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Stephen Colbert:

“You have said you don’t necessarily like to be pigeonholed as an African American writer. What would you like me to pigeonhole you as? (Audience laughs) Because I have to categorize everybody. […] How should I just see you as a category? If you don’t want to be an African American writer, how should I think of you?” (italics mine)

Toni Morrison:

“As an American writer.” (Audience cheers) (2014)

When Toni Morrison insists, in a 1993 interview, that African American literature “pulls from something that’s closer to the edge,” she makes the idea of African American literature sound more like an energy force than an enterprise, marketing structure, or stable, mappable tradition.¹ Morrison’s emphasis, in this same interview, on the “more human future” of the idea of African American literature, clearly underscores the constant rewriting of what it means to be human in African American literature, but Morrison also gestures toward the idea of African American literature as that which is both “here” and “not yet here.” The interview unfolds as follows:

MORRISON:

I would like to write novels that were unmistakably mine, but nevertheless fit first into African American traditions and second of all, this whole thing called literature.

INTERVIEWER:

First African American?

MORRISON:

Yes.

INTERVIEWER:

… rather than the whole of literature?

MORRISON:

Oh yes.

INTERVIEWER:

Why?

MORRISON:

It’s richer. It has more complex sources. It pulls from something that’s closer to the edge, it’s much more modern. It has a human future. (1993)

For Morrison, what is modern about the idea of African American literature is its evocation of “a more human future.” Alain Locke, one of the prime theorists of black modernism, offers one way to understand Morrison’s gesture to the black modernist “more human future.” In 1925, as Locke thinks about the style of the young New Negro Movement poets, he muses, “Our poets have stopped speaking for the Negro—they speak as Negroes. Where formerly they spoke to others and tried to interpret, they now speak to their own and try to express. They have stopped posing, being nearer the attainment of poise.”² The difference between “pose” and “poise” is the difference between a state of identity, overdetermined by an external gaze, and a state of self‐possession (even if that possession is what Fred Moten describes as being possessed by dispossession).³ When Morrison, in the 1993 interview, insists that the idea of African American literature is edge work and profoundly modern, she gestures toward what Locke describes as the black modernist, New Negro art of no longer speaking to others and trying to interpret. For Locke, the is‐ness of African American literature emerges when writers stop “speaking for” black people and “speak as” black people (when they “stop posing” and approach the “attainment of poise”).⁴

Are there formal lines (or wavy lines that seem more like vibrations) that separate African American literature that “speaks as black” and American literature at large? Is there anything distinctive about black literature that allows us to know this is what makes it black? Is the only distinctive feature the fact that the authors are black?

African American literature is a strategic abstraction. When literary scholars were convinced that Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was written by a white abolitionist, it was not framed as a foundational text in a tradition of African American literature. Now, its tropes are routinely used to help define a tradition. In the late 1980s, when it was established that Incidents was written by Harriet Jacobs, the book became a centerpiece in the architecture of African American literature. Proving the black authorship (and reading Harriet Jacobs’ letters that emphasize her desire to “give …[my story] from my own hand”) made it possible to read this slave narrative as a literal expression of the black desire to break out of white‐dominated space, and an expression of a desire for a black interior (and not only a desire for a literary transaction across a color line).⁵ It is easy to critique the equation of black identity and black book, but what if we let go of the very impulse to critique the limits of the equation of the blackness of the author and the blackness of the text, and lean into the is‐ness produced by the texts that, for better or worse, have been marked as “African American”?

When Walter Benn Michaels expresses frustration with the emphasis on feeling in reader response interpretations of literature, he unintentionally expresses the inexhaustible possibilities of “is‐ness” that animate this book’s “reading for feeling” approach. Michaels asserts, “it [literature] is made literally uninterpretable but also literally inexhaustible since how it is perceived—not only what it looks like but what it makes you feel like, what it makes you think of—must be a function not only of what it is but of who you are.”⁶ In What is African American Literature?, I am letting the “what it is” bleed into “who we are” (we people whose “quiet walk down the street,” as Gwendolyn Brooks mused, “is a speech to the people. Is a rebuke, is a plea, is a school”).⁷ I am re‐hearing Fred Moten’s words in In The Break: “What is needed is an improvisation of the transition from descent to cut […]” (70). The line of descent (the genealogy of an is‐ness of African American literature) is a cut‐up formation, a cut‐up blackness (blackness felt and lived by cut‐up people). The idea of the “transition from descent to cut” helps me arrive at an understanding of how the history of the African American literary tradition is cut up when we focus on the black feeling (readers’ and authors’) that produces whatever African American literature is (outside of historical determinism and inside black improvisation). Ralph Ellison’s famous musing, in Invisible Man, on what it means to be “outside of history” offers a way of understanding the unmappable nature of the is‐ness of African American literature.⁸ Just as Ellison’s unnamed narrator meditates on what it means to be “outside of history” as he stares at young men wearing oversized zoot suits as they wait on a subway platform for the train to arrive, I see the is‐ness of African American literature as the feeling of black excess (as the aesthetic edge that cannot be historicized because the is‐ness is what is felt as one waits on the platform and is pulled into the zoot suit). Ellison’s Invisible Man asks himself, “What if history was a gambler, instead of a force in a laboratory experiment […]?” (441). This question is reshaped when we imagine what African American literature is outside of its reduction to the cultural production of black people needing to write ourselves into a history that erased us. Echoing the Invisible Man’s question about the zoot‐suiters, on the subway platform, who are “running and dodging the forces of history” (441), the question becomes, “What if African American literature is a gambler, instead of a force in a laboratory experiment?” The black affective atmosphere (what really distinguishes African American literature) is not felt when one gets on the train of historical determinist approaches to African American literature.

