because such narrow periodization “overstates the role that constitutional or juridical events have played in race relations, while restricting the political awareness and activities of African American writers to discourses of de jure racial segregation” (389). Still, I take Warren’s main point to be that we should consider aesthetic or historical paradigms that move beyond the de jure and de facto racial segregation and discrimination that existed in the past and continues today. Warren contends that “the very idea of African American literature at present asserts the priority of fighting racial discrimination over other forms of inequality” (“Reply” 406) but also that this need not be the case. “Why not simply allow that contemporary writing by black Americans is African American literature but in a new register?” (405), he asks.

This issue of MELUS examines literature from the past and present that attempts to place blackness into new registers or contexts, contexts beyond racial discrimination, Jim Crow, racial inequality, and segregation. Yet this literature simultaneously helps us to see that racial inequality (the lasting residue of slavery and Jim Crow) is still a vital historical fact and continues to impact the registers through which we read African American literature in this contemporary moment. It would be impossible to overstate the role that racial discrimination has played in formations of African American subjectivity, and it continues to be an evident social, economic, and political reality. However, other registers simultaneously exist through which we can examine the aesthetic practices and indices of blackness.

One recent register for the aesthetic and political understanding of blackness is spatial theory. Space is (of course) often racially inflected and demarcated, but we begin this issue with an essay in which gender also plays a significant role. In “Sites of Resistance: The Subversive Spaces of Their Eyes Were Watching God,” Dale Pattison demonstrates that the relationship between space and political power is crucial to Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 novel; Pattison argues that Janie’s evolution as a character depends not only on her ability to cultivate voice, vision, and agency but also on her capacity to locate and produce subversive spaces that challenge patriarchal authority. The porch, in particular, initiates the transformation we see in Janie and is characterized by Pattison as both “a liminal space and a Foucauldian heterotopia.” Hurston ultimately presents three distinct spaces—material, psychological, and narrative—that allow Janie and the reader to challenge dominant discourses of race and gender. Storytelling is also a spatial practice, Pattison argues, and “Janie’s final narrative act, her narration to Pheoby on the back porch, serves as an invitation to the reader to participate in and produce the narrative space of the novel.”

Rafia Zafar’s essay, “Elegy and Remembrance in the Cookbooks of Alice B. Toklas and Edna Lewis,” concerns the Anglo-American Jewish writer Alice B. Toklas’s The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book (1954) and the African American author Edna Lewis’s The Taste of Country Cooking (1976), but like Pattison’s essay, it also analyzes the way women writers manipulate existing social formations (in this case, cookbooks) to achieve configurations of voice. Studies of cookbooks have long noted that they exhibit features of more self-consciously literary texts, but Zafar’s unique insight is to demonstrate that such texts present opportunities not only to script a self and to tell a tale...