Introduction
“Not Necessarily Race Matter”
In “The Value of Race Literature” (1895), an address delivered at the First
Congress of Colored Women of the United States, Victoria Earle Matthews
describes the generational importance of anthologizing “Race Literature,”
or what we now call African American literature:
The lesson to be drawn from this cursory glance at what I may call the past,
present and future of our Race Literature apart from its value as first beginnings, not only to us as a people but literature in general, is that unless
earnest and systematic effort be made to procure and preserve for transmission to our successors, the records, books and various publications already
produced by us, not only will the sturdy pioneers who paved the way and
laid the foundation for our Race Literature be robbed of their just due, but
an irretrievable wrong will be inflicted upon the generations that shall come
after us. By Race Literature, we mean all the writings emanating from a distinct class—not necessarily race matter; but a general collection of what has
been written by the men and women of that Race: History, Biographies, Scientific Treatises, Sermons, Addresses, Novels, Poems, Books of Travel, miscellaneous essays and the contributions to magazines and newspapers. (My
italics)1
In the century after this address, anthologies of African American literature have met Matthews’s challenge, reprinting an assortment and abundance of black-authored fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama.2 But such
1. Victoria Earle Matthews, “The Value of Race Literature,” The Massachusetts Review (Summer
1986): 169–70.
2. For example, the nearly three-thousand-page Norton Anthology of African American Literature, the most comprehensive collection of black-authored writing to date, attempts “to make the
canon of African American literature accessible to teachers and students” and “essential for the
1
2 gene andrew jarrett
textual abundance and generic range, however welcome and necessary,
belie the fundamental tendency of anthology editors to ignore Matthews’s
assertion, italicized in the passage above, that Race Literature is “not necessarily race matter,” but “a general collection of what has been written by
the men and women of that Race.” Put another way, the thematic content
of literary texts does not necessarily or explicitly have to inscribe specific
ideas about racial progress. Rather, the mere fact that African American
literature even exists, that African Americans over the centuries have
demonstrated an unwavering commitment to the idea and act of literary
writing, is enough to signify racial progress. African American literature
should be appreciated in all its forms; it should be read because it both
instructs and delights us, breaks the rules of the world we live in, and
enables us to grapple the complexities of humanity. Just as literary art in
general is “the very thing humanity can least afford to do without,” African
American literature should be defined in the broadest way possible.3
African American Literature beyond Race argues that anthologies too
often ignore the generalist premise of “The Value of Race Literature,”
allowing race to overdetermine the idea of African American literature.
Anthologies give the impression that African American literature must
feature African American protagonists alongside certain historical themes,
cultural geographies, political discourses, or subjectivities defined by race.
And these texts are “authentic” when their authors are identifiable as
African American, regardless of whether these authors desire to be characterized in this way. These protocols contribute to the idea that the canon,
or the “best,” of African American literature only portrays the realities of
black life, or practices what I call racial realism. But this is not entirely
true.
Of course, anthology editors, who mostly dictate what we call canon
formation or tradition building, reserve the right to select entries based on
certain aesthetic, discursive, and thematic priorities, as well as on certain
unavoidable restrictions such as book length and cost. But there is an ideological consistency in the exclusion of unconventional or anomalous
texts from African American literary anthologies. This consistency results
permanent institutionalization of the black literary tradition within departments of English,
American Studies, and African American Studies” (Gates and McKay xxix). Henry Louis Gates Jr.
and Nellie Y. McKay, eds., Preface, The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 2nd ed.
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2004) xxix–xxxvi.
3. Jerome Beaty, ed., Foreword, The Norton Introduction to Literature, shorter 8th ed. (New
York: W. W. Norton, 2002) xxxii.
Introduction: “Not Necessarily Race Matter” 3
from what John Guillory has called a relationship between “a politics of
representation in the canon” and “a democratic representational politics”
in the U.S. academy.4 In terms of African American literature, the promotion of certain images and tropes through the canon belongs to a longstanding and anxious practice in African American letters—dating back to
black intellectual critiques of blackface minstrelsy—to control representations of the race as much as possible, to shield them from stereotypes and
other kinds of racist contamination. While understandable and on countless occasions necessary for African American societal advancement, this
cultural preoccupation with racial representation perpetuated the belief
that the best and most useful African American literature depicts the race.
This idea obscures the ironic fact that some of our most celebrated
African American authors had written remarkable, even beautiful, literature resisting prevailing conventions of racial representation, despite the
cost of critical dismissal and commercial failure.
African American Literature beyond Race exploits this irony by presenting literary works that mark such moments of literary defiance. An alternative to the conventional anthology, it presents intriguing works by
canonical African American authors that, over the course of their publications, consistently became noncanonical. With the help of preeminent and
emerging scholars who introduce and examine special cases of anomalous
African American fiction, this anthology seeks to explain how race, representation, authenticity, genre, canon, and tradition factored—and still factor—into the way scholars read, anthologies organize, instructors teach,
and students learn African American literature. From here we can best
determine what it means for African American authors to write literature
beyond race.
The Terminology and Politics of African American Literature
To say that the term “African American literature” signifies literature by,
about, and/or for African Americans is not simply to utter a definition. In
American intellectual society and culture, it is a determination of the way
authors think about and write the literature, the way publishers classify
and distribute it, the way bookstores receive and sell it, the way libraries
4. John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) 5.
4 gene andrew jarrett
catalog and shelve it, the way readers locate and retrieve it, the way teachers, scholars, and anthologists use it, the way students learn from it—in
short, the way we know it.
