What is African American Literature?

Margo N. Crawford

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781119123361
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

After Kenneth W. Warren's What Was African American Literature?, Margo N. Crawford delivers What is African American Literature?

The idea of African American literature may be much more than literature written by authors who identify as "Black". What is African American Literature? focuses on feeling as form in order to show that African American literature is an archive of feelings, a tradition of the tension between uncontainable black affect and rigid historical structure. Margo N. Crawford argues that textual production of affect (such as blush, vibration, shiver, twitch, and wink) reveals that African American literature keeps reimagining a black collective nervous system.

Crawford foregrounds the "idea" of African American literature and uncovers the "black feeling world" co-created by writers and readers. Rejecting the notion that there are no formal lines separating African American literature and a broader American literary tradition, Crawford contends that the distinguishing feature of African American literature is a "moodscape" that is as stable as electricity. Presenting a fresh perspective on the affective atmosphere of African American literature, this compelling text frames central questions around the "idea" of African American literature, shows the limits of historicism in explaining the mood of African American literature and addresses textual production in the creation of the African American literary tradition.

Part of the acclaimed Wiley Blackwell Manifestos series, What is African American Literature? is a significant addition to scholarship in the field. Professors and students of American literature, African American literature, and Black Studies will find this book an invaluable source of fresh perspectives and new insights on America's black literary tradition.

1
The Textual Production of Black Affect : The Blush of Toni Morrison’s Last Novel

The most successful fiction of most Negro writing is in its emotional content.

Amiri Baraka, “The Myth of a ‘Negro Literature’”

For within living structures defined by profit, by linear power,

by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant

to survive.

Audre Lorde, “Poetry is not a Luxury”

The idea was always to make that time emotionally

real to people.

–Octavia Butler¹

In “Toni Morrison on a Book She Loves,” Morrison explains how Gayl Jones’ novel Corregidora (1975) transformed African American women’s literature. As Morrison remembers her first encounter of Corregidora, she foregrounds the textual production of affect (a “smile of disbelief” that she still “feels on her mouth” two years after reading Jones’ manuscript). Morrison writes:

What was uppermost in my mind while I read her manuscript was that no novel about any black woman could ever be the same after this … So deeply impressed was I that I hadn’t time to be offended by the fact that she was twenty‐four and had no “right” to know so much so well… Even now, almost two years later, I shake my head when I think of her, and the same smile of disbelief I could not hide when I met her, I feel on my mouth still as I write these lines…²

Affect differs from conscious feeling and voluntary body response. Toni Morrison’s lingering smile, produced by Gayl Jones’ Corregidora, is an example of the textual production of uncontainable and unexplainable black feeling that this chapter analyzes. When African American literature produces affective experiences such as what is “felt on the mouth,” the is‐ness of the literature is a particular sticky tension. Sara Ahmed’s attention to the stickiness of affect is similar to what Morrison expresses when she remembers the impact of Corregidora as a lingering sensation felt on her mouth. Ahmed proposes, in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, that “objects become sticky, or saturated with affect, as sites of personal and social tension” (11). Morrison experiences Corregidora as such a sticky book. In a similar sense, Gayl Jones, in an interview, offers a theory of the role of stickiness and tension in the very meaning of “legacy” in African American literary studies. As Jones thinks about Zora Neale Hurston’s literary influence, she foregrounds the tensions that Hurston produced–“We have to do something about the tensions that she had. […] That’s what legacy is.”³

On the lower frequencies, what are the sticky tensions of African American literature? The black protest of The Nation’s decision, in 2018, to publish Anders Carlson‐Wee’s poem “How‐To” reveals the complexity of the sticky tensions. Carlson‐Wee, a white poet, assumes the voice of a homeless person in this poem. Some black readers felt an attempt to approach the sonic waves of an African American vernacular. These readers protested The Nation editors’ choice to publish this poem when so few black poets are published in The Nation. These readers were offended by what felt, to them, like cultural appropriation and a caricature of Black English. The poet, Carlson‐Wee, apologized publicly (on social media) and asserted, “Treading anywhere close to blackface is horrifying to me, and I am profoundly regretful.” Whether one feels the proximity of his poem to blackface may depend on how black (or not necessarily black) the words (and the gestures to nonverbal affect) feel. The poem reads:

