Читать книгу What is African American Literature? - Margo N. Crawford - Страница 6

This book was greatly inspired by Cheryl Wall’s groundbreaking study Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition (2005). African American literary traditions (as Cheryl Wall taught us) are a worrying of lines (lines being understood as lineage, intertextuality, improvisation, and the elasticity of blackness).

In these early years of the twenty‐first century, scholars of African American literature and theory have been gathering, at a wide range of conferences and other events, to begin to theorize the emergent forms, moods, and stories that distinguish twenty‐first century African American literature from earlier flows. These forums, looking at new directions in African American literature and theory, propelled the questions explored in this book’s reshaping of the title of Kenneth W. Warren’s What Was African American Literature? (2011) into the question of what it is (on the lower frequencies).

So many scholars make me hear these lower frequencies of black aesthetics. I thank Cheryl Wall, Eleanor Traylor, Hortense Spillers, Haki Madhubuti, Houston A. Baker, Dana Williams, Kokahvah Zauditu‐Selassie, Fred Moten, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Kevin Quashie, Candice Jenkins, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Soyica Colbert, Brent Edwards, Erica Edwards, Evie Shockley, L.H. Stallings, Jennifer DeVere Brody, Stephen Best, Yogita Goyal, Aida Levy‐Hussen, Carter Mathes, Badia Ahad, Howard Rambsy, Meta DuEwa Jones, Greg Thomas, Lawrence Jackson, Koritha Mitchell, Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Dagmawi Woubshet, Sharon Holland, Douglas Jones, Robert Reid Pharr, Mark Anthony Neal, George Hutchinson, and many more. I thank Richard Samson for his consummate work as editor. I thank the anonymous readers for their great insight.