The Cambridge Companion to American Civil Rights Literature by Julie Buckner Armstrong (review)

Long established as eminent compilations of top tier scholarship, “The Cambridge Companion” series promises range and coherence that provides a state of the field more so than an intervention in the field. In the case of American Civil Rights Literature, the series may deliver something even more innovative. American Civil Rights Literature, as opposed to literature of the civil rights movement, or literature about the civil rights movement, suggests not semantic oversight, but subtle ingenuity that calls for renewed attentiveness to foundational questions of canon production and theoretical orientation. Indeed, Julie Buckner Armstrong’s fine edited collection brings to the fore “civil rights literature” as an emerging field of specialization that willingly resists adherence to traditional literary categorization. The constitution of the field generatively challenges constrictions of historicity that have tended to designate literature as merely adjunctive to the “facts” of civil rights movement socio-political history. Here the dynamic partnership of action and language or, following Lorde and Wright, language as action, situates literature as conduit to the experiential process of civil rights movement meaning making.

Imperative to crafting this literary sub-field is a question that may at first seem intuitive: what exactly is civil rights literature? The precarious nature of this question is shadowed by one’s sense that one should know the answer. The question and complex replies granted through the collection are coupled with acute attention to comparably foundational questions regarding the movement at large: what, where, and when was the civil rights movement? Following Jacqueline Hall Dowd’s famed urging for a “long civil rights movement” these essays wrestle our “consensus memory” free from the limited historical and regional scope that typically brackets civil rights in Southern settings and landmark reforms of the determinative “King Years” 1954-1968 (6). This collection offers literature as vibrant remedy to the faulty linear tale of progressive American politics. With full awareness that movement events and aesthetics began to develop far before Jim Crow and continue to the present day, the collection is primarily dedicated to literature, both canonical and less considered texts, of and about post-WWII through the Black Power era. Organized somewhat laxly by literary tradition each contribution aids in a collective effort to, in the formative parlance of contributor Christopher Metress, consider literature as artifact and process, as relic of material histories, and, more pointedly, agent of civil rights social memory.

Zoe Trodd begins by considering perhaps the most contested genre designation in African American letters, protest literature. Contending that protest literature is shrouded in negative assumptions of sacrificed literary merit, Trodd redeems the expression as critical to civil rights literary heritage. Via works by Brooks, Petry, Hayden, and Ellison, Trodd charts a century-long development of the “spatio-symbolic protest” motif. Trodd reads “spatio-symbolic protest” as melding physical and conjectural boundaries to articulate psychological and material dimensions of racial repression in efforts to shift national marginality into sites of resistance. Similarly Brian Norman considers dilemmas of space and interpersonalism through narrative responses to the color line. At stake is the representation of racial segregation as social reality, but not social finality, toward the ends of usurping the logic of the segregation. Norman presents three approaches to renderings of the color line: 1) interracial experience and consequence in the works of Wright and Toomer, 2) racial passing in Larson and Griffin, and 3) wholly turning from the color line in favor of the intraracial in Hurston and Walker.

GerShun Avilez plots the turn from “reform to revolution” through aesthetic demands and practices of the black arts movement (BAM) (50). BAM and Black Power at large are framed not as the end of civil rights but as a “transfer of energies” (55). Specifically, via Barry Beckham’s surrealist novel Runner Mack, Avilez positions BAM ideological bearings and aesthetic contours as informed by dissatisfaction with civil rights ethos and unfulfilled political reforms while representing revolution as possible but not promised. Here we pivot on comparable themes toward a...