African American Literary Criticism and a Promised Land of Possibility in the Twenty-first Century

“Celebrating Contemporary African American Literature: The Novel Since 1988,” held at Penn State University in the fall of 2009, was one of the most exciting and genuinely interesting conferences that I’ve attended in the field of African American literature in recent years. An opening keynote address by Houston A. Baker, Jr. on modernism in Toni Morrison’s Love, panels that addressed topics such as Sapphire’s Push, a pedagogical roundtable, and sessions on contemporary authors including Alice Randall, Percival Everett, Colson Whitehead, Martha Southgate and Mat Johnson (with appearances and readings by the authors in some cases), topped off with a well-stocked book display and the distribution of a comprehensive bibliography of new fiction in African American literature, made this event quite memorable and special for me. Like some other attendees I talked to afterwards, I walked away with a feeling as if I had been to a mountaintop in African American literary studies and had looked over into a promised land of vast new promises and possibilities. The mountain metaphor troped in a collective sense seemed natural when thinking of motifs related to freedom that have recurred within the long history of African American writing and the salience of the Exodus story within the African American experience from spirituals such as Go Down Moses to the speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I felt assured that African American literature and its criticism had found their bearings for the twenty-first century, even more excited about my own projects as a teacher and scholar in the field, and all the more committed to helping its development and institutionalization in the profession.

As African American literature moves forward and the field of “Twenty-First Century African American Literature” begins to emerge on academic resumés against the backdrop of growing critical dialogue on topics such as Afrofuturism, even in an era when the conventional canon has been more inclusive of texts, and resources for teaching and study have expanded exponentially, we are still in a moment when we are continually forced to grapple with the realities and struggles that shadow it. Nellie Y. McKay and Frances Smith Foster are among the scholars who have elaborated the persistent challenges that the field has faced in its institutionalization, describing limitations in hiring because of narrow perceptions of who should train and teach in African American literature and the problem of its persisting marginalization in some English departments. In scholarship, Vincent Carretta’s claim that the author of the first self-authored black slave narrative in 1789, Olaudah Equiano, was not a West African but born in South Carolina has called aspects of African American literary history into question given that it provided the most vivid description of the Middle Passage in slave narrative writing. One of the most provocative recent works in African American literary criticism, Kenneth W. Warren’s new book entitled What Was African American Literature?, argues that the literature is linked to the past of Jim Crow and the racial identifications and limitations that this era constituted, which no longer obtain and render the literature’s basic premises and purposes obsolete. Warren’s argument is all the more provocative, of course, in light of debates related to the “postracial” and “postblack” that have crystallized in arenas from art to politics over the past decade. One cannot feel blind optimism about the field in a critical arena like the present one by any means.

Whatever assessments can be made of African American literature, for better or worse, it is clearly at a crossroads. Standpoints that are either pessimistic or optimistic can conceivably...