In “Where ‘Separate but Equal’ Still Rules” (May 8, 2000), an Op-Ed
article in The New York Times, Ward Connerly, the chairman of the American Civil Rights Institute and advocate against racial preferences, urges
bookstores to resist classifying and judging the content of a book solely by
the author’s skin color. Connerly complains of bookstore “racial profiling”
against books he and other African American authors have written:
The shelving of their books in a special section [called “African-American
Interest”] deprives black authors or “race” authors of significant sales
opportunities, putting them at a competitive disadvantage compared with
authors whose books are not ghettoized. But the economic harm pales in
contrast to the intellectual and cultural damage caused by the bookstores’
version of racial profiling. They have fallen into the trap of thinking that a
writer’s skin color is a reliable guide to judging the contents of his or her
books. My book, like those by other writers who happen to be black, is
meant for readers of any race interested in the subjects and controversies I
address. By relying on a blatant stereotype—that blacks are the only ones
interested in the history, culture, and politics of black people—the bookstores marginalize some writers and limit their ability to reach out to a
broader audience and to share common bonds and values.5
Quoting Connerly at length does not endorse his legal and political mission to enforce color-blind policies in U.S. education and other institutions of society and culture. But Connerly’s frustration with what can be
termed an “essentialist reification of race” is convincing and should be
taken seriously for its literary implications. His concern with the way race
can operate as a metonym of literature at the price of ideology, to rephrase
the words of Katya Gibel Azoulay,6 focuses on the “theoretical gap”
between the bookstore’s labeling of his work as “African American Interest” and his identification of his own work.
Over the past century anthologies of African American literature have
indoctrinated generations of readers into taking this theoretical gap for
5. Ward Connerly, “Where ‘Separate but Equal’ Still Rules,” New York Times (May 8, 2000).
6. Azoulay opposes “the essentialist reification of race and agree[s] that race operates as a
metonym of culture at the price of ideology” (129). Katya Gibel Azoulay, “Outside Our Parents’
House: Race, Culture, and Identity,” Research in African Literatures 27.1 (Spring 1996): 129–42.
Introduction: “Not Necessarily Race Matter” 5
granted. According to a recent academic forum on anthologies, such collections represent “the collective project, ongoing since the late sixties, of
expanding the canon and curriculum of American literature, especially in
response to the activism and scholarship of feminists and people of color.”
These collections aim to teach students about the ethnic diversity of
American culture.7 This project, however, tends to presume and promote
an “authentic” version of ethnic literature, in which literary representations of ethnicity must correlate with the ethnicity of the author(s). Such a
progressive rearticulation of American literature has implicitly created a
deviant class of writers whose works defy the literary protocols of ethnic
authenticity and realism.8 African American literature is no exception: the
margins within this tradition are produced by the same rationale of ethnic
authenticity and realism used to justify moving this tradition as a whole
from the margins to the center of larger American literature.
Leveling this theoretical criticism against the categories of African
American literature and ethnic literature in general does not intend to
erase them. Just as political climates once warranted—and still warrant—
the institution of African American Studies as a self-contained department rather than as one program among many ethnic others under the
rubric of American Studies, African American literature should be anthologized as an institution, as part of the multi-ethnicization of American literature as Anglo American, African American, Latin American, Asian
American, and so forth. The anthologization of African American literature appropriately affirms a collective resistance to co-optation and/or disenfranchisement by a hegemonic order of racism, particularly a
(sub)conscious belief in white supremacy that has historically resulted in
the marginality of African American writers in anthologies of American
literature. Yet the effort of African American anthologization, however
7. Introduction, “What Do We Need to Teach: Introduction,” American Literature 65.2: 326.
“What Do We Need to Teach” is a forum in which several scholars discuss the academic and cultural politics of the anthologization or canonization of American literature.
8. The complication in this argument, however, is that the meaning of anomalies does not
remain constant across ethnic lines, racial formations, history, and other kinds of contexts.
Indeed, I am disagreeing with Robert Fikes’s incautious incorporation of these authors and their
texts into an African Americanist critical paradigm designed for “white life” novels. Designed primarily for African American authors, his critical model does not guarantee literacy in the various
codes governing Asian American and Chicano literary aesthetics and anomalies. For an overview
of what he calls the “raceless” fiction of Asian American and Chicano writers, see Robert Fikes Jr.,
“Suppression of Ethnicity: The ‘Raceless’ Fiction of Asian American and Chicano Writers,” Connecticut Review 18.2 (1996): 95–101.
6 gene andrew jarrett
admirable, has resorted to problematic essentialist paradigms of canon
and tradition that prioritize the authenticity of African American literature without recognizing the various and frequent ways in which African
American writers themselves were working beyond this paradigm. This
anthology represents one step toward minimizing the neglect of such
experimental African American literature.
Hence the title and even the mere structure of African American Literature beyond Race are loaded with political meanings. The word “beyond”
does not necessarily assert an optimistic belief that we can advance
beyond race in our world. To do so would be naïve; it would ignore the
persistence and predominance of racism, which continues to cripple
African Americans at the most fundamental social, educational, economic,
and political levels. And to do so would ignore the historic and continuing
role of African American literature in indicting racism.
For this book, the paradigm of African American literature moving
beyond race has in mind the keynote lecture Toni Morrison delivered at
the “Race Matters” conference, held at Princeton University in April 1994,
which she reprinted three years later as “Home.” Morrison describes her
ideas about African American literature in terms of a tradition that is at
once “race-specific,” free of “racial hierarchy,” and a celebration of American cultural nationality: “I have never lived, nor have any of us, in a world
in which race did not matter. Such a world, one free of racial hierarchy, is
usually imagined or described as dreamscape—Edenesque, utopian, so
remote are the possibilities of its achievement. [. . .] I prefer to think of aworld-in-which-race-does-not-matter as something other than a theme
park, or a failed and always-failing dream, or as the father’s house of many
rooms. I am thinking of it as home.”9 Morrison’s imagination of “a-worldin-which-race-does-not-matter” does not perpetuate a historical denial
about “race matters,” but actually attends to their historical realities and
complexities and to how they bear upon contemporary humanity. Morrison’s novels and essays have always asserted the significance of race, but
she has also been concerned with the tendency of race to overdetermine
and thus reduce the complexity of human identity, relations, and culture,
especially as portrayed in African American literature.
In “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in
American Literature” (1989), Morrison has interrogated the assumptions
9. Toni Morrison, “Home,” The House That Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain, ed. Wahneema H. Lubiano, 1st ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997) 3.