My emphasis on what is felt can make us rethink Robert Stepto’s dismissal of feeling (as a way of interpreting African American literature) during the late 1970s black literary theory attempt to break out of sociological and “non‐literary” approaches to teaching African American literature.⁹ In a key passage in Afro‐American Literature: The Reconstruction of Instruction (1978), Stepto makes the turn to “feeling” seem like the stale approaches to the literature that crush the art and make all study of African American literature a historical or sociological study of African Americans. He writes:

Those students who, as Ralph Ellison reports, persist in the illusion that they possess a ‘genetic’ knowledge of black culture, may very well compose yet another all‐purpose ‘black’ essay. Others will take the harder but more rewarding path delineated—and in fact demanded—by the multiple forms of literacy, not “feeling,” and draw from all their resources the requisite vision and energy to see author, text, and tradition alike. (15)

But the role of feeling in the is‐ness of African American literature can be a deep refusal of the impulse to reduce the art to history and sociology. Feeling is what matters most when we wonder what African American literature is within what Raymond Williams calls a “sociology of culture,” a “sociology of a new kind,” that makes room for culture as a “structure of feeling.”¹⁰

The is‐ness of African American literature is also a feeling of the present. In What is the Present?, Michael North wonders, “Does it make sense to think of the present as radically distinct from the time around it, from which it seems to emerge and into which it seems to blend?” The present “is‐ness” (the “new” and “contemporary”) of African American literature has been a recursive conversation. The contemporary (as proclaimed, in 1970s vernacular, as “what it is, what it is”) is, of course, restaged constantly. The New Negro movement of the 1920s and 1930s announced this newness in such an emphatic manner, the words “new breed” were mobilized during the 1960s and 70s Black Arts movement, and Trey Ellis’ 1989 essay “The New Black Aesthetic” anticipates all of the “newness” dramatized in twenty‐first century frames of the “new black.” The contemporary (the newness) is constantly evoked, throughout the twentieth and twenty‐first century, as black writing continues to be a way that people feel less shackled by “what was.”

Like Michael Gillespie’s approach to the “idea” of black film, I frame my questions around the “idea” of African American literature, as opposed to an approach that aims to identify texts that are in or outside the “fact” of African American literature.¹¹ The idea of African American literature is different from the “structure” of African American literature (that which Henry Louis Gates, in such a generative fashion, uncovered in The Signifying Monkey in 1987 as the field of African American literary criticism was set in motion). Gates brilliantly studies intertextuality in order to unveil the structure of African American literature. I focus on affect (the blush, the shiver, the vibration, and the twitch and wink) in order to unveil the limits of historicizing approaches to the “idea” of African American literature. African American literature is an archive of feelings, the tradition of a tension between individual affect and historical structure. As Alexis Pauline Gumbs writes, “Breathing seems individual but it is also so profoundly collective.”¹² I approach the collectivity of African American literature as acts of breathing in charged air. The notion of charged air opens up a new dimension of literary tradition, a sense that “tradition” could be re‐felt as the sensuous, atmospheric experience of texts. At this late date in the unfolding of African American literary studies, we need more room for an understanding of African American literary flows as the circulation of affective energy against and within the structures of history. Whatever the shared flow is, it is a flow of feeling created as books are read alongside each other (what John Akomfrah calls an “affective proximity”).¹³

Amiri Baraka conveys the idea of tradition as atmosphere when he begins his 2005 poetry volume The Book of Monk with an epigraph that includes the words “the air running in and out of you.” The practice of African American literature often makes the shared atmosphere of affect matter as much as the themes of black life that are often viewed as the private property of African American literature. Lauren Berlant, in Cruel Optimism (2011), foregrounds the “shared atmosphere” of affect. She writes, “[A]ffective atmospheres are shared, not solitary, and […] bodies are continuously busy judging their environments and responding to the atmospheres in which they find themselves” (15). Approaching African American literature as an affective atmosphere changes the women studies’ paradigm of “writing on the body.” When we think of African American literature as a shared atmosphere, we arrive at “writing with the body.” In the essay “Souls Grown Deep” (2006), in which Amiri Baraka directly focuses on the “is‐ness” of African American literature, when he refers to the “creative is ness of what are” (Razor, 394), he describes writing with the body through formulations such as the “poet is an organ of registered flesh” and “a real cry from a real person.” And, in “Technology and Ethos,” Baraka makes writing with the body gain full shape when he imagines the “expression‐scriber” (alternative typewriter) that involves the entire body, not only fingertips. He writes:

