The Conerra~ra.

r
,
a
Peribd+

- r - he fabled awakening in Harlem during the 1920s

if notwithstanding, one could argue that the true
African American renaissance occurred during
the last quarter of the twentieth century. The impact
of African American artistic production on American
and world culture had never been greater: in film and
television, which made African American performers
household names; in music, with the explosion of rap
and gospel and the inclusion of jazz programming as a
constituent of prestigious cultural institutions such as
Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center; in theater, where
musicals and dramas by African Americans became
staples on and off Broadway; and in the visual arts, as
museums and private collectors purchased works by
African American painters and sculptors in increas-
ing numbers. Never before had so much distinguished
writing been produced by black Americans. Toni Mor-
rison became the first African American Nobel laure-
ate in literature in 1993, by which time her novels had
won a sheaf of awards as well as a secure place in the
American literary canon. In 1990, August Wilson's
The Piano Lesson won the playwright a second Pulit-
zer Prize for drama. Before his death in 2005, he
completed a cycle often plays—one for each decade—
that depicts his version of the variegated African
.American experience of the twentieth century. In
sharp contrast to earlier periods when only one or
two black writers could rise to prominence at a time,
Morrison and Wilson did not stand alone. From Maya
Angelou in autobiography to Pulitzer Prize-winners
Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, Tracy K. Smith, and
Natasha Trethewey in poetry to Charles Johnson and

President Barack Obama's inauguration in 2009, uniting gen-

erations of black Americans across class, region, and gender
divides, affirmed feelings of national belonging and renewed
hopes in the struggle for racial equality.

9,3
 INTRODUCTION I 915
914 I THE CONTEMPORARY PERIOD

fered according to geography and re gion, class, and ethnicity. The most
John Edgar Wideman in fiction to Ntozake Shange and Suzan-Lori Parks in celebrated poetic voices of the 1960s spoke in thebrisk accents of northern
theater to Alice Walker in the essay, dozens of writers garnered critical cities. But many African Americans lived in the South, spoke in the slower
acclaim, large audiences, or both. The institutionalization of African Amer- cadences of the region, and drew from the well of political experience that
ican literature as a subject of academic inquiry ensured that these writers was the civil rights movement. The decade of the 1960s that Alice Walker
and their readers were keenly aware of the tradition in which they worked. _depicts in her poems and essays differs markedly from that of Amiri Baraka.
Whether the writers embraced the tradition or resisted its premises, their In the North, Midwest, and West, black people lived in small towns as
work extended its contours. often as in big cities. John Washington, the protagonist of David Bradley's
Critical trends that distinguished African American literature during the novel The Chaneysville Incident, returns home to rural Pennsylvania; Mor-
contemporary period are (1) the acknowledgment of the multiplicity of Afri- rison's titular protagonist Sula returns to the Bottom, the black neighbor-
can American identities; (2) a renewed interest in history, as writers imagine hood in a small fictional Ohio city, and characters in Sherley Anne Williams's
the psychological and spiritual lives of African Americans during slavery "Tell Martha Not to Moan" inhabit the farm towns of California's San Joa-
and segregation; (3) the emergence of a community of black women writing; quin Valley.rXs the literature reflected the regional diversity of black com-
(4) a continuing exploration of music and other forms of vernacular culture munities it revealed an increasing class stratification as w_elT-Educational
as springboards for literary innovation and theoretical analysis; (5) an open- na dprofessional opportunities that became available the wake of the
ness to speculative or science fiction to inform poetry and prose; and (6) the

in
civil rights movement widened the gap between the middle class and the
influence of African American literary scholarship. poor. Writers explored_ the tensions that ensued and the divide that opened
_even between members of the same familJ Widememan's n's Brothers and
a lCeep-

