african studies(1page for each question)

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Talking ·Book~ , • l . •-; '>

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The lesson to be drawn from this cu,tso.ry glance at wh il t I may ' . call the past , ' present and futur ~ of ou r Race Literature apart

from its value' as first begfrmings, not only tci 'us· as a p eople biit · literaturein genei-al, j s that :unless earnest and systematic-effort

be mad.e to procur~. p. nd preser'(e; for transmissiop .to our succe~- sors, the records, bcioks and various publications already pro_- ciuced by u.s, 'not 'on°Jy will the stu rdy pi,oneers who p~ved' the way and'laid the fo lindation for our'Race Literatu re be-robbed of their just due ; but an irretrievable wrong will be inflicted upon the· generations that shall come ilfte~ us., . , . ) ·

. . -;-:VIC'fORIA E ~ RLE MATTHEWS, ) 895

In the history of .the world's· great literatures, few traditions have origins· as curious as that created by African-slaves ·and ex-slaves,writing in the English language ih the third quarter of the eighteenth century. In the ·stubbornly durable hist0ry of human slavery, · it: was only-the black slaves in England and the United, States who:created; a genre- of literature that, at once, testi- fied •against their .captors and bore vvitness to the' urge •to ·be free · and liter- ate, -to embrace the European . Enlightenment's dream of reason and the American Enlightehment's dream of civil liberty, wedded together glori- ously ,in a great republic 0 of letters . ·)

·. For what could be more peculiar to the institution of human slavery t han liberal learning, than "the arts and sciences," as the French philosophes .put it? Slavery, ,as Lucius ·C ., Matlock argued in 1845 in a review of Frederick Douglass's now classic' Narrative ,of the Life, ' "naturally and necessarily:' is '·'the enemy of literattire .l'! 1Despite ·that antagonistic, relation, Matlock con- tinued, slavery had by the middle• of ;the nineteenth century "become- the prolific theme of ;much that is profound in argument, ·sublime in poetry, and thrilling 1in narrative." -What's more, he concluded with as much aston- ishment as ·satisfaction, "the soil of1slave'ry itself"-and the demands for its abolition-had·tur.ned ·out>:to ,be an ironically fertile ground fo t the creation of. a,new literature, a literature indicting oppression, a literature created by the oppressed: "FroQI the soil 6f slavery itself have sprung forth some of the most ·brilliant productions, whose logical levers will ultimately upheave ,and overthrow -the system .''. It. will be frorri "the pen of self-eni.anoipated slaves," Matlock predicted, that "startling incidents authenticated, far excelling fic- tion in their touching pathos ," will "secure the execrations of all good men and · become a monument more enduring than marble, in testimony strong as sacred-wit .... "

XX XV

xxxvl INTRODUCTION

African American slaves, remarkably, sought to write themselves 0 slavery by mastering the Anglo-American bellettristic tradition. rts;f that _they did ~o against the greatest ~dds. does not beg~n to suggest th~ heroic proportions that the task of reg1stermg a black voice in printed I _ ters entailed. James Albert _UkawsaWi Gr;o_nn,i?saw, the author of the fi;:t full-length black autobiography, A narrative of the most r,emarkahle par- ticulars in the life of James Albert Vkawsaw .Gronniosaw, an African Prince (1770), and the source of the genre of the slave narrative, accounted for this animosity, as well as the slave's anxiety before it, in the trope of the talking book:

[My Master] used to read prayers in public to the ship's crew every Sab- bath day; and then I saw him read. I was never .so surprised in my life as when I Sa\V the . book tal~ to ' my master, for I thoug~t it did as i observed him to looJ<, ,upon it, and mo:ve h,i~ lips. I ;w,ished it would do so with me. As soon as my master had done r-eading, I followed him to the place where ·he put the book, being · mightily delighted with it, and when nobody Sa\,\/' .111e, I opened fr, a~d put inf ei;ir down cl9se upon it, in great, hope.s that it. would say' sometning to me; but I ,was sorry, and greatly ·disappointed, when I found that it would ·not . speak. This thought immediateJy presented itself to me, that every body and every thing despi~ed me because r was 'black.