If you got hiv, say aids. If you a girl,/say you’re pregnant––nobody gonna lower/themselves to listen for the kick. People/passing fast. Splay your legs, cock a knee/funny. It’s the littlest shames they’re likely/to comprehend. Don’t say homeless, they know/you is. What they don’t know is what opens/a wallet, what stops em from counting/what they drop. If you’re young say younger./Old say older. If you’re crippled don’t/flaunt it. Let em think they’re good enough/Christians to notice. Don’t say you pray,/say you sin. It’s about who they believe/they is. You hardly even there.⁴

The words “nobody gonna lower themselves to listen for the kick” capture the tension between reading this poem and feeling a specifically black dialect and reading this poem and feeling the lack of (or an appropriation of) black affect. Are the words “to listen for the kick” only felt as a gesture to black affect if someone has felt the kick of a black text being born and felt there is something private about this strange affective property, something as unconscious and involuntary as the kick of the not‐yet‐here? The words “you hardly even there” may open up the most intriguing part of black readers’ protest of The Nation’s decision to publish this poem. The protestors may have read those final words and felt a desire for black “thereness.”

A crucial moment in Frederick Douglass’ iconic slave narrative Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave Written by Himself (1845) sheds light on the feeling of “black thereness” that shapes the idea of African American literature. Douglass writes:

I was seldom whipped by my old master, and suffered little from any thing else than hunger and cold. I suffered much from hunger, but much more from cold. In hottest summer and coldest winter, I was kept almost naked–no shoes, no stockings, no jacket, no trousers, nothing on but a coarse tow linen shirt, reaching only to my knees. I had no bed. I must have perished with cold, but that, the coldest nights, I used to steal a bag which was used for carrying corn to the mill. I would crawl into this bag, and there sleep on the cold, damp, clay floor, with my head in and feet out. My feet have been so cracked with the frost, that the pen with which I am writing might be laid in the gashes.⁵

Putting the “pen in the gashes” would suspend the writing. To know that feeling, Douglass would have to stop writing and linger, suspended, in the space between writing and bodily feeling. The idea of African American literature “might be laid” in the gap between words and a “fever‐chart of affects and intensities rising and falling” (Fredric Jameson’s lucid description, in The Antinomies of Realism, of the affective energy that cannot be mapped by narrative).

Douglass’ image of the pen that “might be laid in the gashes” takes us to the tension between the personal and impersonal that shapes affect. Douglass uses this image to underscore the bodily effects of having to endure the brutal cold. But the friction between the pen and the gash signals the zone where the writing instrument cannot be separated from the black body. Douglass’ pen “might be laid” in his body and the body of African American literature. The pen that might be laid in the gashes might create the idea of African American literature. Any approach to African American literature as the art tied to an inevitable, collective black identity must take account of Douglass’ “might be” approach to the notion of putting the pen in the gashes. A “gash” is a “long deep slash, cut, or wound.” The practice of African American literature might be the gestures toward the cuts that create the shared slash of blackness.

Thomas Jefferson’s diminishing of Phillis Wheatley’s practice of cutting and slashing lingers. He sees Wheatley and any black writer as being unable to rise above narration in order to produce art. He writes, “Never yet could I find a Black that had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never seen even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture.”⁶ What is African American literature? It is “above the level of plain narration.” The is‐ness may be what Toni Morrison, in Jazz, imagines as the “severed parts [trying to] remember the snatch.”⁷ The is‐ness may be what is produced by the ongoing attempts to touch and know a collective loss, a “snatch,” that cannot ever be known. The paratexts of slave narratives (that needed those authenticating words “written by himself” and “written by herself”) made the idea of African American literature, from its origins, a brand (a brand that should never have become a brand). The is‐ness of African American literature is the refusal to remain the brand of “I write myself into existence.” The is‐ness is the shared atmosphere of unapologetic black existence.

In a dialogue with Claudia Rankine, Lauren Berlant proposes that Citizen pulls readers into a “collective nervous system.”⁸ Just as Rankine’s Citizen is the textual production of this collective nervous system, m...