_
ers is a poignant case in point. Far from monolithic, the black community
MOVEMENT LEGACIES
was ethnically diverse. Paule Marshall's 1959 novel, Brown Girl, Brown-
stones, was among the first to focus on a character's coming-of-age in a
The historical conditions that enabled this literary and cultural renaissance neighborhood of West Indian immigrants who live with, yet apart from, the
were set in motion by the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s._ southern-born black migrants who are their neighbors. q'he novel's "Bajan"
The movement initiated a national conversation about racism, labeling it as (Barbadian) characters bring with them to Brooklyn, along with their
moral
a moral wrong and identifying those who took action against it as dreams and aspirations, a new vernacular as well as a different sense of
agents. As the nightly television news documented, African Americans
"home." Brown Girl was a harbinger. The progressive movements around
were in the vanguard of the movement, and their sense of who they. were issues of race led to the amendments to the Immigration and Nationality
was forever changed. At the same time that they saw in themselves and Act in 1965 and 1990, which, respectively, ended quotas based on national-
their children the capacity for moral heroism, they identified with Africans ity and increased the overall number of immigrants allowed into the United
who were waging a similar struggle against colonialism in Ghana, Nigeria, States each year. Significant demographic changes occurred in the black
and Kenya. Black American leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr., Mal- population: By the turn of the century, stories of immigrants of African
colm X, and Whitney Young, traveled to Africa, and their reports from the descent from throughout the Caribbean as well as Africa and Europe con-
continent strengthened the sense of connection that blacks in the United firmed the impossibility of identifying a unified black experience.
States felt with its people. The change in consciousness was accompanied Although the women's movement is popularly identified with the white
by a change in material conditions. By agitating for opportunities for equal middle class, several of its most visionary voices belonged to African Ameri-
education, better jobs, and decent housing, the civil rights movement cre- can women. Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, and Audre Lorde analyzed the
ated a substantial middle class among black Americans that would in turn inextricability of sexism and racism. They protested racism in the women's
constitute an audience to which black writers could appeal. movement and sexism in the Black Power movement and challenged activ-
By the late-1960s the Black Power and antiwar movements. had taken ists in both to see the common routs of their oppression. Addressing those
hold, especially among blacks on college.campuses. For the latter, the goal African Americans, both men and women, who saw feminism as a diver-
was no longer integration, but separatism. The Vietnam War, in which sion from the struggle against racial oppression, Lorde insisted: "Black
blacks served in much greater numbers than were proportionate to their women have particular and legitimate issues which affect our lives as
percentage of the population, was another political flash point that radical- Black women, and addressing those issues does not make us less Black."
ized a significant segment of the community. Some effects of these political Black feminists argued that the simultaneous oppressions of race, gender,
movements on artistic production were immediate; others were long term and class defined the lives of many African American women,. Any strategy
and far reaching. Manifestoes of the Black Arts movement, the designation for liberation would have to take these interlocking factors into account.
assumed by cultural workers allied with Black Power activists, insisted on The movement for gay rights was the last of the progressive causes
art that was functional, collective, and committed to revolution and change. spawned by the struggle for civil rights. It protested discrimination on the
The prescriptiveness that resulted proved too constricting, and the dictates basis of sexual preference. Lorde and Jordan became leaders in this effort,
of the Black Arts movement were soon discarded. But the movement her- as did Essex Hemphill and Samuel Delany. The movement claimed James
alded a shift toward art that was for and about the black community. Baldwin as a forefather, although Baldwin did not always claim the move-
- This inward turn revealed communities that had never been monolithic. ment. Those who did claim it fought to be accepted as "black" among gays
As the literature increasingly reflected, African American communities dif- w
916 I THE CONTEMPORARY PERIOD INTRODUCTION I 917

(1972). Most historians argued that inadequate documentation existed, a

situation Blassingame began to correct with his massive anthology, Slave
.Testimony (1977). Literary scholars began teaching slave narratives, which
many now consider the foundation of the African American literary tradi-
tion. Nathan Huggins published the first history of the Harlem Renais-
sance in 1971, initiating the still-ongoing study of that important chapter in
literary history. Historian Gerda Lerner edited Black Women in White
America (1973), which further revised the understanding of African Ameri-
cans'roles in U.S. history as both the victims of oppression and the agents of
change. Toni Morrison, then an editor at Random House, was the guiding
force behind The Black Book (1974), a folk history in the form of a scrapbook
that collected posters and patents, bills of sale, spirituals and blues, family
photographs, formulas for conjure, and interpretations of dreams. Like the
academic histories, it did not highlight the accomplishments of notable
men and women; it recovered the experiences of heretofore anonymous
folk. Literary anthologies such as Houston Baker's Black Literature in Amer-
ica (1971), Stephen Henderson's Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black
Speech and Black Music as Poetic References (1972), and Mary Helen Wash-
ington's Black-Eyed Susans: Classic Stories By and About Black Women
(1975) recuperated poetry and prose that pointed to the existence of a black
literary tradition. Building on this tradition, novelists began to invent new
versions of the past. Ernest Gaines wrote a novel in the form of a fictional
autobiography, The Autobiography ofMiss Jane Pittman (1971), that reached
a large audience—especially after it was adapted into a television movie.
Alex Haley's Roots (1976) was turned into a television mini-series that
became the talk of the nation, as U.S. households tuned in nightly to watch
the journey of one family from freedom in Africa to slavery in America to
freedom in the United States. Whether history, criticism, or fiction, this work
may be understood in terms that scholar Stuart Hall describes in "The
In The Louisiana Project" (2003), Carrie Mae Weems incorporates photographs, narrative. Dialogics of Identity": "Identity is never finished. It moves into the future
and video to represent what she calls the footnotes of history" in a work commemorating the by way of a constructive detour of the past."
bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase. Weems, like her literary peers, reimagines slavery in Slavery, a long chapter in the American past, galvanized the imaginations
her work. Here dressed as an antebellum woman, she gazes on the expanse of a plantation. of black writers. While many earlier writers saw only shame in slavery, writ-
ers in the contemporary period have seen it as a way of understanding the
and as "gay" among blacks. Like the feminist movement, the gay rights present From one perspective, slavery represents a wound in the psyche of
movement was highly controversial among African Americans. It served as present-day African Americans that has not yet healed; from another, slavery
yet another reminder that the differences among black Americans were by is the moral blot on the nation's soul that must be confronted and cleansed.
many measures as great as the differences between them and white Ameri- Without question, the history of slavery contains dramatic stories of physi-
cans. Multiple threads make up the weave of contemporary African Ameri- cal courage and spiritual survival. Consequently, writers imagined the inte-
can life and literature. rior lives of enslaved individuals, the ties that bound them as families and
communities, and the acts of will that were required for resistance and
survival. Among the notable examples are David Bradley's The Chaneysville
DETOURS THROUGH THE PAST Incident (1981), Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979), Charles Johnson's Oxherd-
ing Tale (1982) and Middle Passage (1989), Edward P. Jones's The Known
As college students joined the protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s, World (2003), Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977) and Beloved (1987), Nay-
they also fought for a more inclusive curriculum on campus. Black studies lor's Mama Day (1988), Caryl Phillips's Cambridge (1991) and Crossing the
departments were established around the country. Historians examined the River (1993), Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada (1976), and Sherley Anne
past from a black perspective, and their scholarship soon sparked writers' Williams's Dessa Rose (1986). Poets Jay Wright in Death as History (1967)
imaginations. Two works by historian John Blassingame are cases in point. and Rita Dove in Thomas and Beulah (1986) were similarly determined to
While slavery is among the most frequently studied topics in U.S. historio- cure what Morrison deemed the "national amnesia" around the history of
graphy, few historians documented the slaves' point of view before Blassin- slavery, a history that began for African Americans in 1619 and lasted 250
game's The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Ante-Bellurn South years. The stories they told were, of course, as different as the writers were
918 I TnE CONTEMPORARY PERIOD INTRODUCTION I 919