The text . of • Western letters .refused . to speak to the -person of African descent; paradoxically, ;we read about that refusal in a text created -by that very pe'rson of African-descent. In a very ,real sense, the.Angld-African liter, ary 'tradition was created tw~ centuries ago in order to :demonsfrate that persons of African -desc_ent possessed ·the requisite degrees of reason and wit to create literature, that they were, indeed,, full a11,d equal mem~er's of the community of rational, sentient beings, tha~ -they could, indeed, .write. With Gronniosaw's' An African Prince; .a distinctively 'tAfri~an" :voice· regis- tered its presence in the republic of letters; it was_, a i te~t that both talked "black," and, through its unrelenting indictment .of the · institution of slav- ery, talked bac~. , , ·. . , - i , 1 ·

Making the text, "speak" ·in the full range,. of'. timbres · that the African enslaved in England and America brought to the process of writing be<::arrie the dominant urge of the•ex-slave authors. So compelling did Gronniosaw's trbpe of the talking book-prove to be that, between 17.70 and 1815, no fe~er than five authors of. slave narratives used the same metaphor as a crucial scene of instruction to dramatize the author's own road to· lite~acy, initially, and to authorship, :ultimately. John Marrant in 1785,, Cugoano in 1787, Equiano in -1789, and John Jea in , 1815-all :modified Gi:onniosaw's figur_e of the talking book as the signal structural element .of their autobiograph1• cal narratives, thereby providing the formal Hnks ofrepetition and .revision that, in pa~t, define any literary tradition, So related,, in theme and structure, were these texts that by 1790 -yronniosaw's ·Dublin publis~er also include~ John Marrant's Narrative on his list and advertised its-sale on .GronniosaW 5

endpapers . · , , Still, the resistance even to the idea that an African could create litera·

ture was surprisingly resilient. As early as 1680, Morgan Godwyn; the self-

INTRODUCTION I . xxxvll

described "Negro and Indian's Advocate/' had accounted for the resistance in this way:

[a] disingenuous and unmanly Position had been formed; and privately (as it were in the dark) handed to and again, which is th,is, That t~e Negro's though in their Figure they carry some 'resemblances

1

of manhood, ye.t,',~re inde~q no't. men .. ·} ,he. <\qnsi,der,ation of the shape and figure of OU~ Negro's Bodies, their U:~bs and memb~rs; ,their Voice and. Countenanc~1 in all things ,according ~th.other mens; together with their Risi_bility and Discourse (man's peculiar 'Faculties) should be sufficient Conyiction. How. s}:iould they otherwis~ be capable of Trades·; and otp~r ~o less manly imployments; as also ~f Readiiig and Writjng, or ,show so mu~h Discretion in management of Business; .. .' but wherein lWe know) 'that many of our People are deficient, were they not truly Men? ·

Godwyn's account of the claims that'AJric'an~ were not hum~n beings and his ·use of the poss~sslon· of reas~n and its manifestations_ through "Reading and Writing" to refute these claims were widely debated during the Enlight- enment, generally at the African's expense: . ..

The putative relation bet~e~n litera~'y and th/ quest fo~ freedom pro- vided the subtext for this large{ d~liate over lh~ African's "place in nature," his or he'r place· in the great chain of being. Following the Ston6 Reb'ellion ofl739 in South 'Carolina, the largest' uprising of slaves in the colonies before the American Revolution, legislators there 1e·na'cted a d~aconi~n hody of p~blic laws, ~aking two forms of litJ~acy pui-iish~ble by'law: the 'mastery of w~itipg, and the masterr, 'ofthe ,dri.ui-1'.'.Th~ _Ia~ ~~ainst )earning to write read as follows: ·

And whereas the having of slaves taught'to write, or suffering them to be -employed in writing, may be attendfng with great inconveniences; Be it enacted, that all .and every, person and· persons whatsoever, who shall hereafter teach, or cause any slave or· islaves to • be taught· to . write, or shall use or employ any slave as a scribe' in any manner of writing what- soever, hereafter taught to write; eyery such person or persons shall, for every offense, forfeit the sum of one hundred pounds <;urrent money.

The law against the use of the talking dr1;1m was just as strong:

.And for that.as it is absolutely necessary to the safety of this Province, • that all, due care be taken to restrain the wanderings and meetings of negroes and other slaves, at all times , and more especially on Saturday nights, Sundays and o~her holidays, and their ;using and carrying. wooden swords, and other ,mischievous and ·dangerous ;weapons, or using or keeping of drums, horns, or other loud instruments, which may call together or, give sign or notice to one •another- of, their wicked designs and purposes .. , . And whatsoever master,·owner.or overseer,shall per- mit or suffer his or their negro or other slave or slaves, at any time here- after, or beat drums, blow horns, or use any ci~her loud -instruments, or whosoever shall suffer and countenance any, .public meetings or seat- ing's or strange negroes or slaves in their plantations, shall forfeit I 0 current money, for every such offence.

xu vlll IN TRODU C T I ON

1 n the ~w ,w Hcbclllon, both formM of li tcrucy- :,f En~Ji~h lcti.:,. and of tiJt 11 ·I v •rnundur- hud been pivotal to the islavc II C.1J p m:1 t y tJJ rebel. )11 C( l .I, h J' J• .. f..