Introduction: “Not Necessarily Race Matter” 7
and definition of African American literature: “The question of what constitutes the art of a black writer, for whom that modifier is more search
than fact, has some urgency. In other words, other than melanin and subject matter, what, in fact, may make me a black writer? Other than my own
ethnicity—what is going on in my work that makes me believe it is
demonstrably inseparable from a cultural specificity that is Afro-American?”10 Neither Morrison nor this anthology discounts the truth that, in
some way, race matters to us all. We should confront that truth, embracing
the political significance of canons or traditions of African American literature. However, we should also acknowledge and contribute to that large
and ongoing conversation stimulated by the fundamental question, “What
is African American literature?”11
In order to argue that African American Literature beyond Race urges an
indictment of the canon of African American literature to address anomalous texts, I previously employed the word “anomalous” to signify taxonomic counternormativity. As Bruce Lincoln notes: “[A]n anomaly may
both pose danger to and be exposed to danger from the taxonomic order
in which it is anomalous, just as deviants are considered outlaws when the
legitimacy of legal systems is affirmed, but rebels when such systems are
judged illegitimate.”12 The late Claudia Tate had applied this concept to
African American literature. Anomalous texts are “indisputably marginal
in African-American literary history,” she argued, primarily because “they
resist, to varying degrees, the race and gender paradigms that we spontaneously impose on black textuality.”13 Anomalous texts consistently unset-
10. Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American
Literature,” Michigan Quarterly Review 28.1 (1989): 19.
11. In We Wear the Mask Rafia Zafar declares that “[c]ritics of African American literature must
at some point wrestle with the question of what makes a writer, or her texts, black. Can African
descent alone establish a writer’s membership in the canon of African American writers?” (6) In
Authentic Blackness J. Martin Favor pursues this idea from another angle: “Does a person’s racial
categorization, the classification of the subject as black, white, or other, necessarily lend a ‘racial’
character to that person’s cultural work?” (5) Finally, Claudia Tate puts the question succinctly in
Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: “What constitutes a black literary text in the United States? Must
it be written by, about, and/or for African Americans?” (3) Rafia Zafar, We Wear the Mask: African
Americans Write American Literature, 1760–1870 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); J.
Martin Favor, Authentic Blackness: The Folk in the New Negro Renaissance (Durham and London:
Duke University Press, 1999); Claudia Tate, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
12. Bruce Lincoln, Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989) 165–66.
13. Tate, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels 7–8.
8 gene andrew jarrett
tle the traditional notion of a distinct African American literature by usually (but not always) casting African Americans in minor roles, while
marking the protagonists as racially white, neutral, or ambiguous.14 However, the issue of authorial intention—or the reason why certain authors
characterized race in certain literary ways—cannot be so easily theorized
or generalized, since each author and his/her text must be analyzed on an
individual, case-by-case basis. This book hopes to achieve this sort of analytic specificity, providing the extra attention that the selected authors and
their texts so necessarily deserve, but an attention that they have been routinely denied.
This anthology reprints sixteen interesting works of fiction (short stories, novelettes, and excerpts of novels) dating back to the postbellum
nineteenth century. For ease of organization, the literary works appear in
chronological order and according to coincidental historical markers (e.g.,
national or global wars). This structure resists the cultural and intellectual
contexts, also known as “movements,” that have characterized previous
anthologies of African American literature: namely, the “New Negro”
movement that lasted from the postbellum nineteenth century until well
into the postwar 1940s; the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s; the modernism, social realism, and naturalism that spanned the 1930s to the 1950s;
the Black Arts Movement that overlapped the 1960s and 1970s; and the
contemporary period that witnessed the crystallizations of Black feminism
or womanism, postmodernism, and science fiction in African American
literature. The recurrence of these categories in literary scholarship,
anthologies, and curricula has afforded a convenient and popular set of
concepts, discourses, and associations that certainly tempts one into referring almost exclusively to movements wherever African American literary
history is concerned. But such convenience and popularity should not distract us from acknowledging and addressing, as this very anthology does,
the problematic anxieties, assumptions, agendas, stereotypes, and contradictions that underwrote intellectual or academic constructions of movements.
This does not mean that African American Literature beyond Race
encourages the historicist neglect of movements. Indeed, it maintains that
we must always remain mindful of not only why and how certain move14. Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif ” (included in this volume) justifies this disclaimer. The story
features two protagonists, one black and the other white, but the reader is never certain of the
racial identity of either one.
Introduction: “Not Necessarily Race Matter” 9
ments were conceived and articulated in the first place, but also the present role they serve in our reading and writing of history. However, as
Hazel V. Carby notes in Reconstructing Black Womanhood, movements like
the Harlem Renaissance are not necessarily “unique, intellectually cohesive
and homogeneous,” but rather comprise “shift[s] in concerns of the intellectuals” and “discontinuities surrounding issues of representation.”15 For
example, what does it mean that Nella Larsen published two still relatively
obscure stories, “The Wrong Man” and “Freedom,” in 1926, around the
cultural climax of the Harlem Renaissance? Or that Samuel R. Delany
published a piece of science fiction, “Time Considered as a Helix of SemiPrecious Stones,” in 1968, at the height of the Black Arts Movement? To
what extent should other contemporaneous events and phenomena factor
into interpretations of Larsen’s and Delany’s stories? Ultimately, how can
the information gleaned from these questions account for the “discontinuities surrounding issues of representation,” both within literature and of
authorship, intrinsic to movements? African American Literature beyond
Race, while straightforward chronologically, recognizes, exploits, but
remains critical of the major role of anthologies in our understanding of
African American literary history.
Primary Texts and Analytic Contexts
Although mostly well-written and provocative, the primary texts chosen
for African American Literature beyond Race are marginal in commercial
and/or scholarly circles. Half are out of print (Dunbar, Toomer, Larsen,
Thurman, Petry, Yerby) or only recently reprinted (Webb and Harper).
