ABSTRACT
Although literature remains potent in contemporary America, its influence has been diminished by the Internet and by popular culture, especially film, television, and music. The last two decades of the twentieth century saw a number of black celebrities rise to superstardom. The rise of Oprah Winfrey as a media figure, businesswoman, and tastemaker was astounding and unprecedented, and continues to be: few contemporary figures match her cultural influence. Black athletes like Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods became ubiquitous for their product endorsements as much as for their athletic prowess. Spike Lee earned a place in the pantheon of great American filmmakers. This trend has continued in the first decades of the twenty-first century. Rap music crossed into the mainstream and hip-hop’s most prominent power couple – Jay-Z and Beyoncé – are in the cultural stratosphere. And, of course, the United States elected and reelected its first black president, Barack Obama. The media advances and reinforces the perception that African Americans are no longer denied access to the American dream of prosperity. These examples of black success tend to mask the harsh realities that continue to
plague a high percentage of African Americans. In terms of income, education, and rates of incarceration, there is still a tremendous gap between black and white America. The deaths of a number of black citizens at the hands of white police officers have exacerbated tensions between those groups that have existed since the Civil Rights era (and well before). Contemporary black literature is troubled by the notion (or myth) that America is “post-racial:” that the scars of history have healed and that individuals fail or succeed entirely based on their own merit rather than by social factors related to race. Whether or not black writers are writing for or about an underclass, they often remain sensitive to the plight and existence of that population, perhaps as a way of complicating the narrative that the United States has finally moved past its racist ways into a harmonious, raceless future. At the same time, many contemporary black writers resist writing exclusively about
the racial struggle for equality as it was expressed in earlier decades. Now, more than ever before, black writers demonstrate a willingness to write about any subject they wish. Contemporary African American literature has grown in conjunction with a
welcoming and active academic interest in it. The rise of Black Studies programs in the 1970s and 1980s brought forth prominent literary critics like Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Eleanor Traylor, Houston Baker, and Trudier Harris. Literary and cultural icons of earlier literary periods, such as Toni Morrison, Angela Davis, Ishmael Reed, and John Edgar Wideman, have landed positions at wealthy universities. Contemporary black writers tend to be highly educated and intellectual, exacerbating the class distinctions that trouble the world they sometimes write about. The same could be said about African American literary criticism, which took a turn toward the esoteric in the 1980s, along with literary studies more generally, as literary theory ushered in more sophisticated discourse (occasionally at the cost of clarity). Gates, one of the people who steered criticism in that direction, relates a humorous anecdote about a dense lecture he gave to undergraduates at Howard University. It met with silence. Finally a student asked a question: “Yeah, brother, all we want to know is, was Booker T. a Tom or not?” Gates was troubled over “the yawning chasm between our critical discourse and the traditions they discourse on” (Loose Canons, 20). The chasm seems to be widening. Gates’s anecdote revives essential questions: what is black literature and who are
its various audiences? Kenneth Warren’s provocatively titled study What Was African American Literature? (2011) argues that the circumstances that produced a body of recognizably African American literature have changed irrevocably, and he goes so far as to suggest that they changed long ago, more than a half-century prior to his study, at the end of the segregation era (from the late nineteenth century through to the 1950s). He writes:
Whether African American writers of the segregation era acquiesced in or kicked against the label, they knew what was at stake in accepting or contesting their identification as Negro writers. By contrast, the entailments of being regarded or not being regarded as an African American writer at the present moment are comparatively less clear. My argument presumes, then, that African American literature can be treated as a historical designation.