Writing, muny phll ()1wph cr:, argu~u ,n t c .;., n 1,.,,,t,c2mc_nt , 1 ~t,1od c1lonc

1. 101111 the fin e urt H 1H1 th e mo,; t ,w l, cn t rcpm,,tory ol gcn,w,1 the vi~if,l'= II I ,., I J ' I h . , I sign of reason ii sel f. In tlrl s :, u wr ,n alc ro c, . owcv~r, writ1

1

ng, c1 thou~ secon da ry lo rca:wn, wa ll neverth ~Jc1111 t~c medium of r~ason ,. cxprcs~ion. We know rcu son l,y Hs rcprcsc nLi.JllOn !i. Suc.: h rcprcscntat,om, could as~umt spoken or wr itten form . Eightecn l~ ~ccnlury European _writ.c:s ~rivilegca wrUing~ in th elr wr ilin gs about A ~ri cam, _al least- as the pn_nc,pal mea- sure of th e African s' hum anity, th e ir capacit y for progrcc,s, their very pl~ in th e grea t chain of being. As th e Scottish philosopher Da vid Hume put it in u footnote to the second edition of hi~ widely read essay "Of National Chara cters":

I am apt to suspec t the negroes, and in general all the other species of me n (for there are four or five different kind s) to he naturalJy inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complex- ion than white, nor eve n any indi vidu al eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious ma nu facturers amongst them, n o arts, no sciences. On the other hand , th e most rude and barbarous of the whites, such as the ancient Germans, the present Tartars, have still something eminent ab~ut them , in their va lour, fo rm o f government, or some other particular.

Such a uniform and constant difference could not happen, in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an original distinc- tion betwixt these breeds of men. Not to mention our colonies, there are negro slaves dispersed all over Europe, of which none ever discm·ered any symptoms of ingenuity; tho ' low p eople, without education, '"iJI start up amongst us , and distinguish themsel ves in every profession. In Jamaica indeed they talk of one negro as a man of parts and learning [Francis Williams] ; but 'tis likely he is ad mired for every slender accom - plishment, like a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly.

Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher, responding to Hume's essay a decade later, had this to say:

The negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises aboYe the trifling. Mr. Hume challenges anyone to cite a single e.~mple in which a Negro has shown talents , and asserts th at among the hundreds of thousands of blacks who are transported elsewhere from the countries. al

th ough many of them have been set free , still not a single one~rns e,·er

found who presented th· · · th . any mg great m art or science or anv o er praise-worthy quality h h - ·. all · . , even t oug among the whnes some cont.mu nse aloft from the lo t bbl

· h Id S wes ra e, and through superior gifts earn respecl 1 ~ t e word .. 0 fundamental is the difference between these two races

o ma n, an It appears to b . . . . color. The reli ion of~ . e as grea_t m regard to mentaJ capac1t.Jes as in sort of idolatrvgth . ttshes so w'.de-spread a mong them is perhaps a si bl e to huma;, nc~tL.s:;

1 s a~ deepl y mt o the trifling as a ppears to be pos-

other common b' · A bi rd feat h er, a cow horn, a conch shell, or a~· is an ob,iect f ,

0 ~ect '. as soo n as it becom es consecrated bv a few words.

J · o , enerat1 0 <l f · · n a n o invoca tion in swea r ing oaths. The blacl-s

INTRODUCTION xxxlx

are very vain but in the Negro 's way, a nd so talkative th a t they must be driven apart from each other with thrashings . ·

Thomas Jefferson , in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) , echoed this discourse in his disparaging remarks about Phillis Whea tley's book of poems:

Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry. Among the blacks is misery e nough , God knows, but not poetry. Love is the peculiar oestrum of th e poet. Their love is a rde nt, but it kindles the senses only, not the imagination. Religion , indeed, has produced a Phillis Wheatley; but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under her name a re below the dignity of criticism.

To test assertions such as these , various Europeans and Americans edu- cated young black slaves along with their own children. "El negro Juan Latino," who published three books of poetry in Latin between 1573 and 1585, w as one of the earliest examples 6f such an experiment, followed by Wilhelm Amo, Jacobus Capitein , and Francis Williams·, in the first quarter of the eighteenth century. The first black person to publish a book of poetry in English , Phillis Wheatley, was also the subject of such an experiment. But whether Wheatley had the capacity to write, herself, poems of such accom- plishment, was a matter of considerable controversy in Boston in 1773.

And it was a matter of controversy a nd of immediate concern to her master and mistress, John and Susannah Wheatley, because the publication of their slave's book was dependent upon establishing the "authenticity" of their slave's authorship, the fact that she had written her poems herself. How could they prove that? Well, sometime in 1772 or 1773, through a proce- dure the nature of which scholars have yet to discover, the Wheatleys per- suaded a group of Boston's m0st august 'citizens-"the most respectable characters in Boston," as they would later be described , no less than eigh- teen of them-to read Phillis Wheatley's manuscript and then, somehow, to "examine" her about the poems in that manuscript. Whether or not they did so collectively, in a trial setting (as a filmmaker might conceive it), or whether they did so individually (which seems unlikely, given the time that eighteen separate interviews or examinations would entail), we do not know. Among them were John Erving, a prominent Boston merchant; the Reverend Charles Chauncey, pastor of the Tenth Congregational Church ; and John Hancock, who would later gain fame for his signature on the Dec- laration of Independence. At the center of this group would have sat His Excellency, Thomas Hutchinson, governor of the colony, with Andrew Oli- ver, his lieutenant governor, close by his side.

