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Historically speaking, the collective enterprise we now know as African American or black literature is of rather recent vintage. In fact, the wine may be newer than generally acknowledged, which is to say that it was neither pressed on the African continent nor bottled during the slave era. Rather, African American literature was a postemancipation phenomenon that gained its coherence as an undertaking in the social world defined by the system of Jim Crow segregation, which ensued after the nation’s retreat from Reconstruction. This social order, created by local and statewide laws, statutes, and policies, received constitutional sanction in 1896…
Blyden Jackson’s easy acceptance of what might be termed an integrationist imperative was characteristic of many of the essays on literature that appeared in the fourth number of the eleventh volume of Phylon in 1950, a special issue titled “The Negro in Literature: The Current Scene.” Founded by W. E. B. Du Bois and published by Clark Atlanta University, Phylon was a major venue for the publication of literary, cultural, and historical scholarship on race. Its contributors were frequently among the most prominent scholars, both black and white, writing about the idea of race relations in the United States and…
At any given moment in academic discourse there are some writers whose epigrammatic style proves virtually irresistible to scholars across a range of disciplines—writers whose words seem at once to sum up our most pressing concerns and to defy precise paraphrase, leaving one unsure whether they have expertly condensed the problems of the moment or merely achieved a vague evocativeness that serves to cover a variety of sins. Walter Benjamin has been one such figure of late, and his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” one such text. The particular thesis I have in mind is thesis VI, which…
One does not have to look very hard in Michael Thomas’s prizewinning 2007 novel Man Gone Down to find references to African American literary history. Early in the novel’s fifth chapter, the narrator, a troubled man of black, Cherokee, and Irish ancestry, intones, “It’s a strange thing to go through life as a social experiment,” faintly but unmistakably echoing the opening paragraphs of W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, in which Du Bois tells how it feels “to be a problem” by admitting, “Being a problem is a strange experience.”¹ A few pages later, the narrator…
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