Most of the texts have enjoyed at least one reprint since their initial publication, but nonetheless all sixteen selections remain understudied, if studied at all, in literary scholarship. According to a recent (2004) international
bibliography prepared by the Modern Language Association, these primary texts constitute the central subject matter of less than 2 percent of all
the dissertations, articles, chapters in edited collections, and books published on their authors since 1963.16 It is no surprise that over the past century, African American literary anthologies, often edited by scholars, have
15. Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987) 164.
16. I focused on cases in which the MLA Bibliography designated the anomalous text as a “primary subject work,” the African American author as the “primary subject author,” and the scholarly
10 g e n e a n d r e w j a r r e t t
perpetuated this discrepancy.17 By reprinting the noncanonical fiction of
canonical African American authors, this anthology overcomes this problem by illuminating certain personal, professional, and ideological aspects
of the primary authors long overshadowed by their canonical reputations.
Only two authors do not yet belong to the canonical category—Frank
J. Webb and Frank Yerby. However, since the former is arguably a progenitor of the “anomalous tradition” and the latter is certainly the most
prolific contributor to it, both authors deserve attention in our study of
African American literary history. For example, Yerby’s marginality is
especially remarkable, if unfortunate. His status as the most prolific and
commercially successful African American novelist in history forces us,
perhaps more than any other writer, to confront the aesthetic and racialpolitical principles of African American canon formation over the past
half century. Although his death on November 29, 1991, sparked interest in
his life and work in media and scholarly circles, this discussion was brief
and spawned little scholarship. More often biographical than literary-critical, the handful of Yerby studies that did emerge has yet to compel the
production of a book-length analysis of the author’s life and legacy. This
anthology provides an ideal context to (re)introduce Yerby to readers and
to address some of the issues of authorship, racial identity, literary aesthetics, and audience that have surrounded his work and African American literature in general.
Accordingly, this volume raises questions about the long-standing aesthetic devaluation of popular fiction in academic literary studies, reflected
by the critical elitism persisting in the smaller field of African American
work as an “entry.” Two Wolves and a Lamb accounts for 0 out of the 12 total entries on Webb;
Sowing and Reaping for 4 out of 74 on Harper; The Uncalled for 0 out of 73 on Dunbar; “York
Beach” for 1 out of 243 on Toomer; “The Wrong Man” and “Freedom” for 0 out of 137 on Larsen;
The Interne for 0 out of 25 on Thurman; Country Place for 3 out of 69 on Petry; Seraph on the
Suwanee for 14 out of 546 on Hurston; Yesterday Will Make You Cry/Cast the First Stone for 2 out
of 118 on Himes; The Foxes of Harrow for 1 out of 10 on Yerby; Savage Holiday for 6 out of 764 on
Wright; Giovanni’s Room for 30 out of 472 on Baldwin; “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones” for 0 out of 117 on Delany; “Recitatif ” for 7 out of 1,360 on Morrison; and “Bloodchild” for 2 out of 68 on Butler. In sum, the anomalous texts account for 70 out of the total of
4,086 entries on these African American authors, which is a ratio of 1.7 percent. Bear in mind that
these results are subject to change annually.
17. Consider the anthologies published over the past seventy-five years: most of them highlight
texts of racial realism, according to Jessamine S. Kallenbach’s Index to Black American Literary
Anthologies (1979), a survey of over one hundred and thirty literary anthologies printed between
1924 and the late 1970s. In addition, my own research indicates that another sixty African American literary anthologies published since 1979 have demonstrated a similar trend.
Introduction: “Not Necessarily Race Matter” 11
literary studies.18 According to Susanne B. Dietzel, “[t]he field of popular
fiction is a relatively unexplored terrain in African American as well as
American literary history and criticism.” She goes on to say that “[i]n the
fields of literary criticism and the teaching of African American literature,
for example, scholars and critics alike have restricted their efforts to
reviewing, promoting, and canonizing only those texts that fit the prevailing aesthetic and literary standards.” As a consequence, a “rigid division”
exists between “high and low, or elite and mass culture,” and by extension
between popular fiction and canonical fiction.19 African American literary
demonstration or disregard of racial realism, I would add, has further
influenced how and why these “standards” continue to exist. Dispensing
with critical elitism is a prerequisite to the open-minded and intellectually responsible recovery and study of anomalous African American literature.
African American Literature beyond Race features only fiction, though a
history of anomalous African American poetry certainly exists, which I
will briefly discuss here. African American poetry, while still understudied
with respect to the novel and other genres of fiction, contributes significant insight to hermeneutic and taxonomic inquiry. In the past, scholars
have consistently described African American poetry “about” African
American life in terms of “form” and “content,” whereby “form” signifies
rhyme schemes, meter, diction, and syntax, while “content” means thematic narrative and tropes. Within these descriptions a negative and/or
dismissive tone has surrounded African American poetry not about
African American life.
One of the first such instances in modern African American literary
criticism appears in Margaret Walker’s “New Poets” (1950). The essay
employs the name “new poetry” to designate African American poetic
departures from World War II – era racial “protest.”20 Pointing to the
18. For an interesting analysis of the methodological tension between studies of popular
fiction and the canon, see Scott McCracken, Pulp: Reading Popular Fiction (Manchester and New
York: Manchester University Press; distributed in the USA by St. Martin’s Press, 1998).
19. Susanne B Dietzel, “The African American Novel and Popular Culture,” The Cambridge
Companion to the African American Novel, ed. Maryemma Graham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) 156.
20. Walker is referring to Robert Hayden and Myron O’Higgin’s The Lion and the Archer
(1948), Gwendolyn Brooks’s Annie Allen (1949), and Bruce McWright’s From the Shaken Tower
(1944), which depart from the “protest” of Hayden’s Heart Shape in the Dust (1940), Walker’s own
For My People (1942), Melvin Tolson’s Rendezvous with America (1944), Brooks’s A Street in
Bronzville (1945), and Owen Dodson’s Powerful Long Ladder (1946).
