The American Protest Essay and National Belonging: Addressing Division (review)

Brian Norman’s ambitious new book, The American Protest Essay and National Belonging: Addressing Division, has an excellent sense of timing. In a political season in which feminism and the Civil Rights Movement have borne fruit in the race for the presidency, it explains how American writers have, since the nineteenth century, employed the essay to probe the boundaries of citizenship, to expose the contradictions between America’s promise of equality and its practices of exclusion, and to demand justice from the Enlightenment traditions embedded in its founding documents. Given the importance of this literary tradition in American political history, the groundbreaking nature of this project requires some explanation.

As Norman points out, the essay has been a neglected genre throughout the history of Anglophone criticism. One of its great contemporary theorists, Claire de Obaldia, even calls it “paraliterature”—writing that surrounds and depends on more important genres, especially the novel (Obaldia 1–8). In any history of the form in Europe, one is required to point out that the sixteenth-century writer Michel de Montaigne, who founded the modern genre based on classical sources, began his essays by taking notes in the margins of books. Marginality of origin is then used to explain marginality of ends: the essay is essentially an afterthought, despite its centrality to criticism itself. This has led to the bizarre claim, on both sides of the Atlantic, that there are no real essayists after the founders of each national tradition: Montaigne, Bacon, and Emerson are fathers who sire no children who survive to adulthood. This narrative of the genre that cannot reproduce itself is belied by the plenitude of essays since the start of the periodical tradition in the eighteenth century, up through the dominance of the essay in forums like Harper’s, the New Yorker, and the Atlantic, including, most recently, the rise of the blog. The denial of this tradition as a tradition—the notion of each essay, and essayist, as sui generis—leads to a failure in criticism to establish basic narratives of the genre’s history, formal properties, and role in the public sphere. The trope of the essay as Proteus, a shape-shifter that eludes stable categories, haunts every attempt at critical progress.

Therefore, Norman’s project is more radical than it appears: his attempt, in a full-blown monograph, to define a sub-genre and follow it through its iterations in a national tradition, is a groundbreaking gesture. It is a meta-gesture, in fact: he tries to achieve in the republic of letters what his essayists demand in the American republic: full equality under the law. In this sense, his first chapter, “Toward an American Protest Essay Tradition,” and the conclusion, “Why the Essay?” are worth the price of the book by themselves, and ought to be required reading for undergraduate, graduate, and, indeed, professorial students of American literature. The core of the book, however, operates under an even higher ambition: to narrate the history of the protest essay in comparative ethnic perspective, not only juxtaposing work from the African-American, Chicana, American-Indian, Jewish-American, and Anglo-American traditions, but interweaving accounts of these strands as a self-generating web of discourse. This effort is repeated on the political plane: movements for feminism, Civil Rights, Indian sovereignty, and cosmopolitanism are woven together, leading back to the codependent arising of the essay with the novel, the manifesto, and oratory.

To understand the way The American Protest Essay advances the field, it is useful to examine its closest precursors. In terms of scholarship on ethnic-American essayism, the most significant ancestor is Gerald Early’s Speech and Power: The African-American Essay from Polemics to Pulpit (1993). Like Norman, Early has a broad view of what an essay is and how essays begin. He is especially attentive to the way the African-American tradition has drawn on political and religious oratory for the originary impulse and the rhetorical strategies of...