from one another. Bradley wrote about the Underground Railroad in west-
ern Pennsylvania, while in Beloved Morrison's characters escape from slav-
ery in Kentucky to "freedom" in Ohio. Gayl Jones imagined a plantation in
Brazil, while characters in Crossing the River and Dessa Rose trekked across
the United States, seeking freedom in the West. Edward P. Jones depicted
a black slaveholder. Naylor invented an all-black community in the Sea
Islands where the legacy of slavery was self sufficiency, while Johnson
tested Enlightenment ideas of freedom and citizenship. In studies such as
Orlando Patterson's Slaven• and Social Death (1982) and Paul Gilroy's The
Black Atlantic (1993), scholars confirmed the insights of these fictions
when they began to perceive slavery as a central element in the develop-
ment of modernity.
Detours through the past did not necessarily reach back to the nine-
teenth century. In the 1970s many African Americans lost faith in the
dream of integration; others were concerned lest they be assimilated into
the dominant society without understanding or appreciating the segregated
communities which they were now being allowed to leave. Many writers
followed the direction of Albert Murray "south to a very old place," as he

i
titled his memoir. Upon returning to his hometown o£ Mobile, Alabama,
Murray wrote, "(TJhe neighborhood that was the center of the world as you
first knew it had been razed, completely industrialized, and enclosed in a The Sisterhood. \'ertamae Grosvenor. Alice Walker. Lori Sharpe. Toni Morrison, June
chain-link fence by the Scott Paper Towel Company." In Train Whistle Gui- Jordan, Nana Maynard, Ntozake Shange, and Audrey Edwards met informally in New
York during the 1970s.
tar, Murray reinvents that world in fiction. Angelou's memoir likewise revis-
its a depression-era South and re-creates both the dignity of women like her
grandmother Mama Henderson and teacher Mrs. Flowers and the random-
ness of attacks on their hard-earned sense of themselves. Surely the most
lyrical evocation of the communities that once nurtured the souls of black unread authors in America." Her work would soon reach hundreds of thou-
folk is the opening passage of Sula; tellingly, here the Bottom, a name that sands of readers; it would provide a touchstone for the writing of a new
Bras once widely applied to the black sections of southern towns, is located generation as well. The year 1970 saw the publication of extraordinary first
in the Midwest: novels by Morrison (The Bluest Ere) and Walker (The Third Life of Grange
Copeland). Powerfully written and deeply unsettling in their exploration
In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches of family violence, sexual oppression and abuse, and the corrosive effects of
from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there racism and poverty, these novels ran counter to the then prevailing mood of
was once a neighborhood. It stood in the hills above the valley town of righteous anger and triumphant struggle. Angelou's 1 Knnn' Why the Caged
Medallion and spread all the way to the river. It is called the suburhs Bird Sings partook more in that mood, but at its dramatic center—as in
now, but when black people lived there it was called the Bottom. Morrison's novel—was the rape of a girl In a society ordered by hierarchies
r\s it unfolds, the novel elegizes the impromptu ceremonies of everyday life, of power based on race, class, and gender, no one is more powerless, hence
the sassy talk, and the raunchy humor that characterized life in the Bottom. more vulneFahle, than a poor black girl. In these texts such characters
But the perspective is never sentimental or nostalgic. Racism is an invisible anchor [he critique of social ideology.
vet pervasive and disfiguring presence. i In a sharp departure from many of their male precursors, Morrison,
Walker, and their female contemporaries did not focus on the traumatic
encounters of blacks and whites across the color line. The interracial con-
THE COMMUNITY OF BLACK WOMEN WRITING flicts at the heart of narratives by black male writers from Frederick Doug-
lass to Ralph Ellison to Amiri Baraka did not take center stage. Racism
The emergence of what Hortense Spillers calls "the community of black remained a major concern. But for these writers, the most painful conse-
women writing" is one of the hallmarks of the contemporary period. Events quences of racism were played out in the most intimate relationships.
in 1970 signaled its arrival. The Black Woman; an anthology edited by Toni Making hitherto private traumas public soon proved controversial. Women
Cade Bambara, heralded an effort by black women to define themselves. writers were accused of bashing black men and, worse, of being disloyal to
Another impetus was the recuperation of literary precursors Jessie Fauset, the race. For example, Shange's for colored girls who have considered sui-
Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston, whose classic volume of folklore cide/when the rainbow is enuf, a "choreopoem" that was clearly indebted to
Mules and Men was reprinted in 1970. At that time, Hurston remained, in Baraka and the Black Arts movement for its poetic technique, became the
her biographer Robert Hemenway's words, "one of the most significant object of controversy when it was staged on Broadway in 1977. Critics
 INTRODUCTION I 921
920 I THE CONTEMPORARY PERIOD