We can only speculate on the nature of the questions posed , either col- lectively or individually, to the fledgling poet. Perhaps they asked her to identify an'cl explain-for all to hear-exactly who were the Greek and Latin gods and poets alluded to so frequently in her work. Perhaps they asked her to conjugate a verb • in Latin , or even to translate randomly selected passages from the Latin , which she and her master, John Wheat- ley, claimed that she "had made some progress in." Or perhaps they asked her to recite from memory key passages from th e texts of John Milton and Alexander Pope, the two poets by whom the African seems to have been mos t directly influenced. We do not know.

xi INTRODUCTION

We do know, bowev.er, that the African poet's responses were more than sufficient to prompt these eighteen august gentlemen to compose, sign, and publish a two-paragraph "Attestation," an open letter "To the Publick" that prefaces Phillis Wheatley's book, and which reads in part: '

I

We whose Names are ~nder-written, do assure the World, that t.he POEMS specified in the following Page, were (as we verily believe) writ- ten by PHILLIS, a young Negro Girl, who was but a few Year·s since, brought an uncultivated Barbarian from Africa, and has ever' since been, and now is under the Disadvantage of serving as a Slave in a Family in this Town. She has been examined by some of the best Judges, and is thought qualified to write them. ·

So important .was this document in securing a publisher for Phillis Wheat- ley's poems that it forms the signal element in the prefatory matter printed in the opening pages of her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, which was' issued in London in the falI of 1773 because Boston printers remained skeptical about her authorship and refused , to publish the book. Without. the printed "Attestation/' , Phillis Wheatley's publisher claimed, few would have believed that an African could possibly have written -poetry all by herself. As the eighteen put the matter clearly in their letter, "Num- bers would be ready to suspect they were not really the Writings of PHILLIS."

This curious anecdote, surely one of the oddest oral examinations on record; is only a tiny. part of a larger, and even more curious, episode in, the Enlightenment;. At least since the end of the seventeenth century, Europe- ans -had wondered aloud whether or' not the African ·"species .of men," as they 1:post commonlf put it, could ever create formal literature, could ever master "the ·arts and· sciences." If they could, the argument ran, then the African variety of humanity and the _European variety were fundamentally related. If not, then it ,seemed clear that the African was destined by nature to be a slave, rightly relegated to a low place in the great chain, of being, an ancient construct that arranged all of creation on a vertical scale ascending from plants, insects, and animals through human beings to .the .angels and God himself.

By 1750, the chain had become minutely calibrated; the . human scale rose from "the lowliest Hottentot" .(black South African) to "glorious Milton and Newton." If blacks could write and publish imaginative literature, then they could, in effect; take a few , "giant steps" up the chain of being; in a pernicious metaphysical game of "Mother, May I?" For example, reviewers of Wheatley's book argued that the publication .of her poems meant that the African was indeed a human being and should not be enslaved. Indeed, Wheatley herself was manumitted . soon after her poems were pu~l!shed. That which was only implicit in Wheatley's case would become explicit fifty

. ·der-years later. George Moses Hor.ton had, by the mid 1820s, gamed~ cons• ull- able reputation at Chapel Hill .as the· "slave-poet." His master ~n~ted f a page · advertisements in northern newspapers soliciting . subscriptions fo~ book of Horton's. poems a'nd promising to exchange the slave's freedom 0 ; a sufficient return on sales of the book. Writing, for these slaves, was no ·only an activity of mind; it was also a commodity that gained them access to their full humanity-Horton literally bought freedom with his poems.

INTRODUCTION xii

Two hundred and twenty years separate the publication of Phillis Wheat- ley 's curious book of poems and Toni Morrison's receipt of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993. Morrison's success is part of a larger phenomenon . African American literature has been enjoying a renaissance in quality and quantity for the past several decades, .even vaster than the New Negro, or Harlem, Renaissance of the 1920s, spurred on to a significant extent since 1970 by the writings of African American women such as Morrison , Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, Rita Dove, Gloria Naylor, Jamaica Kincaid , and Terry McMillan , among a host of others. The number of literary prizes won by black authors in the last thirty years, including Pulitizer Prizes, National and American Book Awards, far exceeds the total number of such honors won by African Americans during the previous hunqred years. And several times since 1990, as many as three or four black authors have appeared simultaneously on the best-seller list of the New York Times. While the audience for this magnificent flowering of black literature crosses all racial boundaries, black readers have never been more numerous: as early as June 1996 the Times reported that African Americans were purchasing' 160 mil- lion books a year; a decade and a half later, that figure has dramatically increased.

