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African American Literary Criticism in the Present Moment

Bibliographic Data

ID23157355
AuthorsKenneth W Warren (corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume34
Issue1
Pages369-379
Publication date2022-02-23
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Literary History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0896-7148 • E-ISSN: 1468-4365
PublisherOxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1093/alh/ajab082
OpenAlexW4244601172
LanguageEN
References cited15

For more than a century, scholars of Black literature have sought to align a critical project focused on identifying and celebrating Black distinctiveness with a social project aimed at redressing racial inequality. This commitment to Black distinctiveness announces itself as a project on behalf of “the race” as a whole, but has always been, and remains, a project and politics guided in the first instance by the needs and outlook of the Black professional classes. Over the first half of the twentieth century, this cultural project achieved some real successes: politically, it helped discredit the moral and intellectual legitimacy of the Jim Crow order that in various ways affected all Black Americans; culturally, it placed Black writers in the vanguard of a modernist project predicated on multicultural pluralism. Since the 1970s the limitations of this project, culturally and politically, have become increasingly evident. Blind to the class dimension of their efforts, literary scholars continue to misrepresent the historical/political nature of the project of Black distinction as a property of cultural texts themselves. Overestimating the efficacy of race-specific social policies, these scholars disparage the universalist social policies that would most effectively benefit a majority of Black Americans.

Legitimacy · Optimal distinctiveness theory · Political science · Politics · Racism · Sociology · Gender Studies · Law · Race, History, and American Society

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