but the reality of his prospects as he tries to move from a career of petty
focused on the image of black male characters, none of whom appeared on crime to one of entrepreneurship is grim. Shrinking employment opportu-
stage, rather than the female characters whose stories were being told. nities and rising rates of drug abuse and violence took their toll on inner
"What did it mean for a black woman to be an artist in our grandmother's city black neighborhoods during the Reagan years, a time when such
time? In our great-grandmothers' day?" asks Walker in her classic essay "In problems were low on the national agenda. While Martin Luther King Jr.'s
Search of Our Mothers' Gardens," which offers a theory of black female birthday was made a national holiday in 1986, most initiatives put forward
creativity and defines a tradition of black women's art. Despite believing by civil rights organizations were rejected. Rather than the guarantor of
that the answer to her question is "cruel enough to stop the blood," Walker civil rights, the federal government began to be viewed as antagonistic to
imagines generations of black women artists who released their creativity the civil rights agenda—particularly to programs of affirmative action. In
in song and the crafts of quilt making, baking, and gardening, which Walker response, Jesse Jackson waged vigorous campaigns for the Democratic
reevaluates as art. The portrait Walker draws of her mother gardening is presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988; neither was successful but both
the portrait of an artist "ordering the universe in her personal conception led to significant increases in the number of registered black voters. More
of Beaut : Many writers share Walker's impulse to recuperate the artistic African Americans than ever before won elective office on the local and
legacy of their foremothers: Paule Marshall pays homage to the "poets in state levels: in 1989 Douglas Wilder was elected governor of Virginia, the
the kitchen" whose linguistic creativity inspires her own, while Naylor fi rst black governor of a state since Reconstruction. Overwhelmingly, black
endows her protagonist Mama Day, a midwife and conjure woman, with the voters supported Democratic candidates. But a small group of black con-
ability to quilt, bake, and garden superlatively. In Sula Morrison creates servatives, among them essayists Stanley Crouch and Shelby Steele, drew
the "magnificent" Eva Peace, a character whose will to order the universe notice. In 1991 President George H. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas to
according to her own personal conception is both beautiful and sinister. the Supreme Court The nomination, already intensely controversial, became
even more so when law professor Anita Hill accused Thomas of sexual
harassment. After televised hearings and the Senate vote, Justice Thomas
THE INNER CITY took his seat.
The Thomas-Hill hearings initiated a series of media spectacles that
Black male writers turned inward as well. In his "Homewood" trilogy (Hiding focused on African Americans in the 1990s. In 1991 Rodney King was
Place, Damballah, and Sent for You Yesterday), John Edgar Wideman maps beaten by Los Angeles police officers after a high-speed chase. When, despite
both the Pittsburgh neighborhood in which his characters have lived for gen- the existence of an incriminating videotape, the officers were acquitted
erations and the psychological terrain that defines them as individuals and as of all charges, violence erupted in Los Angeles that resulted in thirty-eight
members of an extended family. Telling the history of that family in the lan- deaths, four thousand arrests, and damage estimated at more than $500
guage in which they lived it and summoning the spirits of their ancestors million. In 1995, O. J. Simpson, a former professional football player and
through memories and dreams, Wideman writes fiction that is innovative in sports commentator, was tried for the murder of his ex-wife and another
both content and form. All but one of August Wilson's plays are also set in man. Gavel-to-gavel television coverage made the trial one of the most
Pittsburgh, and their textured representations of African American culture watched in history. Reaction to Simpson's acquittal divided substantially
as it evolved through the twentieth century are at the core of Wilson's art. As along racial lines, as most whites denounced the verdict and most blacks
he states, "[T]he field of manners and rituals of social intercourse—the applauded it. Issues of police misconduct were raised in Simpson's defense,
music, speech, rhythms, eating habits, religious beliefs, gestures, notions of issues that were set in bold relief again in 1999, when New York City police
common sense, attitudes toward sex, concepts of beauty and justice, and the officers killed an unarmed West African immigrant, Amadou Diallo.
responses to pleasure and pain—have enabled [African Americans] to sur- Some of the idealistic fervor of the 1960s was reignited, as the struggle
vive the loss of our political will and the disruption of our history." If Wilson's against apartheid in South Africa gained momentum during the 1980s. On
drama is grounded in the everyday expressions of African Americans, his college campuses, in churches, in corporations, and in Congress, African
often soaring monologues reveal the capaciousness of their concerns, their Americans were in the forefront of the movement for sanctions against the
heroic aspirations, their moral triumphs and defeats. For example, Joe Turn- apartheid regime. When Nelson Mandela toured the United States in 1990,
er's Come and Gone, set in 1911, recounts the experiences of migrants newly after his release from twenty-seven years in prison, he received a hero's
arrived in the city, alienated from its ways and ultimately hopeful that they welcome. For blacks, his visit was the culmination of a growing identifica-
can make a future there. By the 1980s, the period in which Wilson's King tion, both political and cultural, with Africa. Human rights activists in the
Hedley II is set, despair is pervasive: "the people wandering all over the place. United States had long made common cause with anticolonialist activists.
They got lost. They don't even know the story of how they got from tit to tat." From the 1960s onward, black popular culture in this country assS'ted
Of course, this is precisely the story Wilson's dramas tell. African and pseudo-African elements, including names, -hairstyles, dressy
and _the celebration of Kwanzaa a holiday created in the_ nited&ates by
Ron Karenga. In the academy, Molefi Asante formulated the ideologyof
THE 198Os AND 199Os Afrocentrism, which called for scholarship based on Africa as the center
of civilization. Although his ideas were not widely accepted by other scholars,
The despair in King Hedley II reflected the mood in much of urban black Asante won a popular following.
America during the 1980s. The protagonist's sense of himself may be royal,
922 I THE CONTEMPORARY PERIOD INTRODUCTION I 923