This prominence in the marketplace has had its counterpart in the cur- riculum. Black literature courses have become a central part of the offerings in Engfish departments and in departments of American studies , African American studies, and women's studies. Maya Angelou's delivery of "On the Pulse of Morning" at President Bill Clinton's inauguration in 1993 (she was the first poet to read at an inauguration since Robert Frost did so for John F. Kennedy in 1961), Elizabeth Alexander's delivery of "Praise Song for the Day" at President Barack Obama's first inaugµration in 2009, and Rita Dove's unprecedented two-term appointment as Poet Laureate of the United States are further signs of the pervasive presence of African Ameri- can literature in American society. The globalization of hip hoj:>, the domi: mnt form of American popular music for the past three decades , has not only spawned a "Spoken Word" movement (a much larger postmodern ver- sion of poetry readings by the Beats in coffeehouses on the 1950s) and the citation of classical black poetry (and the "sampling" of canonical soul and rhythm and blues lyrics from the 1960s and 1970s in marvelous examples of intertextuality), but also has contributed to a renaissance in African American poetry, which we shall address at the end of this essay.

This broad acceptance of the authority of African American writing was, of course, not always the case. Leonard Deutsch, a professor of English at Marshall University, recalls the harsh resistance that greeted his request to write a Ph.D. dissertation on Ralph Ellison at Kent State University in 1970. When his prospectus was approved, a member of his thesis commit- tee-a well-known Mdville scholar-;---resigned in protest, arguing that

To write this dissertation is bad on two counts: for Len Deutsch him- self, and subsequently for the university. A doctoral dissertation implies substance, we_ight (stuffiness ·often accompanying this), and spread, and not concentration upon the wings of a gnat. If it be concentration, the dissertation must by concentration bring together and sum-up worlds of thought and material-the dissertation as metonymy or synecdoche ,

xi I I I NTRODUOTION

which it generally is , One coul~, _for !_nsta~ce,_ w~ite about Hemingway, Faulkner, ·or Bellow (recently, hvmg or still k1ckmg) ·because .men like them ha':'e established a respectable an.d accepted corpus of work rang, ing sufficiently to call for comment. .· · , · · , · ,.

Emso~'s wor~, h'e conclud.ed, was of'the ·.st 0

ature _to ~~ ria,n_~ beiryg, itud- ied for ,a f>h.q. ii/ English. Other_ stories 1of w~it~ pr?f~ .. ss~r-~ ,;mq Pfedi;i~i~ nantly white instit4tio_n,s of ~~gher edu<;:~t10~ d1~c.°-ur_ag~n~ .scholarly inte.rests an~ careers in Afi!c~p , American literat1,1,re abo_1.p;i d _in _ acaderni,c folklore. . . · . ; , , . , , . . , .· ,

The resistance to the lit¢rary meri.ts _of black literature, as we have .see~ h'as its origins in the, Ei:i,li,gh!~nment , a~d in tpe pecul~a~ instit1!~1on of ery. The so1;ja, an~ politi_ca~~ ,us,es to ~hich t~is literature h11s been put haV:~ placed a trew.endo~s burden 0I).• the_s~ w,riters,_ cast~n& aQ author and her or his works i.n , i:,li~ ,rok.~f i ynec9oche, a part standing for .'th,e et~ni~ w.h9i~, signifyfog ~h~ -,:~h~ N~gro" ~as,, w~9, t pis or _h~r "i~her~nt" intellec;!4a) poten,tial, might be, _and whether _or not, tqe . larger group w~s ~q,titled to ·th'e full ran,ge 'of rights and resporisibiJitie's jof Arperican c'itizensh.ip. B~cause ~f the perilous stature of African Americans in American so~iety, their liter~~ ture has suffered u.nd~r Jremendous e~~ral!terary burdens. . , · ,.

Writing in the "Pref~ce" to An Antho{pgy of American Negro Literature (1929), V. F. Caly~~Joi{, _:a 1\Jrrxist critic;, argued that black litr r~~u~e --~~s primarily a reflection of th~ Negro's h~stor ica] economic exploitation,:

In a subtle way,- Negro art and litera ture in Amedca have had an eco- nomic origin. All · that is 'original iri '! Negro folk~lote, · or singular ·fn Negro spirituals and Eli.Jes, , can- be·trace d to the economic institution of slavery 'i1nd its infltierice upon' the · Negro soul. · ' 1