12 g e n e a n d r e w j a r r e t t
poetry of Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Bruce McWright,
Walker argues that race is “rather used as a point of departure toward a
global point of view than as the central theme of one obsessed by race,”
reminding us that “there are other factors in the writing of poetry that are
equally as important as perspective.”21 She goes on to say that “new poets”
“focus our attention on craftsmanship with their return to an emphasis on
form. The new poetry has universal appeal coupled with another definite
mark of neoclassicism, the return to form. They show an emphasis placed
on technique rather than subject matter, and a moving toward intellectual
themes of psychological and philosophical implications which border on
obscurantism.”22
Walker’s statement presents several problems that contemporary readers of African American poetry “not about” race must overcome in order
to take this literature seriously. First, it is debatable whether “emphasis
placed on technique rather than subject matter” (my italics) is possible.
Poetry is almost always so self-reflexive that form and content are more
cooperative than conflictive, more conjoined than disjoined, in literary
expression. Form should not be pitted against content; rather, form
encodes content, and vice versa. Form operates in itself as a layer of content, and content as an embodiment of formal concerns.23 Secondly, if we
take Walker’s argument at face value, one could argue that “neoclassical”
poetry dates as far back as the late eighteenth century. Joan Sherman has
focused on “neoclassical” African American writers ranging from Phillis
Wheatley and George Moses Horton to such postbellum nineteenth-century writers as Islay Walden, Henrietta Cordelia Ray, Eloise Thompson,
George Marion McClellan, and Timothy Thomas Fortune. (I would add
Paul Laurence Dunbar to this list.) As Sherman puts it, these authors
“show a decided bias for neoclassical decorum, heightened poetic diction,
and technical virtuosity.” They “are integrationist, at times explicitly, more
often through conscious adherence to such white themes, techniques, and
21. Margaret Walker, “New Poets,” Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary
Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, ed. Angelyn Mitchell (Durham and London:
Duke University Press, 1994) 128.
22. Ibid., 129.
23. Hollander mentions in Melodious Guile that the “figurative music of poetic language has
often in the past been associated with a notion of ‘form’ as opposed to something like ‘content.’
[. . .] But these notions cast weak light on poetry, all the more since, once the distinction has been
drawn, the point will immediately be made that poetry involves ‘form as content,’ or, for formalists like Roman Jakobson, ‘code as message’ ” (5). John Hollander, Melodious Guile: Fictive Pattern
in Poetic Language (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988).
Introduction: “Not Necessarily Race Matter” 13
ethical attitudes,” whereby “white” refers to American and British Romantic poetry.24 Finally, Walker’s use of the word “obscurantism” to describe
new poetry, which implies that form can occlude content within a poem,
inscribes what would become a long-held discrepancy in value between
complex meters and race matters in African Americanist discourse.
Antiformalist discourse has coincided with the expression of anxiety over
the political irresponsibility of “nonracial” poems and their authors.25
The legacy of Dunbar has suffered from this critical discourse. The
scholarly characterization of Dunbar as split in literary personality, torn
between imitating in “nonracial” ways the formal styles of white Romantic
poets and selling out to a racist market for blackface minstrel stereotypes,
24. Joan R. Sherman, Invisible Poets: Afro-Americans of the Nineteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974) xxvi.
25. In “The Myth of a ‘Negro Literature’ ” Amiri Baraka criticizes Wheatley for her “ludicrous
departures from the huge black voices that splintered southern nights” (106), and implicitly for
conforming to the style of Alexander Pope’s and other traditional Greek, Latin, and English
poetry. Robert Hayden was attacked by “the militant voices of the black activists of the 1960s
[. . .] for his refusal to subjugate his art to their social, political and moral aims” (Fetrow 25).
Arthur P. Davis in “Integration and Race Literature” laments that the black poet of the 1940s and
1950s “has dropped the special [protest] tradition which the occasion demanded and moved
towards the mainstream of American literature” (610–11). In Black Poetry in America, Louis D.
Rubin Jr. asserts that the black poet “could not afford the luxury of individual withdrawal or
imaginative transcendence” (Jackson and Rubin 26) characteristic of traditional poetry, especially
in the face of years of social, economic, and political crises surrounding African Americans. In
his classic introduction to Modern Black Poets, Donald Gibson states that the “nonracial” poetry
of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Leslie P. Hill, George Marion McClellan, William Stanley Braithwaite,
Margaret Danner, Arna Bontemps, and Countee Cullen are “indistinguishable from those written
by non-black poets,” and it was not until the advent of the poetry of the 1960s that we beheld
“the creation for the first time of a significantly definable black poetry” (9–10). And the illumination of the above complaints does not even begin to shed light on the scrutiny of other critics
who ironically denounced African American poetry, regardless of “racial” guise, as too race-oriented, of minimal intelligence, and, if none of the above, as poetry poorly wrought. See Amiri
Baraka, “The Myth of a ‘Negro Literature,’ ” Home: Social Essays (New York: Morrow, 1966): 105–
15; Fred Fetrow, “Portraits and Personae: Characterization in the Poetry of Robert Hayden,” Black
Poetry in America: Two Essays in Historical Interpretation, by Blyden Jackson and Louis Decimus
Rubin (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974); Donald Gibson, “Strategies and
Revisions of Self-Representation in Booker T. Washington’s Autobiography,” American Quarterly
45.3 (September 1993): 370–93. For more information about “white” criticism of the aforementioned and other African American poets, see Henry Louis Gates Jr., Figures in Black: Words,
Signs, and the “Racial” Self (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) 61–79; George
Kent, “The Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks,” On Gwendolyn Brooks: Reliant Contemplation, ed.
Stephen Caldwell Wright (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996) 66–80; Alan R. Shucard, Countee Cullen (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984) 17; for Melvin Tolson, see Michael
Bérubé, Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers: Tolson, Pynchon, and the Politics of the Canon (Ithaca
and London: Cornell University Press, 1992) 151n6, n7, n8, and 169.