Writers across a broad spectrum incorporated African images and belief

systems into their work. Examples include Tina McElroy's Baby of the Fam- REMAPPING AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERARY TERRAIN
ily, Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow, Morrison's Beloved, Shange's Sas-
safrass, Cypress, & Indigo, Wideman's Datnballah, and Wilson's Joe Turner's A consciousness grew among some African Americans who saw themselves
Come and Gone. African cosmologies and mythologies inform Harryette both as citizens of the United States and as members of a transnational
Mullen's poetry. The figure of the "ancestor" in writing by Lucille Clifton, community of people of African descent. This consciousness reflected both
Marshall, Morrison, and Naylor reflects a reconnection with African spiri- the increasing influence of African and Afro-Caribbean writers on the
tual and cultural rituals. Johnson in Middle Passage and Walker in The development of African American literature and the fact that a number of
Color Purple and Possessing the Secret ofJoy invent African settings for their black writers in the United States were themselves immigrants. Jamaica
fiction. Many African American writers cite the influence on their work of Kincaid, who came to the United States from Antigua, "the small place" to
African writers, notably Chinua Achebe, Ama Ata Aidoo, Ayi Kweh Armah, which she often returns in her writing, is among the best known, although
Buchi Emecheta, Bessie Head, Camara Laye, Ngugi wa Thiongo, Sembene she resists being identified with any school. Kincaid's critique of colonial-
Ousmane, Flora Nwapa, and Wole Soyinka, the first African writer to ism is striking, as is her representation of the complicated relationship
receive the Nobel Prize for literature. between mothers and daughters under a colonialist regime. Edwidge Dan-
ticat's characters fly back and forth between Haiti and Brooklyn in a circuit
of travel that is typical of twenty-first-century immigrants. In its themes
and images, Danticat's work, like Kincaid's, often resonates as well with
that of the community of black women writing in the United States. Born
in St. Kitts, in the British West Indies, and raised in the United Kingdom,
Caryl Phillips, who now lives part of the time in New York City, has reimag-
ined the history of Africans throughout the diaspora in his novels. Whether
the Barbadian characters that Hilton Als draws in The Women, or the set-
tings that shift between the United States and Jamaica in Michelle Cliff's
fiction, or the interfacing of Afro-Caribbean and Asian-Caribbean cultures
in Patricia Powell's novel The Pagoda, the terrain of African American lit-
erature is being re-mapped.

A NEW CENTURY

9/11 became the immediately recognizable shorthand for the terrorist

attacks on September 11, 2001, that destroyed the World Trade Center
in New York City, damaged the U.S. Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and
downed a passenger plane in rural Pennsylvania. More than three thou-
sand people were killed in the first foreign attack on the continental United
States since the nation's founding. The effect was traumatic for Americans,
who had felt themselves invulnerable to violence on such a massive scale.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/ll, Americans bonded together across
lines of race, region, and political persuasion. However, the presidential
election the year before had been so close that it was decided by the Supreme
Court (Bush v. Gore). Politically, the nation was sharply divided. Economic
uncertainty and fears of another attack deepened the national disequilib-
rium, especially as the nation entered two wars: in Afghanistan in 2001
and Iraq in 2003.
Katrina, the hurricane that hit the Gulf Coast in August 2005, wreaked
havoc on New Orleans and the coastal regions of Alabama and Mississippi
and caused almost a thousand deaths. Americans in the affected areas went
without food and water for days, as they waited to be rescued by a federal
In The Two Generations (t991), Jamaican-born Albert Chong, an artist of government that seemed incompetent if not callous in its response. The
African and Chinese descent, shows the history of migration and immigration televised faces of these Americans were mainly black and poor. Journalists
and the roots tying diasporic subjects to the Caribbean with his inclusion of who referred to them as "refugees" rather than citizens added insult to injury.
the passport, necklace, and tools. In protest, one New Orleans resident wrapped herself in the American
924 I THE CONTEMPORARY PERIOD INTRODUCTION I 925

