African American Literature: The African American Literary Canon: Rationale and Function, Pros and Cons
Chair: Chris Bell, Nottingham Trent University, tooferbell@yahoo.com
Secretary: Melissa Daniels, Northwestern University, m-daniels@northwestern.edu

Panel One

“I stood all the while listening”: Reframing Trauma in William Wells Brown’s Narrative of the Life of William W. Brown

Stephen Lucasi
University of Connecticut
stephen.lucasi@huskymail.uconn.edu

This paper considers the role of the voice, or of vocality, in William Wells Brown’s 1847 Narrative. Throughout the narrative, Brown renegotiates the more conventional philosophical dictum that, as Kaja Silverman remarks in World Spectators, “appearance,” in its visual and linguistic registers, “is the locus within which Being unfolds” (3). Brown subverts the paradigmatic visual symbolization of trauma constructed throughout the slave narrative genre. For Brown, vocality (defined as vocal expressions that do not emerge within systems of language) replaces the visual and linguistic registers of “appearance,” being and subjectivity. The traumatic acoustic imagery in Brown’s narrative demands an examination informed by theoretical models of subjectivity articulated by, among others, Kelly Oliver and Adriana Cavarero. I argue that Brown’s construction of the voice in the form of the scream inheres in a gap between Oliver’s “witnessing” and Cavarero’s “vocality.” How, this paper asks, is Brown simultaneously bound to and resistant to Western notions of logocentrism that nullify the individuating and identificatory power of vocality? How does his construction of vocality offer a subversion of the literary acquisition at the heart of Douglass’s narrative? And how, finally, might such a subversion offer a powerful critique of conventional forms of subjectivity?

Worrying Canons, Conventions and Comedy:  Charles Johnson’s Modernist Revision of the Slave Narrative in The Oxherding Tale

Kristen Proehl

College of William and Mary

kbproe@wm.edu

“It is necessary,” writes author Charles Johnson in Chapter VIII of The Oxherding Tale (1982), “to speak briefly, and apologetically, about the form of this Narrative, which…often ‘worries’…the formal conventions—as we define them—of the Negro Slave Narrative.” He thus calls attention to the important role of African American literary traditions in his novel, cleverly disrupting his portrayal of the unusual adventures of protagonist Andrew Hawkins, a bi-racial slave who eventually escapes from a South Carolina plantation. Using Frederick Douglass’s classic Narrative as a guide, my paper examines the cultural politics of Johnson’s modernist revision of the antebellum slave narrative. As The Oxherding Tale synthesizes Western and Eastern philosophy, as well as African American and European artistic traditions, the novel destabilizes the established boundaries of the African American canon. Although Johnson has disavowed politicized art in public interviews, his writing nevertheless engages in its own form of politics, calling for a liberation of aesthetic forms. Johnson’s unorthodox, and often comic, vision of the slave past exposes the limits of Western, rationalist historical interpretation. As the novel’s conclusion investigates the politics of “passing” through Andrew’s bi-racial ancestry, we gain new insights into the social negotiation of racial identity.

“The American Dream – and Black Man’s Nightmare”: Remaking America in Raymond Andrews’s Fiction

Meghan Lydon

Independent Scholar

Meghan_lydon@hotmail.com

Raymond Andrews, a relatively unknown African American writer from Madison County, Georgia, who ended his own life in 1991 just as his literary fame began to mount, was engaged in reconsidering and rewriting American history to incorporate unrecorded black experience nine years before Morrison does so in Beloved. My paper looks at how Andrews’s unusual biracial identity plays out in his autobiography and possibly causes his autobiography and other novels to be critically overlooked. It also traces how the work of this regional writer concerns itself with broader American history, literature, and culture, such as the Civil War, segregation, the New Deal, Washington Irving, baseball, Thanksgiving, and John F. Kennedy. Lastly, my paper examines how Andrews, a child sharecropper, finally decides that the American South has healing, as well as harmful, powers.

Publishing Blackness: Multiracial Writers and the Publication of Identity

Justin Ponder

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

jponder@uwm.edu

In this paper, I will explore how issues of bi-raciality and multi-raciality affect the African American literary canon. More specifically, I will look at how the literary canon is the vehicle through which the biracial writer Danzy Senna writes her blackness into being. Senna discusses living as a visibly white woman, but, in her writing, she claims black heritage, publishing novels that assert this otherwise invisible identity. As this biracial author publishes her blackness into being, she insures that from thereafter everyone will know that the white-looking writer Danzy Senna is black. Her claims to black identity in Caucasia are completed once she is included in the anthology Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers. Because this anthology includes her among the new generation of African American writers, it effectively classifies her as an important up and coming writer, but it simultaneously classifies her as an African American. With this, as the canon grows to include multiracial authors who look white but claim black identities in writing, the African American literary canon also becomes the vehicle through which these writers achieve a black identity that their physical appearances deny them.