14 g e n e a n d r e w j a r r e t t
has reduced him to racial-political irresponsibility, when in fact his negotiations of the literary marketplace were much more complex. This
anthology features Dunbar’s fiction, in which his productivity equaled his
poetic output, as well as the fiction of other African American authors, in
order to clarify the dilemmas of creativity and audience they all faced. If
only initially to start “small,” to avoid the unwieldy format that could easily result from providing multiple literary genres the scholarly attention
and textual space they so deserve, this book anticipates future collections
reprinting and introducing anomalous African American fiction, poetry,
and drama that of necessity must go unmentioned or subordinated in
African American Literature beyond Race.
Headnotes and Methodology
In order to make the selected literature accessible to a broad range of readers, this book employs headnotes written by a scholar of African American
literature, often someone with specific expertise in the text, the author in
question, or both. All the headnotes address questions raised by the context, text, and implications of the selected literary work. Contextual questions include: What is the significance of the literary work in terms of the
author’s career? How well known or obscure is the literary work in critical
and commercial circles, and why? Textual questions include: What is the
nature of racial representation in the work? Is the racial identity of the
characters explicitly or implicitly marked as racially white, neutral, or
ambiguous? How does this fact make the work necessarily revealing or significant? What is the significance of the literary work in terms of such
themes as society, culture, race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, or class? What
are the literary merits of the work—that is, is it one of the author’s
“weaker” or “stronger” works, and in what sense? Finally, questions
regarding the implications include: How does this work affect our sense of
what constitutes the tradition or canon of African American literature?
Would this work be useful for African American literary studies, either in
the classroom or in specialized scholarship? The authority and expertise of
the headnotes should assist teachers in knowing how to interpret the literature and relate it to students. Notable for their range in methodological
style and their consistently high level of critical sophistication, the headnotes are rigorous enough to appeal to scholars hoping to place these literary works in their proper contexts.
Introduction: “Not Necessarily Race Matter” 15
As mentioned before, generalizing why the canonical authors wrote the
noncanonical texts chosen for this volume is risky, because the nature and
historical circumstances of each text vary. However, certain broad and
overlapping themes do recur, enabling us to connect, albeit provisionally,
the motivations of these authors to one another, and the issues they faced
within larger African American literary history. Several authors, such as
Webb, Dunbar, Hurston, Thurman, Petry, and Baldwin, sought to demonstrate their expertise in depicting the complexities of humanity, contrary
to the expectations of critics, the marketing industry, or their own racial
communities. Certain authors tried to describe and resolve certain human
problems that transcended racial lines: Harper focused on the national
issue of temperance, Larsen on female sexuality, Wright on pathology, and
Baldwin on homosexuality. For certain authors, including Webb, Dunbar,
Himes, and Baldwin, the texts were profoundly autobiographical, allowing
them to tackle issues influencing their personal lives. For these and other
authors, the texts represented their ideological resistance to arbiters or
movements of African American literature. In particular, Dunbar conflicted with William Dean Howells’s influential interpretation of black
dialect literature, Toomer with Alain Locke’s Harlem Renaissance, and
Yerby with Wright’s “radical” (proletarian, Marxist, and communist)
brand of racial realism. Some authors embraced certain philosophies of
literary aesthetics, race, or culture that fueled their skepticism over the traditional properties and implications of African American literature. In this
case, Toomer was concerned with the Gurdjieff movement, Wright with
psychoanalysis, Yerby with individualism, Morrison with postmodern
hermeneutics, and Delany and Butler with science fiction. Finally, certain
authors, such as Hurston, Himes, Yerby, and Butler, were quite public
about the commercial rewards they hoped to reap by writing African
American literature beyond race.
Grasping the anomalous texts of African American literature, moreover, strengthens the grasp of the canon itself. For example, Webb’s “Two
Wolves and a Lamb” not only deepens and complicates the portrayal of
evil but also recalls the literary intertextuality, the culinary themes, the
French phraseology, and the topography found in his earlier novel, The
Garies and Their Friends (1857). Harper’s Sowing and Reaping revises the
sentimental plot of courtship and marriage in her well-known short story,
“The Two Offers” (1859), while rearticulating the temperance discourse of
its publisher, The Christian Recorder. The modernist strategies and themes
discernible in Larsen’s two stories, “The Wrong Man” and “Freedom,”
16 g e n e a n d r e w j a r r e t t
reverberate in her two canonical novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing
(1929). The “mysticism” and philosophies of Gurdjieff had influenced
Toomer’s production of Cane (1923)—and African American culture in
Harlem, too—as much as it had allegedly impacted the more obscure literary works he published subsequently, including “York Beach.” The
tropes of vernacular authenticity (dialect) and the chauvinistic resemblance between the male protagonists of Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and Seraph on the Suwanee encourage deeper comparative
readings of the two novels. Both The Street (1946) and Country Place
enabled Petry to contest postwar conventions of the public behavior and
domestic role of women, while forcing us to realize the complexities of
working-class women’s lives, black and white. And by the time “Recitatif ”
appeared in print, Morrison had already released novels—The Bluest Eye
(1970) and Sula (1973)—in which the relationships between women grow
in resolve and spirituality in spite of or because of the absence, violence,
or abuse attributable to their parents, particularly their fathers. The headnotes further explicate these ideas, and support the contention that anomalous texts could be central to interpretations of the more famous texts
and contexts of African American literature.
As a whole, this anthology should contribute to and advance beyond
the ongoing and lively methodological conversations about the discursive
roles of “blackness” and “whiteness” in African American literary and cultural studies. Shelley Fisher Fishkin has identified the “trend” represented
by over one hundred books and articles, published in a multitude of disciplines in American studies since the late 1980s, “complicating” monolithic
notions of blackness and/or interrogating the privilege and power often
naturally and namelessly accorded to whiteness. “The first years of the last
decade of the twentieth century,” Fishkin writes, “may have brought the
withering away of simplistic essentialist notions of racial identity as well as
increasingly sophisticated understandings of how power relations built on
antiquated, discredited assumptions of racial difference sustain and perpetuate themselves.”26 At the turn of the twenty-first century, the intellectual and interdisciplinary fields of what I call “Blackness Studies” and what
have been called “Whiteness Studies” and “Critical White Studies” continue this intellectual approach to race.