flag; others held up a flag with a hand-written sign that said. "We are New York City neighborhood of Greenwich Village where demonstrations
Americans too." Inevitably scenes of children separated from their parents against a police raid in 1969 marked the beginning of the gay rights move-
and dying elders evoked images of the historical traumas of slavey and ment. The references marked the progress the nation has made, even as
segregation. Although most disagreed with rapper Kanye West when he they suggested how much work remained to be done.
declared that President George W. Bush "doesn't care about black people." Historians and social critics will long debate the meaning of Barack
many African Americans shared his exasperation. Katrina seemed like a Obama's election. Although it marked a turning point in U.S. history, it did
return to a nightmare from which people thought they had awakened. not produce the postracial society that some had anticipated. The struggle
In January 2008, Barack Obama, an African American and the junior for racial equality continues. Obama's presidency was quickly engulfed by a
senator from Illinois, won the Iowa caucus in the campaign for the presiden- series of crises in the national and international economies, natural disas-
tial nomination of the Democratic Party. Apart from a memorable keynote ters, and global unrest in addition to political stalemate at home. Black
speech at the 2004 convention, Obama was little known in black America. unemployment continued to be twice that of whites. Some activists argued
But his victory in predominantly white Iowa changed that African Ameri- that one consequence of having a black president was the diminishment of
cans who had supported Senator Hillary Clinton, front-runner for the nomi- the longstanding tradition of black protest. But almost 95 percent of Afri-
nation and wife of former president Bill Clinton, shifted their support to can American voters supported the president's reelection in 2012. In the
Obama. As John Lewis, a hero of the civil rights movement and a congress- main, they endorsed his policies and embraced the sense of possibility for
man from Georgia, expressed it, they did not want to be caught on the wrong themselves and their children that he embodied. For African American lit-
side of history. To many older blacks, who had never imagined that in their erary historians, Barack Obama, whose memoir Dreams from My Father:
lifetimes a black person could be elected president, the inconceivable A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995) became a bestseller, was signifi-
became a possibility. Senator Obama, with his soaring oratory and promise cant for another reason: the president of the United States was an African
of hope and change, soon came to represent the culmination of the struggle American writer.
for racial equality. Hundreds of thousands of blacks, Latinos, and young
people registered to vote for the fi rst time. In September, a fi nancial crisis hit
Wall Street, and Obama's cool, measured response sealed his victory over EXPERIMENTAL TEXTS/FUTURISTIC FICTIONS
Republican senator John McCain. When Ohama's election was announced,
dancing broke out in the streets of African American communities. Almost Increasingly African American writers create fictions that imagine the
two million Americans, of every race, stood in the frigid cold of January 20, future and poems and plays whose formal risk taking provides the pleasure
2009, to witness his inauguration. of the text. Experimentalism in African American literature dates back at
On his first day in office, the president signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair least to Jean Toomer's Cane (1923). It is significant that "I'oomer wrote drama
Pay Act that made it easier for workers to file pay discrimination lawsuits. as well as fi ction and poetry. His expressionistic plays Ratio and Natalie
Despite implacable opposition from Republicans in Congress, including lead- Mann are precursors of Suzan-Lori Parks's An American Play and Topdog/
ers repeated threats to make him a one-term president, Obama achieved Underdog, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002. Formally experimental,
legislative victories. Chief among them was the Affordable Care Act which sharply satirical, and sometimes profanely funny, Parks's plays cast African
promised to extend health care to thirty million uninsured Americans. American actors in the roles of the nation's founders to highlight the absence
Opponents dubbed the act "Obamacare." a term intended to be derisive, but of blacks from conventional historical narratives. Identity is fluid, never
which the president eventually embraced as a sign of his success. On the fixed in these plays, which open themselves to diverse interpretations.
international front, President Obama began to restore frayed relations with Elements of jazz performance —riffs and improvisation, sound and
allies; an important step was the ending of the war in Iraq in 2009. He also rhythm—partially inspire the poetic experiments of Yusef Komunyakaa,
ended the "don't ask, don't tell" policy that prohibited gays in the military from Nathaniel Mackey, and Harryette Mullen. Komunyakaa, who has co-edited
acknowledging their sexual preference, and in 2012 the president expressed three volumes of jazz poetry, pays homage to musicians —"painful gods jive
his support for marriage equality. talk through! bloodstained reeds & shiny brass"—as he tries to imagine
That November President Obama was re-elected by a margin of almost how it feels "to scream for help through a horn." Working like a consum-
five million votes over Republican rival Mitt Romney, former governor mate jazzman, Mackey extends tradition, blends cross-cultural influences,
of Massachusetts. President Obama's second inauguration drew pointed and establishes a signature sound in his poetry and fiction. Describing the
attention to the historical significance of his tenure. Myrlie Evers Williams, juxtaposition of influences on one of her poems, Mullen imagines it "as the
the widow of civil rights martyr Medgar Evers, who was assassinated in the place where Sappho meets the blues at the crossroads." Fragmented and
driveway of their Jackson, Mississippi home in 1963, gave the invocation. densely allusive, postmodern black poetry challenges readers, especially
The gay Cuban American poet, Richard Blanco, composed the ceremonial those less fluent in the multiple literary traditions in which the authors. work.
poem "One Today." In his speech, the president invoked historical sites But it rewards those readers who persevere.
associated with struggles for equality: Seneca Falls (the New York town Science fiction offers the possibility of inventing a world in which racial
where a pioneering women's rights convention was held in 1848), Selma and gender categories no longer apply, which is perhaps one reason it appeals
(the Alabama town where Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. led the pivotal to African American writers. Poet Tracy Smith and novelist Colson White-
march for voting rights for blacks in 1965), and Stonewall (the bar in the head occasionally deploy techniques of science fiction in their poetry and
 THE CONTEMPORARY PERIOD INTRODUCTION I 927
926 I

