05 February 2009

What Is African-American Literature?

 

Gerald Early leads a lively class discussion at Washington University in St. Louis.

Gerald Early leads a lively class discussion at Washington University in St. Louis.

By Gerald Early

Emergence of a new, black pulp fiction may indicate the maturity, rather than the decline, of African-American literature.

Gerald Early is the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, where he directs the Center for the Humanities. He specializes in American literature, African-American culture from 1940 to 1960, Afro-American autobiography, nonfiction prose, and popular culture. Author of several books, including the award-winning The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature, and Modern American Culture (1994), Early has edited numerous anthologies and was a consultant on Ken Burns's documentary films on baseball and jazz.

African-American writer Nick Chiles famously castigated the publishing industry, young black women readers, and the current state of African-American writing in his controversial 2006 New York Times opinion piece entitled “Their Eyes Were Reading Smut.” (The article’s title is, clearly, a parodic paraphrase of the classic 1937 Zora Neale Hurston novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, a feminist staple of the African-American literature canon, considered by many literary scholars to be one of the great American novels of its era.) Although he was happy about mainstream bookstores like Borders devoting considerable shelf space to “African-American Literature,” he was more than a little nonplussed by what the store and the publishing industry considered “African-American Literature” to be. “[All] that I could see was lurid book jackets displaying all forms of brown flesh, usually half-naked and in some erotic pose, often accompanied by guns and other symbols of criminal life,” wrote Chiles. These novels have such titles as Gutter, Crack Head, Forever a Hustler’s Wife, A Hustler’s Son, Amongst Thieves, Cut Throat, Hell Razor Honeys, Payback with Ya Life, and the like. The well-known authors are K’wan, Ronald Quincy, Quentin Carter, Deja King (also known as Joy King), Teri Woods, Vickie Stringer, and Carl Weber. They occupy a genre called Urban or Hip-Hop Fiction, gritty, so-called realistic works about inner-city life, full of graphic sex, drugs and crime, “playas,” thugs, dough boys (rich drug dealers), and graphic violence; lavish consumption juxtaposed to life in housing projects. In some instances, the works are nothing more than black crime novels told from the point of view of the criminal; in others, they are black romance novels with a hard-edged city setting. In all cases, they are a kind of pulp fiction; despite their claim of realism, they are actually about fantasy, as their readers are attempting to understand their reality while trying to escape it. Mostly young African Americans, primarily women, the gender that constitutes the greater portion of the fiction-reading American public, read these books and the books are marketed exclusively for this clientele. Some of these novels sell well enough to support a few authors without the need of a “day job,” a rarity in the writing trade.

The existence of these books proffers three aspects of change for African-American literature from what it was, say, 30 or 40 years ago. First, despite problems with literacy and a dismal high school drop-out rate among African Americans, there is a young, mass, black reading audience of such size that a black author can write for it exclusively without giving a thought to being highbrow or literary or to crossing-over for whites. Second, the taste of the masses is distinct from, and troubling to, the taste of the elite in large measure because the elite no longer control the direction and purpose of African-American literature; it is now, more than ever, a market-driven literature, rather than an art form patronized and promoted by cultured whites and blacks as it had been in the past. The fact that blacks started two of the publishing houses for these books, Urban Books and Triple Crown, underscores the entrepreneurial, populist nature of this type of race literature: by black people for black people. Third, African-American literature no longer has to be obsessed with the burden or expectation of political protest or special pleading for the humanity of the race or the worth of its history and culture as it had to in the past. (This is not to suggest that African-American literature has abandoned these concerns. They are most evident in African-American children’s and adolescent literature, which is frequently, as one might expect, highly didactic.) This is not to argue that the books that Chiles deplores have some neo-literary or extra-literary worth that compensates for them being trashy, poorly written novels. But these books do reveal some of the complicated roots of African-American literature and of the construction of the African-American audience.

Blaxploitation films of the early 1970s — such as Melvin Van Peebles’s independent classic, Sweet Sweetback’s Badass Song; Coffy, Foxy Brown, and Sheba, Baby, starring Pam Grier; Hell Up in Harlem, Black Caesar, That Man Bolt, and The Legend of Nigger Charley, starring Fred Williamson; Superfly; the Shaft movies, starring Richard Roundtree — created the first young black audience for hard-boiled, urban black, seemingly realistic art centered on hustling, drugs, prostitution, and anti-white politics (in which whites — particularly gangsters and policemen -- are destroying the black community). The literary roots for this came from two streams in the 1960s.  The highbrow, mainstream literary and leftist types endorsed such nonfiction, black prison literature as The Autobiography of Malcolm X; Eldridge Cleaver’s essay collection Soul on Ice; Poems from Prison, compiled by inmate and poet Etheridge Knight, which includes Knight’s “Ideas of Ancestry,” one of the most famous and highly regarded African-American poems of the 1960s; and Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson. All of these books have become part of black literary canon and are frequently taught in various college literature, creative writing, and sociology classes. On the pulp, populist fiction side in the late 1960s and early 1970s were the novels of former pimp Iceberg Slim and imprisoned drug addict Donald Goines — including Trick Baby, Dopefiend, Street Players, and Black Gangster. These novels are the direct antecedents of the books that Chiles found so dismaying in 2006. They occupied a small but compelling portion of the black literature output in the 1970s. Many saw them in a far more political light at that time; now these books dominate African-American literature or seem to. Then, as now, there is a strong belief among many blacks — poor, working-class, and bourgeois intellectuals — and many whites, as well, that violent, urban life represents “authentic” black experience and a true politically dynamic “resistance” culture.