26. Shelley Fisher Fishkin, “Interrogating ‘Whiteness,’ Complicating ‘Blackness’: Remapping
American Culture,” Criticism and the Color Line: Desegregating American Literary Studies, ed.
Henry B. Wonham (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996) 276.
Introduction: “Not Necessarily Race Matter” 17
Blackness Studies, first of all, has concentrated on the cultural logic of
racial representation, or how the black race has been portrayed in American culture. It has explored the historic assignation of racial essentialism
and authenticity to African American authorship and culture, challenged
the notion of an African American literary tradition built according to
racial iconography, pinpointed the ideological lines stratifying African
American communities, and developed new frameworks for theorizing
African American intellectualism and culture.27 In the wake of these developments, African American Literature beyond Race illuminates the historical contingency and ideological genealogy of “blackness”—or how ideas
about race and representation have cooperated in African American intellectualism and culture—and thereby accounts for how these ideas have
determined the reading and writing of African American literature. Following in the methodological footsteps of Blackness Studies, this anthology unsettles conventional ideas about “black texts” and, by implication,
what constitutes African American literature. In a more sophisticated way,
it forces us to pay attention to the implicit historical contingencies and
ideological genealogy of “racial authenticity.” It also urges us to account
for the way realism, in particular, tends to arbitrate critical classifications,
interpretations, and aesthetic judgments of African American literature in
terms of race.
This anthology also possesses a special relationship with Whiteness
Studies. This academic field suggests that Whiteness is neither a “raceless
subjectivity,” as Peter MacLaren puts it in a different context, nor an
“invisible norm for how dominant culture measures its own civility.”28
Rather, it is a construct whose racial politics become visible when examined in terms of the enormous impact of Anglo-Saxon diasporas on
mostly Western conceptions and articulations of race, culture, nation,
universality, and normativity.29 Accordingly, certain scholars have focused
27. Scholarly examples include Claudia Tate, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels; J. Martin Favor,
Authentic Blackness; Robert Reid-Pharr, Conjugal Union (New York: Oxford University Press,
1999); James Smethurst, The New Red Negro (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Madhu
Dubey, Signs and Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); and Michelle Wright,
Becoming Black (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). In popular-cultural studies we can point
to Phillip Brian Harper, Are We Not Men? (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); John
McWhorter, Authentically Black (New York: Gotham Books, 2003); and Debra Dickerson, The
End of Blackness (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004).
28. Peter MacLaren, “Decentering Culture: Postmodernism, Resistance, and Critical Pedagogy,”
Current Perspectives on the Culture of Schools, ed. N. B. Wyner (Boston: Brookline, 1991) 244.
18 g e n e a n d r e w j a r r e t t
on African American literary typologies, ethnologies, and themes of
whiteness.30 African American Literature beyond Race suggests that anomalous works can comment on or depict whiteness in ways that warrant
further critical study. But this anthology also advances beyond African
Americanist applications of “Whiteness Studies” to account for certain
subtleties in the concept of anomalies. Valuable as they are, these applications (aside from Claudia Tate’s) are not designed to account for certain
nuances in the text and context of African American writers who elect not
to comply with historically specific conventions of racial realism. Literary
avoidance or disruption of these conventions, for example, does not automatically or necessarily mean the acceptance and depiction of whiteness.
Such texts do not necessarily or always employ race as the primary human
marker.
This distinction between anomalous African American literature and
African American literature featuring white “characters” furthers what
Fishkin, in another essay, has called “transgressive” African American literature. Transgressive texts “violate” critical and commercial norms
demanding that “black fiction writers are expected to focus on AfricanAmerican life in the United States as seen through the eyes of black characters,” and that “black novelists are expected to focus on issues of race
and racism and are considered suspect when they do not.”31 Indeed,
African American literature has almost always been defined in terms of
29. See David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness (London: Verso, 1991); Vron Ware, Beyond
the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History (London and New York: Verso, 1992); Mike Hill, ed.,
Whiteness: A Critical Reader (New York: New York University Press, 1997); Birgit Brander Rasmussen, The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001);
Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, eds., Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997); Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz, eds., White Trash:
Race and Class in America (New York: Routledge, 1997); Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race
Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993)
and Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, 1997); and Clyde Taylor, The Mask of Art (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998).
30. African Americanist approaches to Whiteness Studies include David Roediger, ed., Black on
White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White (New York: Schocken Books, 1998), and the
corresponding scholarship of Jane Davis, The White Image in the Black Mind: A Study of African
American Literature (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000); Mia Bay, The White Image in the
Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White people, 1830–1925 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2000); Clyde R. Taylor, The Mask of Art (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press, 1998); and Tate, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels.
31. Fishkin, “Desegregating American Literary Studies,” Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age, ed.
Emory Elliott et al. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) 125.
Introduction: “Not Necessarily Race Matter” 19
racial pragmatism, that is, the degree to which it is “grounded,” accounting
for and even shaping the material circumstances of the racial-political
world. This kind of literature is not necessarily “protest,” a popular but
reductive descriptor that had gained traction especially in 1949, when
James Baldwin pinned it to Richard Wright’s first novel, and has remained
in use ever since in studies of African American literature.32 Instead, this
kind of literature focuses more generally on the politics of racialism, or
the role of racial ideology in determining power relations between and
among individuals, groups, and institutions. In the process—and perhaps
this is where “protest” comes in—literature can also seek to represent,
engage, rearticulate, and/or transform racialism, or the way people have
essentialized what Kwame Anthony Appiah has called the “heritable characteristics” (biology) and distinctive behavioral “traits and tendencies”
(culture) constitutive of racial identification, particularly of the African
Diaspora.33 As a consequence, racialist approaches to African American
literature have often assumed that African Americans possess the utmost
experiential authority in talking about African America, that their literature serves as an authoritative expression of their views on race and
racism, and that the persons, places, and things imagined in this literature
automatically earn racially authentic status. For Fishkin, African American
literature disrupting such long-standing connections of race to realism
tends to be, “as often as not, ignored”—that is, “out of print and out of
favor.”34
But what do we make of the way Toni Morrison’s postmodern
hermeneutic 1998 novel, Paradise, defies the conventional readings of
American literature by complicating both blackness and whiteness in literary characterization? Fishkin quotes Morrison’s explanation of the racial
ambiguity in this novel, which refuses to disclose conclusively the racial
identities of the female main characters, just as she has refused to do so in
her 1983 short story, “Recitatif ”: “The tradition in writing is that if you
don’t mention a character’s race, he’s white. Any deviation from that, you
32. Baldwin closed his essay, “Everybody’s Protest Novel” (originally published in Partisan
Review, June 1949; reprinted six years later in Notes of a Native Son), by aligning Wright’s Native
Son (1940) with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) in the tradition of the “protest
novel.” A recent example of “protest” representing a thematic focal point for African American
cultural history is Patrick Rael’s excellent book, Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum
North (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
33. Anthony Appiah, “The Conservation of ‘Race,’ ” Black American Literature Forum 23.1
(Spring 1989): 44.