< • • ). ·.,•. •

Richard Wright w<;mld. e<;ho th~se sen.t,iments in his "Bluepril')t for Negro Writing," pµblished in 1,9,37'. Calver.ton went ~n to argue that the Neg~o's music and folk art were never "purely imitative," and tqat .black vernacular cultural: forms were "definitely. and unequivocally American,' '. th~ only "qrig- inal" Amer.ican culture. y,et cre,ated. \i\Trjght, too,. would repeat this claim. Ji ~lack writ~rs turned to t~e~r own vern,acula,r .tr.~di~ions, he concl~dtq, bl:

1 t

literature ~ould he as ongmal and as cpmpellmg as _black music an? ( o~- lpre. The lite~a~y m?vement of the , 1920s, he maintained, _was mort; 1~~he tant for what it implied ahqu( what.;hi~torian Carter G. Woo4son:c.alledf h public Negro mind" th~IJ. for ·w.hat , it, had contributed. to the qmon ° t e world's great literatures: .·, , . , . . ·

' .• t·•.; . • -

f . . , . > ' ' , stitute a I this new literature of the Negt o ' in A'merica does not cop it'is · • : d , · • · 1 1, · d culture, -renaissance, It oes signify rapid growth ih racia art an . · tes a

· a g th th ' · '· · · ' · · · ' it illustra row at is as yet unfinished. Indeed we may say · , than g rowth th t. d , ' .r ,, , . ·l• ,. b' . , It. d1·cates more a m a ynamxt sense has just egun. m the rise of a literature. It marks the rise of. an .entire people. .

' . d "the nse . Calvert~n's argument ~~out_ .t~e pr~dt ctjo:n of lite~ary arts ~n, oet Jarn~s

of an entire people" ech_o,ed . t_he eloquert argument that th~;J of Amert· W('.ldon Johnson h~d qiade in his . important antholo~r, T_~e ~f the· Harle: can Negro Poetry, published in 1922 at the very beg~nnmg .. · I essays 0 Renai J h · ' , · · · r cnuca ssance. 0 nson's preface remains one of the maJ0

INTRODUCTION xlill

the nature and function of black literature. In it Johnson states explicitly what had been implicit in the critical reception of black literary production since Phillis Wheatley: blacks must create literature because it is , inevita- bly, a fundamental aspect of their larger struggle for civil rights, and it can never escape this role because it serves as prima facie evidence of the Negro's intellectual potential:

A people may become great through many means, but there is only one measure by which its greatness is recognized and acknowledged. The final measure of the greatness of all peoples is the amount and stan- dard of the literature and art they have produced. The world does not know that a people is great until that people produces great literature and art. No people that has produced great literature and art has ever been looked upon by the world as distinctly inferior.

Johnson here was drawing upon Ralph Waldo Emers~m's claim (made in 1844 in his speech "On the Emancipation of the West Indies") about the necessity for blacks to contribute "an indispensable element" to the Ameri- can nation's cultural mix before they would be granted full citizenship:

If the black man carries in his bosom an indispensable element of a new and coming civilization, for the sake of that element, no money, nor strength, nor circumstance can hurt him; he will survive and play his part .... The intellect-that is miraculous! Who has it, has the talis- man. His skin and bones, though they were the color of night, are trans- parent, and the everlasting stars shine through with attractive beams,

In large part because of these extraliterary expectations___'.__and because of the pernicious withholding of literary and formal education from blacks- African American literature did not come of age until well into the twenti- eth century. As Sylvestre ·c. Watkins put it in his Anthology of American Negro Literature (1944), , . . . . . .

Negro history and Negro literature have maintained a very close rela- tionship through the years. In his• struggle for a better

1 way of life , the

Negro has, through necessity, made his literature a purposeful thing born of his great desire to become a full-fledged citizen of the United States . His late start did not allow him the pleasure of creating a new phrase, or a more beautiful expression. The struggle 'against ignorance, indifference and racial bigotry had first claim upon his time and energy.

Indeed, the tension inherent in the African American tradition between even the most private utterances of a poet such as Phillis Wheatley-whose mastery of the English language and whose grace under pressure as the synecdoche for the African in Western culture would merit for her a place in the canon , even if her work were not as layered as it is-and the political uses to which those utterances are put obtains to this day. What is the "black voice" that Gronniosaw sought to place in his text? What, exactly, accounts for the "African" element in African American literature? What is the relation between vernacular literature, the blues, gospel, the sermon , and jazz and the formal African American literary tradition? And what rela- tion does the canon of African American literature bear to that of the

- xllv INTRODUCTION

American tradition? To begin to address these questions, we and our nine colleagues decided to produce -this anthology.

The Norton Anthology of African American Literature is a celebration of over two centuries of imaginative writing in English by persons of African descent in the United States. It is most certainly not the first anthology seeking to define the canon of African American literature. But it is the most comprehensive; its sheer scope and inclusiveness enable readers to trace the repetitions, tropes, and signifying that define the tradition.

