Afro-American Literary Study in the 1990s, and: Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (review)

reviews 145 Afro-American Literary Study in the 1990s edited by Houston A. Baker, Jr. and Patricia Redmond. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989. 246 pp. $24.95 (cloth). Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance by Houston A. Baker, Jr. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987. 122 pp. $9.95 (paper). Houston A. Baker, Jr. and Patricia Redmond's Afro-American Literary Study in the 1990s is the first volume of the new scries Black Literature and Culture edited by Baker. It is a propitious beginning and a provocative and informative volume which both clarifies and complicates current critical debates in Afro-American literature and theory. The essays and responses in the collection, which derive from the proceedings of a three-day conference on the study of Afro-American literature and criticism, arc in constant dialogue with one another: challenging, correcting, criticizing or supporting the other essays, but never simply dismissing them out of hand. The result is a thoroughly productive, interactive, and rigorous treatment of current concerns in Afro-American scholarship. The debates presented in the volume concerning exclusion and inclusion, consensus and multiplicity, and csscntialism and assimilation, speak to the fundamental concerns of defining who qualifies as an Afro-American scholar, what constitutes Afro-American literature and criticism, and what position should be maintained vis-a-vis the larger black community and white-dominated literary and academic institutions. These tensions arc evident in the very organization of the conference and in the production of the volume. For purposes of the conference, which was not open to the public, inclusion was based on "earned participation" by those Afro-American scholars who provide "laborious research, ample scholarly production, and demonstrable commitment" (3). The conference reflected the "heritage of collaborative activity" of the Afro-American community of scholars. As Baker and Redmond explain, this type of collaborative activity is often at odds with the academic institutions which promote and reward intellectual individualism and originality. Therefore the "rising but uncertain status" of AfroAmerican studies in the academy brings with it "pressure to conform to a highly individualistic model of academic interaction," a pressure to assimilate into mainstream academic practices. Inclusion, or access to, the published essays has now been extended to anyone reading the volume. The proceedings were published in order to "release into the larger community some of the insights and energy that became ours during a remarkable three days" (1). The reader is invited to "both profit intellectually from the various exchanges, and join us in the risks and possibilities that they suggest." And the readers' "generous and thoughtful cooperation, response, and collaboration" is called for (13). But there is also an ambivalence concerning the reader's participation, which leads to certain unproductive metaphors of the relation for reader to text, and reader to participant. In addition to being called on as an active participant, the reader is also described in the passive, limited and voyeuristic position of one who cannot be part of the "lively and often contentious exchanges that occurred between speakers," but who is allowed "to eavesdrop on this performance" and to be "privy to the triumphs and struggles of contemporary collaborative practice among Afro-American literary scholars" (4-5). In this vein the reader seems to be invited to sec (academically) how the other half lives while the critics participating in the collection arc described as fascinating entertainers. The tensions in the volume can be described as, on the one hand, a desire for greater consensus, for defining an Afro-American literary tradition through canon formation, paradigms and unifying theories, and, on the other hand, a fear that such an emphasis on unity and consensus docs not encourage multiple voices, nor fully recognize the need for confrontation, disruption and réévaluation of accepted categories and assumptions. However, contributors do not simply line up on one side or the other. For example, concerning canon formation. Gates explains that his task in creating the Norton anthology of Afro-American literature will be "to bring together the 'essential' texts of the canon, the 'crucially central' authors, those whom we 146 the minnesota review feel to be indispensable to an understanding of the shape and shaping, of...