Panel Two

Reinventing the Canon:  The Politics of Anthologizing African American Literature

Sharon Lynette Jones

Wright State University

sharon.jones@wright.edu

Although the field of African American literary studies was once relegated to the sidelines of literary studies, the late 20th and early 21st century has witnessed the movement of this area to a more central role.  As courses continue to become more prevalent and the job market continues to expand for African American literature specialists, the continued desire to anthologize and canonize African American literature continues to be a source of discourse and discussion among individuals in the field. In this paper, I will argue that this canon remains dynamic and not static as we continue to mold this diverse body of oral and written literature. As a means of exploring these issues, I will examine my own experiences as co-editor of The Prentice Hall Anthology of African American Literature, a comprehensive anthology which includes the oral and written tradition from the 18th to 20th century, as well as current debates regarding the politics behind canon formation.

Toni Morrison and the Serviceable Image of White Americans

Dan Colson

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

ecdanc@hotmail.com

Toni Morrison has both an intellectual and an intuitive grasp of the climate of African-American literature and culture, and she writes partially in order to help consolidate a truly black American literature. Though she claims to write mostly for black readers, her audience has now grown far more diverse. As Morrison ascends into the literary pantheon and begins to rival the great white American writers of the past, she becomes subject to the same critical examinations-and same criticisms-as earlier American literary giants. Like Hawthorne, Poe, Hemingway, and Faulkner, Morrison utilizes a culturally specific, serviceable image which relies on an assumption of certain preconceptions in her audience. In this essay, I examine her recognition of the black stereotype that white writers used; I briefly discuss critical interpretations of black images (and blackness) in American literature and explain Morrison's view of black literature and the role she plays in it; and I explore the use of whites and whiteness in Morrison's novels and the implications of canonization and the possibility of a bifurcated canon.

Power Dynamics in African American Theater

Kimmika L. H. Williams-Witherspoon

Temple University

The cultural production and reproduction of linguistic markets is tied to a society’s ability to manipulate race, class and gender through linguistic access in the public sphere. In that social space, the “public transcript”, replicated in minority or subordinate culture, often mirrors those ideas and images expected of them by the more powerful, dominant or majority culture. This research offers evidence of a “hidden transcript” operating in these social sites, despite the appearance of conformity, contesting the over-arching power relations of hegemony.

Knowing that “language forms a kind of wealth” (Bourdieu 1991:43-65) and pointing to the salient correlations between the “hidden transcript” in classic examples of AAT, this paper, “Power Dynamics in African American Theater”, critically evaluates the negotiations of power that African American theater artists subvert by infusing the work with “latent meaning” that may be opaque to all but “the initiate”.

By re-evaluating classic examples of AAT for evidences of the imposition of power, we can identify how its “hidden transcript” (even in seemingly complicit representations of AA culture) still manages to send counter hegemonic messages to stimulate political ideology formation and group solidarity within the AA community. 

Educating Blaque: Obtaining a Ph.D. in African American Literature within American English Departments

Ellesia A. Blaque

Wayne State University

aj5303@wayne.edu

African American Literature is being held hostage in America's English departments.  Simultaneously, the discipline is being held at a distance in American's few Africana Studies departments.  Where does this leave the budding scholar of African American Literature?  Scrambling to find mentors, departmental support, and form dissertation committees.  Hustling to jump through theoretical and methodological hoops that oftentimes are disassociated with the discipline.  In its current pedagogical state, Black Literature is taught without emphasis on the history that motivates it by professors who are indifferent to the required content in teaching such courses.  This presentation's goals are to demonstrate the need to relocate the discipline into Africana Studies departments, advance those departments to doctoral levels, and place a new generation of scholars at the helm of not only the discipline, but also the canon. Relocating educators, scholars, and students of black canonical texts into a department dedicated to the African Diaspora is not only necessitated by the lingering racially oppressive metastasis impeding the discipline's growth, but also by the lack of educational quality and focus currently plaguing the field.  We all cannot converge on UNC-Chapel Hill; after all, despite offering a Ph.D. in African American Literature, their pickins are also slim.