prose. Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany are two of the genre's most columns were featured in the popular magazines Ebony and Essence, while
respected practitioners. Doro, a four-thousand-year-old character who Internet sites provided readers endless opportunities to evaluate books for
appears in several of Butler's novels, appropriates the bodies of others themselves.
regardless of gender and race. One of Delany's novels, Triton, features more Finally, scholarship about African American literature and by African
than forty different genders. Time travel, a key motif in Butler's popular American writers has flourished during the contemporary period. Indeed,
literary scholars have documented, analyzed, and to an extent helped pro-
Kindred, allows her to represent the past and present simultaneously, to
highlight both how much has changed and how much has not. Delany, who duce the renaissance among African American writers. At the same time,
invents entire civilizations in his fiction, is similarly unbound by constraints poets and writers have been among the most influential literary critics. By
the 1980s scholarly studies had begun to appear in some number. Robert
of time and place. Literary theorist Frederick Jameson deems Delany's
Nevpryon series "a major and unclassifiable achievement in contemporary Stepto's Behind the Veil: A Study ofAfro-American Narrative (1979), Houston
American literature." It is fitting that the first allusion in the work included Baker's The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature and Criticism (1980),
and Barbara Christian's Black Women Novelists: The Development of Tra-
here, an excerpt from Delany's Atlantis: Model 1924, is to Jean Toomer.
dition, 1892-1976 (1980) are examples of the variety of critical studies in
this period. Anthologies of critical essays such as Roseann Bell, Bettye
OLD GENRES/NEW TRENDS Fisher, and Beverley Guy Sheftall's Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black
Women in Literature (1979); Dexter Fisher and Robert Stepto's Afro-
American Literature: The Reconstruction of Instruction (1979); Henry Louis
At the turn of the twenty-first century, African American writers, in a
resurgence of interest in autobiography as a genre, told new stories of grow- Gates Jr.'s Black Literature and Literary Theory (1984); and Michael Harper
and Robert Stepto's Chants of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Litera-
ing up black. Barack Obama and Danzy Senna chronicle their coming of age
ture, Art, and Scholarship (1979) suggested different approaches to teaching
in biracial families. June Jordan and Paule Marshall recount growing up in
Brooklyn in families whose roots were in the Caribbean. Scholars Houston and theorizing about black literatures.
Baker, Jr., Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Deborah McDowell pen haunting Poets and novelists were major voices in this critical conversation. They
memoirs of life in the segregated South. This work reflects the recent and organized themselves into groups such as Cave Canem and the Dark Room
widespread popularity of the memoir as a genre, but it also harks back to Collective to facilate the exchange of ideas. Practically every contemporary
writer in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature has either
the beginnings of the African American tradition. Performance poetry rep-
resents another variation on an old genre. Throughout African American written essays that recovered older writers, illuminated the relationship
literary history, some poets have created work to be heard rather than read between the African American oral tradition and African American litera-
and to take up immediate rather than long-range concerns. In the 1990s tures, and/or crafted literary theories derived from his or her own literary
practice. After writing perhaps the most influential reading of her own Ac-
the poetry slam became popular in diverse venues: on campuses, in night-
tion in an essay titled "Unspeakable Things Unspoken," Toni Morrison
clubs, and on television. In 2002 Def Poetry Jam was produced on Broad-
way. Poets performed work inflected with the rhythms of rap and often published a widely cited volume of essays, Playing in the Dark (1992),
accompanied by recordings of hip-hop, much as Langston Hughes had articulating the theory that American literary classics such as Melville's
performed his poems to the accompaniment of the Fats Wallerjazz band in Moby-Dick and Hawthorne's romances reflect the African presence in
the 1920s and The Last Poets had recorded their verse in the 1960s. American life, even when race is not their subject. Morrison's critical inter-
In 1996 talk-show personality Oprah Winfrey established a book club for vention was one catalyst in moving American literary study to take greater
her television audience that introduced fiction by Morrison and Ernest account of race in the formation of all literary traditions in the United
Gaines to a huge new audience that spanned the lines of race, class, and States.
ethnicity; equally important, Oprah's Book Club highlighted work by emerg- Unlike their predecessors, the younger writers of the contemporary period
studied African American literature in the classroom. For example, Naylor
ing writers such as Pearl Cleage, Breena Clarke, and Danticat. As popular
fiction by black authors such as E. Lynn Harris and Terry McMillan sold in asserts that reading Morrison's The Bluest Eye as a college student gave her
the millions, the number of novels published by African Americans increased the authority to begin writing fiction herself. Her novels, especially Linden
exponentially. Lines blurred between literary and commercial fiction; writ- Hills and Mama Day, acknowledge her debt to Morrison, Hurston, and
Walker as well as to Dante's Inferno and Shakespeare's The Tempest. Walker,
ers published in multiple genres, including detective fiction, mysteries, and
who first found Hurston's name in a footnote as she was doing research for
romance novels. In the new century, urban fiction dominated the African
American literary marketplace. Scholar Eve Dunbar describes these novels a short story, claimed her as a literary foremother, wrote essays about her,
as the literary counterpart to hip-hop, in which women have a greater voice. and described her own novel The Color Purple as a "love letter to Zora."
Scholars, notably Henry Louis Gates Jr., have subsequently identified the
In all of these genres, publishers discovered a large audience that craved
pattern of shared themes and tropes in the two authors' texts. As Gates
fiction that reflected their actual lives or the "good life" to which they
aspired. Eager to discuss what they read, readers organized book clubs, in demonstrates in his critical study The Signifying Monkey (1988), black
texts "talk" to other blach_texts_and the art of signifying is simuliane-
an updated version of nineteenth-century literary societies. Oprah's Book
Club was replicated in microcosm in communities across the nation. Book ously oral and literary. He asserts, moreover, that the African American
928 I THE CONTEMPORARY PERIOD ALBERT MURRAY I 929

