Kenneth W. Warren's What Was African American Literature?: A Review Essay

This is a curious little book. It argues that what we now call "African American literature" is invented after Reconstruction in reaction to the Jim Crow regime and dissolved in the 1950s by the legal abolition of segregation. "With some significant qualifications, I am arguing here that, mutatis mutandis, African American literature as a distinct entity would seem to be at an end, and that the turn to diasporic, transatlantic, global, and other frames indicates a dim awareness that the boundary creating this distinctiveness has eroded" (Warren 8). Preceding this announcement of the argument, Warren lays out his cards this way: "African American literature might be viewed as a 'historical' entity rather than as the ongoing expression of a distinct people" (8). Warren, the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor of English at the University of Chicago, originally proffered this argument at the 2007 W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures at Harvard. Very few literary scholars—if any—would object to the notion that African American literature "might be viewed as a 'historical' entity." Indeed, most would make a considerably stronger claim: that African American literature—like any and all literature—is definitely a historical phenomenon. 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. While Warren's thinking is fuzzy concerning the necessarily historical nature of literary traditions, he is surprisingly gung-ho about attempting to kill off African American literature. (Notice, for instance, how he waffles between African American literature as no longer distinct and African American people as no longer distinct in the two quoted statements above, which stand adjacent on the same page of the book.) Warren never explains why he singles out African American people or literature for inevitable demise, which would entail also explaining, more fundamentally, what distinguishes literature in the African American tradition from that in any other tradition. The answer, riding along on various assumptions rather than precisely articulated, arrives with the contrarian phrase: "rather than as the ongoing expression of a distinct people."

This is Warren's argument in a nutshell. African Americans presumably were "a distinct people" under the Jim Crow regime, but certainly not before that (1896?) and, with the hindsight of half a century, assuredly not after that (1954?). How interesting that "a distinct people" can be made and unmade by legislative and judicial fiat. Despite that opening clause seeming to confirm social constructionist and cultural historicist understandings of "literatures" as historical formations rather than as naturally transcendent forms, Warren's argument actually depends on naturalist assumptions about literary production—at least insofar as the special case of African American literature is concerned. A "people," mutatis mutandis, must remain "distinct" for a literature to continue to exist as such.

Lest we surmise that Warren's polemic on the end of a literature appeals to post-structuralist theories proposing the death of the author, he disabuses us of this by the nature of his arguments. Instead, his book is an inverse version of the kind of swan song found in Alvin Kernan's The Death of Literature, which in alerting us to the troubling new dispensation of techno-media laments the passing of a great print civilization. Instead, Warren is in a hurry to funeralize African American literature so that he can usher in . . . —what exactly is not clear. For Warren, a distinct people is a natural, organic category— actually a natural "entity" determined by the official actions of national governments. If Warren had focused on the question of a "distinct culture," rather than a "distinct people," he perhaps would have considered what it means for a culture to come into being as a result of a Supreme Court decision and to be dissolved as a result of jurisprudential and legislative act. Cultures are not necessarily more "distinct" than peoples, but at least this would begin to unravel...