A typewriter?—why shd it only make use of the tips of the fingers as contact points of flowing multi directional creativity. If I invented a word placing machine, an ‘expression‐scriber’, if you will, then I would have a kind of instrument into which I could step & sit or sprawl or hang & use not only my fingers to make words express feelings but elbows, feet, head, behind, and all the sounds I wanted, screams, grunts, taps, itches […]¹⁴

In M Archive: After the End of the World, Alexis Pauline Gumbs imagines that fingertips can do what Baraka needs the entire body to do. She writes, “they attended to their fingertips” (51). As Gumbs describes the intensity of the “pulsing fingers” and “muscle memory” (and the “channeling” of memory “into hands”), she, like Baraka, foregrounds the process of writing with the body.¹⁵ The body of black literature is produced by the tension of the flesh that has been named the “black body.” The tension is the “open system of nervousness” of African American literature.¹⁶ As Ashon T. Crawley theorizes about the breath of black aesthetics, he presents this idea of the “open system of nervousness,” and leans on Susan Buck‐Morss’ insistence that “the nervous system is not contained within the body’s limits” (Crawley 52‐53). An open system of black nervousness (an open system of black feeling) distinguishes African American literature from other literary traditions.

Jean Toomer links the words “emotion” and “Negro” in a letter, written in 1922, to Waldo Frank. Toomer states, “The only time that I think ‘Negro’ is when I want a peculiar emotion which is associated with this name” (131, Modernism and Affect). We can easily read this confession as Toomer’s internalization of a racialized primitivist notion of black passion, but this confession might also push us to re‐read Toomer’s Cane as a classic example of how the practice of African American literature often becomes the practice of working narrative for its most affective possibilities. When we read Cane through this lens of affect, the opening image “Her skin is like dusk / on the eastern horizon/ O cant you see it” is a striking image of black blush. The most striking image of affect as uncontained intensity and as a way of understanding the interaction between the personal and the impersonal may be the opening words in Toomer’s “Fern”: “Face flowed in her eyes.” The loss of the definite article signals that this aesthetic flow is the transmission of affect, not the transmission of the “definite article” of literary historicism that disciplines affect (that makes an archive of feelings become an archive of who is definitively within or outside “African American literature”).

Alice Walker, in In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens (1983), advises that “we” (those of us who are invested in the ongoing tradition of black aesthetics) keep Cane and let Toomer go.¹⁷ But how could we ever hold the aesthetic of evanescence that shapes the opening affect‐laden portraits in Cane? Fred Moten, in The Feel Trio, writes, “Cutting around corners puts me in mind of jean toomer, I think I’ll change my name to gene tumor. I want to be a stream tuner, unfurled in tongues that won’t belong in anybody’s mouth, mass swerving from the law of tongues.” The practice of cutting pivots on an alternative kinship that can hurt and make one feel like “gene tumor,” or make one feel like a “stream tuner,” a creator of streams of feeling. As Brian Massumi explains, “[F]eelings have a way of folding into each other, resonating together, interfering with each other, mutually intensifying, all in unquantifiable ways” (1). In What is African American Literature, I’m cutting around corners and feeling this flow of feelings that creates a literary tradition built on disruption, surprise, and contingency.

Gérard Genette writes, ‘‘More than a boundary or a sealed border, the paratext is, rather, a threshold’’ (Paratexts, 1–2). The idea of African American literature is the idea of entering into a black book. These words “black book” are used during the 1960s and 70s Black Arts Movement (BAM) as a way of thinking about the textual production of an entrance into a black interior. After the BAM production of black books, the idea of African American literature remains a generative surface, a frame that remains a frame, not a threshold into an understanding of interiority that is the antithesis of surface. The practice of sharing a critical edge makes literary tradition become less of an historical entity and more of an unmappable conversation, what Felice Blake refers to (in Black Love, Black Hate: Intimate Antagonisms in African American Literature) as the town hall meeting of African American literature (the town meeting that cannot meet anywhere else). African American literature is the performance of the shared black edge of a conversation.

In Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition (2005), Cheryl Wall thinks of literary tradition as a line that is worried. She writes, “In using the line as a metaphor for ‘literary tradition,’ I do not intend to imply a strictly linear progression. A worried line is not a straight line” (13). A shared edge is a way of thinking about the crooked lines, in the twenty‐first century, that are making the word “tradition” become what Dionne Brand, in the novel In Another Place, Not Here, calls “not rip enough.” The ripped up textual conditions of possibility is what some writers are discovering now as they make us feel what Tracy Smith, in Life on Mars, sees as the edges that are too linked to feel like edges as opposed to curves. Smith, in the poem “Sci‐Fi,” hails an art that has “no edges, but curves” (7). A curve‐like edge is a way of understanding the precarious, shared edge produced by the twenty‐first century beyond the black book impulse, embodied in texts such as Percival Everett’s turn‐of‐the‐century novel Erasure and Claudia Rankine’s shiny, white book Citizen.