literary tradition is "double-voiced"—that is, it reflects writers' reading of literary and cultural scholarship has gained a strong foothold in the acad-
Western texts, but it "repeats with a difference, a black difference that emy and a significant audience outside of it.
manifests itself in specific language use." Theories of intertextuality have
become central to African American literary study.
Hurston first defined signifying as a cultural practice in Mules and Men.
Gates appropriated the term in his attempt "to locate and identify how the
black tradition had theorized about itself." Much African American literary
theory was similarly tethered to black vernacular tradition. Stepto's Behind ALBERT MURRAY
the Veil employed call and response as a metaphor for intertexuality. In his
1916-2013
influential Blues, Ideology and Afro-American Literature, Baker extrapo-
lated "a vernacular theory" from the blues. Deborah McDowell posited The
Changing Same, a figure borrowed from Baraka's study of black music, for
intertexuality in black women's writing, while Mae Henderson fused post-
structuralist and feminist theory in "Speaking in Tongues," a trope derived Ibert Murray's career as a writer was distinguished by his insistent drive to cre-
from the Bible by way of the black sanctified church. Even as they created ate, in fiction and nonfiction, the literary equivalents of blues and jazz. Murray
theories that took into account the "signifyin(g) black difference;' critics of the modernist undertook this project under the auspices of Eliot, Hemingway.
African American literature engaged in readings from the wide range of Joyce, Faulkner, and especially Thomas Mann—all highly conscious writers who
employ mythic patterns and a wide range of intellectual and artistic references to
perspectives that existed in the academy, such as formalism, Marxism, psy-
give their writing the _peculiar weight and force that define a vital aspect of the
choanalysis, poststructuralism, and feminism. By the turn of the century modern. But Murray wore these influences lightly. In a voice unmistakably his
scholars were producing biographies, critical monographs, anthologies, and own, he brought to life the little-explored aspect of African American experience
works of literary theory in unprecedented quantity. that views the shortfalls and tragedies of life in much the way they are regarded in
'[heir ideological investments were various, their methodologies were blues-idiom music, where trouble is taken for granted ("I'rouble, trouble." one
diverse, and so too were their conclusions. Feminist critics, for example, blues song says, "I've had it all my days") but where defeat is never conceded. Hur-
were skeptical of the concept of tradition, which as Mary Helen Washing- ray's heroes learn to regard their lives as fairy tales and romances in which,
ton noted, had often been used to "exclude or misrepresent women." Spill- whether they receive official recognition or not, they achieve a style of living and
I
ers asserted that "'tradition' for black women's writing community is a loving and making art that transcends the bounds of officialdom. Ultimately, they
matrix of discontinuities that partially articulate various periods of con- achieve a way of life—even in the violent briar patches of segregated America —
which, like the music of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, is the envy of the
sciousness in the history of an African-American people." Hazel Carby
world.
advocated that "black feminist criticism be regarded as a problem, not a Born on May 12, 1916, in Nokomis, Alabama, Albert Lee Murray was adopted
solution, as a sign that should be interrogated, a locus of contradictions." soon after birth by sharecropper, dockworker, railcar crosstie cutter, and sawmill
Queer theorists including Robert Reid-Pharr and Charles Nero likewise hand Hugh Murray and homemaker Mattie (James) Murray. Murray grew up in
challenged the assumptions underlying the concept of tradition and the Magazine Point, outside of Mobile, where he discovered a world at once stiflingly
metaphors of family that often accompanied it. In The Practice of Diaspora provincial and open to possibility. At Mobile County Training School, (Murray fell
(2003), Brent Edwards argued that African American texts were part of a under the influence of the principal, Benjamin Francis Baker. who regarded him as
global circuit of art and ideas. part of the "Talented Tenth," whose goals involved loyalty to past and future gen-
From its beginning as an academic subject, African American literary erations of African Americans and the will to assume leadership on a broad scale.
study has been interdisciplinary; Sterling Brown, to name one pioneer, was Murray received a scholarship to attend college and enrolled at Tuskegee Institute
as interested in folklore and music as in formal literature. The literature is in 1935.
I At Tuskegee, Murray pursued an intense program of literary studies, reading
no" taught in African American studies, ethnic studies, and women's stud-
I assigned texts along with unassigned new works by such critics as Edmund Wilson
ies departments as well as in English. In the 1980s and 1990s, this interdis- and Morton Zabel, which encouraged and enhanced his study of the literary mod-
ciplinarity contributed to the development of cultural studies, a diverse erns. He also tuned in to the national radio broadcasts of Duke Ellington. Earl
interdisciplinary field that sees culture not as a static "canon" or "tradition" Hines, and other jazz masters whose work was fast becoming a consuming passion.
but as the emerging and dynamic product of a network of antagonistic power Though they did not become close friends until later, Murray the undergraduate
relations. It is not surprising that cultural studies has been profoundly con- was aware of another ambitious reader at Tuskegee, music major Ralph Ellison.
cerned with African American culture. Acting on the premise that identity Murray pursued graduate study at the University of Michigan before returning to
today is formulated through interaction with film, video, and mass-produced Tuskegee Institute (in 1942), where he taught English and directed theatrical pro-
music as well as, if not more than, in relation to traditional social struc- ductions. In 1943, he enlisted in the air force. He served through World War 11 and
tures, African American cultural critics such as Daphne Brooks, Michael continued, in active and inactive service at home and abroad, until his retirement
as a major in 1962. Between stints of active service, he received his master's degree
Eric Dyson, bell hooks, Wahneema Lubiano, Valerie Smith, Michele Wal-
from New York University (in 1948) and taught at Tuskegee. After retiring from the
lace, and Cornel West have turned their critical attention to black popular air force, Murray settled in New York City, where he worked as a writer and as an
culture. They also use the tools of textual analysis to clarify the meanings occasional visiting professor—at Colgate. Barnard, Columbia, Emory, the Univer-
of media spectacles such as the Thomas-Hill hearings. African American sity of Massachusetts at Boston, Washington and Lee, and elsewhere.