Historicizing African American Literature: An Interview with Ken Warren

African American literature no longer exists. That is one implication of Ken Warren's What Was African American Literature? (Harvard UP, 2011), which has provoked a good deal of debate. This interview clarifies Warren's position, explaining that he is not dismissing that body of literature but making a historical distinction: for a century, authors responded to Jim Crow and that defined the literature they composed, whereas since the 1970s that has changed and the literature augurs a new period.

In his first book, Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism (U of Chicago P, 1993), Warren looks at another side of Jim Crow, examining how the racial politics in the wake of the Civil War inform mainstream authors like Henry James and William Dean Howells—who, in their realism, tacitly stand against extreme change. In his next book, So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism (U of Chicago P, 2003), Warren shows how Ellison produced his work as a response to the Jim Crow era—in effect, he could not finish his second novel because Jim Crow ended. Warren also has co-edited two collections, Renewing Black Intellectual History: The Ideological and Material Foundations of African American Thought (with Adolph Reed, Jr.; Paradigm, 2010), to which he also contributed two chapters, and Jim Crow, Literature, and the Legacy of Sutton E. Griggs (with Tess Chakkalakal; U of Georgia P, 2013).

Born in 1957, Warren grew up in Colorado, New Mexico, and elsewhere, as his father served in the Air Force. He attended Harvard College (BA, 1980) and Stanford University (PhD, 1988), doing his dissertation with the Americanist Jay Fliegelman. From 1987-91 he taught at Northwestern University, and since 1991 he has been at the University of Chicago, currently as the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor of English.

This interview was conducted at the Intercontinental Hotel during the MLA Convention on 12 January 2014 by Jeffrey J. Williams, professor of literary and cultural studies at Carnegie Mellon University, and transcribed by Steven Secular, an MA student at Carnegie Mellon.

Jeffrey J. Williams:

You've gotten a lot of response to your book, What Was African American Literature? because you argue that, in one sense, African American literature no longer exists. I think your more fundamental point is really that we should see it historically. Could you give your argument in a nutshell?

Ken Warren:

There is a moment in What Was African American Literature? where I make reference to Erich Auerbach's Literary Language and Its Public. Among other things, Auerbach is remarking on what he sees as a potential terminus for thinking about Western or European literature as a coherent entity. He is operating at a moment when it is still possible to engage literature and its rhetorical connection to something broader in a coherent way, but it may no longer be possible on the other side of that moment. So, behind What Was African American Literature? is a broad question about how the literary formations that we designate by saying something like "African American literature" connect to the broader social groupings or the moments that we take to be transparently invoked by the term. There's an even broader question about what we mean when we designate a body of literature by national group terms—particularly when you think about the fact that literature is a relatively elite set of practices. Even when we bring into our discussion expressions by non-elite practitioners, if you want to call them that, how do those things actually connect?

There's a way in which the concerns of What Was African American Literature? are continuous with concerns over the course of my career. But it also represents a reflective turn. Early on in my career, my work was driven by a sense that the only way to understand African American literary texts and race in American literature was to embed them in the broader cultural, social, and political discourses of American literature. If you're talking about something distinct, you have to be able to describe the...