A History of the African American NovelAfrican American Writing

The particular brand of recuperative and archival work done by Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, Christina Sharpe, Frank B. Wilderson III, and others over the last twenty years has reshaped the landscape of African American literary criticism, clarifying that, in its many disciplinary genres, the field has long been propelled by the profound psychic consequences of antiblackness, whether in its archival or political or aesthetic dimensions. However, not all have been persuaded by this critical turn. Stephen Best has recently criticized, in his 2018 None Like Us, the move toward what scholars have called the melancholic historicism of the last two decades. Best, like Kenneth W. Warren a few years before him, articulates a discomfort with the formative affective tenor of contemporary black studies and interrogates the coherence of the black literary tradition. None Like Us shares not only the resistant polemic quality that defined Warren’s What Was African American Literature? (2011) but also the rejection of the very historical ground through which African American literary criticism has long understood itself. Two recent contributions to African American literary criticism—Valerie Babb’s A History of the African American Novel and Werner Sollors’s African American Writing: A Literary Approach—remind us that Best and Warren remain outliers in the pitched battle over how the field understands its own historical terms.Babb’s literary history of the African American novel is exhaustive and will be a boon to teachers and new scholars alike. The book is divided into two parts: first, a chronicling of the trajectory of the black novel, from its roots in early black newspaper culture to its contemporary postblack iterations; second, a review of the black novel’s many and disparate generic forms. It aims to be encyclopedic in its coverage of periods (the first part is organized by decades: 1850s–1900s, 1900s–1920s, etc.) and genres (the neoslave narrative, the detective novel, the speculative novel, pulp, the graphic novel and other visual media, and novels of the diaspora) and is supplemented with an appendix of primary text bibliographies for more than 130 authors as well as a brief critical bibliography for each of its chronological periods.What’s more, it offers itself as a descriptive history of African American intellectual thought, situating each of its many authors and texts amid the pressing critical and political issues of their particular moments. For example, Babb argues that Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends (1857) and Martin Delany’s Blake; or, The Huts of America (1859, 1861–62), like all the early black novels published in the 1850s, participate in the same political project of using fiction to “write new histories” (28), while also deftly distinguishing between the competing stakes that underwrite Webb’s narrative of free black assimilation in the north and Delany’s revolutionary proposal for revolt among enslaved peoples in the transnational south. Babb similarly demonstrates a command of the novel’s early formal innovations as a function of those same self-conscious impulses, charting the ways William Wells Brown’s Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter (1853) and Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative (circa 1885) borrow from the romantic and sentimental genres that underwrote leisure narratives by white authors to insert black writers into their own burgeoning literary tradition while simultaneously critiquing those same conventions.Babb maintains this anthological approach to black literary history throughout the book. Brief readings of the first professional class of black writers, including Charles W. Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, Frances Harper, Sutton Griggs, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and W. E. B. Du Bois, suggest that, as access to publishing institutions grew, black novels were increasingly able to “re-appropriate black experience from white writers” (69) whose redemption narratives of antebellum life dominated conventional histories of slavery. The evolution of black aesthetic traditions dominates the middle of the book’s history, which charts the ways that theories of cultural blackness—orality, black folk rituals, musical vernacular, doubling—began to produce collective identities and eventually a cultural nationalism. Babb tracks this expressive culture through the Harlem Renaissance and then in the realism and modernism of the post–World War II period (though Babb’s assessment of the midcentury work of Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ann Petry, and Ralph Ellison makes only a single mention of the formative quality of black writers’ relationship with the Left).Babb’s book makes perhaps its most compelling intervention into the contemporary critical landscape of African American studies in its assessment of the last half century, the post–Jim Crow era that is the subject of Warren’s provocative thesis. Babb assesses the Black Arts movement (largely the formative work of Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal but also the contributions of less well-known figures such as Carlene Hatcher Polite, who challenged the movement’s largely masculinist orientation) as a call to those “seeking a philosophy through which modern blackness might function” (154). And though A History of the African American Novel never explicitly rebuts Warren’s thesis (in fact, his name doesn’t appear in the book), its comprehensive engagement with both the many experimental forms of the black novel across the last half century and the burgeoning corpus of African American critical theory makes plain the case for both a vibrant and an intellectually fortified literary tradition.African American Writing: A Literary Approach, a collection of a dozen essays published by Werner Sollors between 1981 and 2011, is narrower in its ambitions, with an attention to single authors and an inevitable distance from our contemporary critical landscape owing to its retrospective character. Sollors’s essays, at the times of their publication, probed lesser-known writers and texts, including Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789) and Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends, and his attention to African American drama—including deft allusive readings of Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro (first performed in 1964, published in 1969) and Baraka’s Dutchman (first performed in 1964, published in 1964)—lent critical prominence to touchstones of black theater.But while Sollors’s brief introduction to the volume gestures to the unsettled tenor of African American literary studies, suggesting that the subjects of each of his essays “resist[ed] notions of a prescriptive aesthetic” (4) for black writing by turning to a “transnational and transracial” intellectual influence (11), it does not sustain a critical engagement with the arguments of the collection’s own essays or endeavor to situate them in the new century. And while of course it is true, as Sollors notes, that many of the central figures of the black literary canon—Equiano, Du Bois, and Richard Wright are Sollors’s most obvious examples here—looked outside the United States for political solace, the introduction does little to orient this internationalism across the collected essays or amid the tumult loosed by Warren’s polemic. Still, new readers of Sollors’s foundational work will be impressed by the breadth of his engagement with both seminal and less widely read figures in the field and by the insistent and incisive historicizing that characterizes each of the essays, situating each of his subjects within not only a national political context but also a broader internationalist frame

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