Just as ·the eighteenth-century slave n·arrators revised the trope of the talking book, writers in the black tradition have repeated and revised fig- ures, tropes, and themes in prior works, leading to formal links in a chain of tradition that connects the slave narratives to autobiographical strategies employed a full century later in works such as Richard Wright's Black Boy, Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and Toni Morrison's Beloved. Precisely because "blackness" is a socially constru_cted category, it must. be learned through imitation, ·and its literary representations m,ust also be learned in the same way-lik~ ja~z- through rep~tition and revision. The African American literary tradition exists as a formal entity because of this historical practice, which the edi- tors of the monumental anthology The Negro Caravan (1944) called "a sort of literary inbreeding which causes Negro writers to be influenced by other Negroes more than should ordinarily be expected." _ If Virginia Woolf was correct when she claimed that "books speak to other books," it is also true that works ,of literature created by African Americans often extend, or sig- nify upon, other works in the black tradition, structurally and thematically. Tracing these formal connections is the task of the teacher, and is most certainly a central function of this anthology.

If African American literature is flourishing dramatically in the twenty-first ceritury, so too is the academic study of this field. Crit,ical studies, antholo- gies, encyclopedias, companions, chronological histories, reprints, and refer- ence works of all sorts are el)abling us to reqssemble the fragm_ented history of African American writing, . buried so often in what one commentator in 18~4 called "the ephemeral caskets" of periodical lit~ratu~e, pamphlets, occasional publications, and limited, even. vanity, editions. This _scholarly work of recovery will most likely end the cy~le of each genei;-ation o~ scholars being forced to reinvent t~e proverbial wheel. Such duplic;ation o~ effor:t has been the great curse confronting schqlars of African Americar;i _ cultur_e. These tools-the collective scholarship of the last several decades-will enable future scholarship and creative learning. · .

The Norton Anthology of African American Literature .builds upon a dis• tinguished tradition of anthology editing that began at least as early as the mid-nineteenth century, with t/:ie publication •of Les Cenelles: Chdix d~ Poe- sies Indigenes in New Orleans in 1845. These forays. into canon formatwnd for every anthology defines a canon-were also acts of,love, arduously graftek

h d h k · ' wor toget er un er t e most difficult circumstances. Often a blac wnter s l . t t d I b · . ' antho -exis s o ay on Y ecause of his or her presence m a scarce or rare

ogy. Robert Thomas Kerlin's superbly edited Negro Poets and Their Poems (1923), for example, includes works by poets such as J. Monrad Alle;, Joshua Henry Jones Jr., Eva A. Jessye, Irvin W. Underhill, and Andre Raza -

INTRODUCTION xiv

keriefo, whose works are seldom, if ever, taught or anthologized today. Today's canonical figures can often be another generation's amusing foot- note to literary history.

In making selections for this anthology, the editors listened carefully to a caution advised by the writer and social critic Victoria Earle Matthews in 1895 in her important speech "The Value of Race Literature": .

Race Literature does not mean things uttered in praise, thoughtless praise of ourselves, wherein each goose thinks her gosling a swan . We have had too much of this .... Race Literature does mean though the preserving of all records of a Race, and thus cherishing the material saving from destruction and obliteration ':"hat is good , helpful and stim- ulating. But for our Race Literature, how will future generations know of the pioneers in Literature , our statesmen , soldiers, divines, musi- cians , artists , lawyers, critics, and scholars?

We have endeavored to choose for the Norton Anthology works of such a quality that they merit pre servation and sustain cl a ssroom interest. Like several historically important anthologies-Kerlin's Negro Poets and Their Poetry, Calverton's Anthology of American Negro Literature, Sterling Brown, Arthur P. Davis , and Ulysses Lee's Negro Caravan , among others-we have given a prominent ·place to the black vernacular tradition. We have placed this section at the beginning of our text because, historically, anonymous vernacular literature certainly preceded the tradition of written letters among African Americans, and because all of the world's literatures have developed from an oral base . In the instance of our literary tradition, the oral, or the vernacular, is never far from the written. Oral expression-the dozens , signifying, rap poetry-surrounds the written tradition rather as a Mobius strip intertwines above and below a plane, in the traditional antipho- nal "call and response" structures peculiar to African and African American expressive cultural forms. Not only has the vernacular tradition served as the foundation of the written tradition, but it continues to nurture it, comment upon it, and criticize it in a dialectical, reciprocal relation that surely obtained historically in every major literary tradition. (A visit today to a black beauty parlor, or barbershop, in a bl.ack neighborhood , verifies this claim.) The ver- nacular tradition, however, does not live on the page, but in community and in performance. The Norton Anthology, with its accompanying multimedia website , is the first anthology to offer side by side the written and oral tradi- tions, thus illuminating the connections between them. This unique feature of our anthology is a literal response to James Gronniosaw's compelling meta- phor, an electronic talking book that makes concrete the black tradition's first structuring metaphor; through technological innovation, we have come full circle from Gronniosaw's foundational trope of 1770.