34. Fishkin, “Desegregating” 122, 125.
20 g e n e a n d r e w j a r r e t t
have to say. What I wanted to do was not to erase race, but force readers
either to care about it or see if it disturbs them that they don’t know.”35
The character is white not because of the presence of racial markers but
because of their absence. The lack of racial information—or the underdetermination of race—has been just as successful in defining whiteness as
the excess of racial information—or the overdetermination of race—has
been in defining blackness. Into that void of identification constitutive of
whiteness, Morrison hypothesizes, readers often project their natural
imagination of universal humanity as white humanity.
Despite this interpretive tendency, however, racially unmarked or
ambiguous characters in African American literature are not necessarily
white. The reader’s racial identification of characters does not always or
necessarily match the writer’s intended portrayal of them. Remaining
mindful of the potential disagreement between the intentions of the
(black) author and the impressions of the reader helps us to examine
works such as Paul Laurence Dunbar’s first novel, The Uncalled, whose
protagonist is not definitively black or white. As a result of this ambiguity
we must interpret the novel in terms that extend beyond the racial identities of “characters,” and we must think about how Dunbar is “transgressing” or “violating” the norms of genre, which comprise certain historically
relative principles of form and theme. Indeed, when Dunbar wrote The
Uncalled without the conventional—that is, minstrel—stereotype of an
African American, he experimented with other kinds of identification
(e.g., cultural regionalism and socioeconomic class) to signify human difference and to tell a profoundly spiritual story. This anthology provides
such readings of genre in order to illuminate those extra layers of meaning
that enhance our understanding of the aesthetic and political complexities
of African American literature.
The Classroom
African American Literature beyond Race should be useful for courses
taught at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. An introductory
course on African American literature should assign the book in order to
contest or question the principles of the course’s central anthology, which
in most cases would be The Norton Anthology of African American Litera35. Morrison, quoted in Fishkin, “Desegregating” 124–25.
Introduction: “Not Necessarily Race Matter” 21
ture. Creative and open-minded literature instructors all know that literary anthologies attempt foremost to be representative, and inevitably they
tend to be exclusionary. It is incumbent on instructors, then, to complement anthologies with texts that cover unrepresented topics, genres, or
historical moments, with the hope of diversifying curricula and broadening students’ understanding of literature. This anthology similarly aims to
diversify and enhance the teaching and learning of African American literature. The book should provide important perspectives and critical discourses on race, nation, and culture hitherto unimaginable in traditionally
conceived courses on African American literature. The predominance of
canonical African American authors allows instructors to continue to use
canonicity as the primary context for educating students. Yet the selection
of the noncanonical fiction of these authors also allows instructors to
probe, along with their students, the politics, pragmatics, and implications
of the African American canon.
A more advanced undergraduate course on African American literature—such as an honors, junior, or senior seminar focusing on a particular theme, genre, or movement—would also find the anthology useful.
The scholarly headnotes should assist the instructor in discussing not only
issues of canonicity and tradition but also what these issues imply about
the methods we tend to employ in our approaches to literary texts. For
example, the “color line” has served as an essentialist trope of human difference between blacks and whites, but how and why has it also served as a
trope of taxonomic difference between African American literature and
(Anglo-)American literature? Fishkin has suggested — correctly, I
believe—that the color line dictates the primary texts and pedagogy of literature courses. The segregationist mentality among scholars, teachers,
and students persists.36
African American Literature beyond Race attends not only to such interracial segregation but also to a smaller, though no less significant, intraracial segregation of canonical African American literature (i.e., expressive
of racial realism and representative of racial authenticity) from anomalous
African American literature (those black-authored texts that disrupt these
paradigms of expression and representation). While undergraduates in an
entry-level literature course, with no prior background in African American literature, should be capable of interpreting the texts of this anthology, those in an advanced level course should, in addition, achieve more
36. Fishkin, “Desegregating” 121.
22 g e n e a n d r e w j a r r e t t
sophisticated readings of these texts and begin to explore their historical
implications.
Graduate courses, to conclude, should encourage a meta-analytic step
before or after interpreting and historicizing the texts within this anthology: interpreting and historicizing the very paradigms of the collection. In
any case, students should be encouraged to revise information about
African American writers of whom they know a lot, unearth information
about writers of whom they know little, and explain why they must do so
in each case.
African American Literature beyond Race is a practical pedagogic tool
for covering many authors and texts, canonical and noncanonical, within
a short period of time, and for presenting information in a clear, accessible, and convenient way for experts and nonexperts alike. Of course, more
than one book-length collection and study will be required to implement
the revisionist demarcation of the literary territories from which anomalous primary texts and their authors have been barred not simply on
pragmatic and aesthetic grounds but also on racial-political ones. Hopefully, subsequent scholarship on African American literature will sustain
the intellectual excitement anticipated and required for “anomalies” to be
taken seriously in African American literary studies.
Gene Andrew Jarrett, University of Maryland