Chiles probably would have preferred if Borders and other bookstores would not label urban or hip-hop novels as “African-American Literature.“. It would be better for the public if such books were called “Afro-Pop Literature” or “Black Urban Fiction” or “Mass-Market Black Fiction.” Then, the category of “African-American Literature” could be reserved for those books and authors who are part of the canon: writers ranging from late 19th and early 20th century novelist Charles Chesnutt, poet and novelist Paul Laurence Dunbar, and novelist and poet James Weldon Johnson, to 1920s and early 1930s Harlem Renaissance figures like poet and fiction writer Langston Hughes, novelist and poet Claude McKay, novelists Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen, and poet and novelist Countee Cullen, to the great crossover figures of the 1940s through the 1960s, like novelist and essayist James Baldwin, novelist and short story writer Richard Wright, novelist and essayist Ralph Ellison, novelist Ann Petry, poet and novelist Gwendolyn Brooks, and novelist John A. Williams, to the Black Arts-era writers like poet and children’s writer Nikki Giovanni, poet, playwright, and fiction writer Amiri Baraka, and poet Haki Madhubuti (Don L. Lee), to post-1960s writers like novelists Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, Walter Mosley, Colson Whitehead, Ernest Gaines, and Charles Johnson, poet and novelist Ishmael Reed, poets Yusef Komunyakaa and Rita Dove. A few additional figures, like playwrights Lorraine Hansberry, Ed Bullins, Charles Fuller, and August Wilson, and some diasporic writers, like novelist and playwright Wole Soyinka, poet Derek Walcott, novelists Chinua Achebe, George Lamming, Jamaica Kincaid, Zadie Smith, Junot Díaz, and Edwidge Danticat, could be thrown in for good measure.

Chiles’s concern about the supposed decline of African-American literature reflects the elite’s fear that the rise of hip-hop and the “urban” ethos generally represents a decline in urban black cultural life. The “urban nitty-gritty,” as it were, seems like a virus that has undone black artistic standards and a black meritocracy. Now, there is only purely market-driven drivel aimed at the lowest, most uncultured taste. This is clearly a position of someone like novelist and culture critic Stanley Crouch. The sensitivity on this point is not by any means wholly or even mostly a matter of snobbery. It has taken a very long time for African-American literature to reach a level of general respectability, where the general public thought it was worth reading and the literary establishment thought it was worth recognizing. Now, for many blacks, blacks themselves seem to be denigrating it by flooding the market with trash novels no better than Mickey Spillane. It is by no means surprising that blacks, a persecuted and historically degraded group, would feel that their cultural products are always suspect, precarious, and easily turned against them as caricature in the marketplace.

Another way to look at this is that urban literature has democratized and broadened the reach and content of African-American literature. In some ways, urban lit may show the maturity, not the decline, of African-American literature. After all, African-American literature is the oldest of all self-consciously identified ethnic minority literatures in the United States, going back as far as 1774 to Phyllis Wheatley’s first book of poems, to the slave narratives of the antebellum period that produced such classics as The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). African Americans have thought longer and harder about the importance of literature as a political and cultural tool than other ethnic minorities in the United States have. The Harlem Renaissance was a movement by blacks, helped by white patrons, to gain cultural access and respectability by producing a first-rate literature. The rise of urban lit does not repudiate the black literary past, but it does suggest other ways and means of producing black literature and other ends for it as well. Moreover, some urban lit authors are far from being hacks: Sister Souljah, a well-traveled political activist and novelist, is a more-than-capable writer and thinker, however provocative she may be. The same can be said of the lone novel of music writer Nelson George, Urban Romance (1993), clearly not a trash novel. Some of the books of Eric Jerome Dickey and K’wan are worth reading as well. A major figure who straddles black romance and urban lit is E. Lynn Harris, a popular writer whose books deal with relationships and other matters of importance for blacks, particularly black women, today.

When I approached Bantam Books two years ago to become general editor of two annual series -- Best African American Essays and Best African American Fiction — I wanted to make sure that the books had crossover appeal to various segments of the black reading public, and so I chose Harris to be the guest editor of Best African American Fiction of 2009, the first volume in the series. I see these volumes as an opportunity not only to bring the best of African-American letters to the general reading public — from younger writers like Z. Z. Packer and Amina Gautier to established voices like Samuel Delaney and Edward P. Jones – but also to forge a sort of marriage between various  types of African-American literature. I wanted to use E. Lynn Harris’s reach to bring serious black literature to an audience that might not be aware of it or even desire it. It is far too early to say whether this attempt will succeed, but the mere attempt alone acknowledges a level of complexity in African-American literature and a level of profound segmentation in its audience that shows that African-American experience, however it is made into art, has a depth and outreach, a sort of universality, dare I say, that actually bodes well for the future of this and perhaps of all of American ethnic minority literature.

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.