As we go to press, we are in the midst of an especially active and fecund period for Af,rican American literature, as evidenced by the dazzling array of work produced across the full range of modes of artistic expression. Take, for example, the stunning work of poets such as Rita Dove and Yusef Komun- yakaa (winners of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1986 and 1994, respec- tively), and the prolific second generation, including Thomas Sayers Ellis, Terrance Hayes, Tracy K. Smith (winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for

xlvi INTRODUCTION

poetry), Natasha Trethewey (United States Poet Laureate and winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for poetry), and Kevin Young, bridged by the sustained work of Elizabeth Alexander, widely known for her volume The Venus Hot- tentot and her poem "Praise ,Song for the Day" '(which, as we -' mention above, she read at President Obania's inauguration in 2009). The organiza- tion Cave Canem has contributed dramatically to . the growing s.ophistica- tion, ,i,nfluence, and ~opularity ?~ black ~oetr)'. na,tio,-ially. l'he mos,~ recent developments in African American poet1~s, what Al~~ander caJls, a _black poetics for the times," hav~ yielded poetry' epit,oinized by formal dexterity combined with deep connections to black sou·ncls and cultural referents. Th'at this groundbreaking work in formal traditions __ is _hap'pe)J.ing in_ tan- dem _with exdtirig dev~lopin~nts in black cinema and in 'the fourth ~ecade of hip hop is_ sure to ·spark cross-fertilization ar~,d fascinati~_g _innovations by artists in all three areas. No wonder some scho~ars bel~eve that black poetry is flowering as never before, certainly noi: since the Black Arts Movement, spearheaded and championed by Amiri Baraka in the latter half of the I 960s.

But this vital period for poetr:y-and here we must pause to note the pass 0 ing of that crucially.significant, shape-shifting canonical,poet, Amiri Baraka, in early January 2014-is matched by equally •important innovations in fic- tion and drama. The :enduring significance and bold formal experimenta- tion of writers such as Octavia Butler, Samuel R. -Delany, Jamaica Kincaid, Toni Morrison, Walter Mosley, Ishmael Reed, and Alice Walker go hand-in- hand -with the important and exciting fiction by writers such as C~imam- anda Ngozi -Adichie, Paul Beatty, Teju Cole, Edwidge Danticat, Ji.mot Diaz (winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for fiction), Victor Lavalle, Danzy Senna, and Colson Whitehead, among many others. These writers explore trans- national and bi-/multi-racial themes with ·dazzling invention, · drawing on emerging technologies, an array of genres, their identities as first-generation African immigrants. and Caribbean-African Americans, feminist , and.gay or lesbian, and all ·sorts of even more-localized black hyphenations, such as Haitian-African American, Nigerian-African Americans, Dominican-African American. Through their -work, they put into .question what we mean-by an ''African American" identity or "African American literature" in fresh ways, ways that challenge essentialist . nqtions .1 of ethnicity, · gender, sexuality, national identity, and ev:en "race" and "literary tradition." These writers embody and express "new" ways to be "black'! within·the context ·of traditional American racial and artistic, definitions. Among' playwright~, the work_ of the late Lorraine Hansberry and ,August Wilson. (winner of the Pulitzer Pnze in 1987 and 1990), Lynn Nottage, Suzan-Lori Parks (winner of the Pulitzer in 2002), and Anna Deavere Smith has inspired a younger generation that includes Eisa Davis Lydia Diamond Danai Gurira Katori Hall, Bra nden J ki -J b ' . ' ' d T Scott en ns aco s, Kwame Kwe1-Armah, Tarell McCraney, an racy Wilson. With this generation of black writers the black diaspora is fully rooted in rich new soil. '

The broad and deep influence up~n contemporary Africa.n American wr~t- . f k · JI hip mg O spo en black •English and popular vernacular forms-especia hop, of course, but "hip hop as one sound among many. that these writers

INTRODUCTION xlvll

interpolate into their work" from both sacred and secular forms, as Alexander puts it-is a notable development in the tradition over the last two decades. But we should recall that the relation between the black-spoken and the black-written, as it were, has itself been a leitmotif in black aesthetic theory whose origins go back at least to Paul Laurence Dunbar's concerns about the merits of his dialect poetry versus his standard English poetry and James Weldon Johnson's introduction to The Book of American Negro Poetry in 1922 and carry through the critical essays of Baraka and other Black Arts Movement writers. One can argue, then, that the canon, in the twenty-first century , has returned to contemplate and reconfigure its roots, and that the trope of the talking book, literalized in Toni Morrison's bril- liant formal narrative innovation in her novel Jazz, has never in the history of the African American literary tradition been more varied and vital.

HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.

VALERIE A. SMITH

9

J