Literary Criticism, U.S.: Scholarship in the Twenty-First Century

Literary criticism in the early twenty-first century accepts and interrogates historical and political influences on African-American literature. This willingness to read literature within specific cultural contexts has led to the emergence of literary cultural studies. Thus African-American literary criticism has developed even more sophisticated, interdisciplinary approaches to literature by welcoming new ways to explore and critique gender, sexuality, class, nation, and culture within the entire history of African-American literature.

Cultural and historical approaches to literary criticism have reevaluated claims that, for instance, do not recognize the impact of Frederick Douglass on American and African-American letters. While past critics generally understood Douglass primarily as a political activist, newer critics are rereading Douglass as a crucial figure in the American Renaissance of the nineteenth century and as a major influence in African-American letters. Saidiya V. Hartman's Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997) and Fred Moten's In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (2003) consciously accept intersections of politics and aesthetics as they also position Douglass at the very beginning of their inquiries. Like many of their peers, Hartman and Moten use interdisciplinarity to produce an African-American literary criticism within and beyond the color-line. Even as they position black American literature at the center of their investigations, they also use critical tools such as Marxist theory, psychoanalysis, visual theory, and the law to interrogate and extend the limits of African-American literary criticism.

In her book Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (2000), Siobhan B. Somerville argues that race and sexuality are related categories, both crucially dependent on the color-line. Her readings of novels by Pauline Hopkins, James Weldon Johnson, and Jean Toomer mark an important development in African-American literary criticism in which race, sexuality, and gender together are necessary concerns. Besides Somerville's views, Robert F. Reid-Pharr's Conjugal Union: The Body, the House, and the Black American (1999) explores antebellum African-American literature through lenses of race, sexuality, gender, and class. Feminist literary critics have helped to open these new ways of thinking through gender, sexuality, and class. Carla Peterson, Valerie Smith, Hortense J. Spillers, Claudia Tate, and Cheryl A. Wall are some of the most influential scholars of the 1980s and 1990s. Their work continues to shape the most recent developments in African-American literary criticism.

The question of subjectivity as a political and aesthetic concern has influenced recent developments. Since the publication of Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), literary criticism has even more carefully explored the internationalisms of African-American authors. Brent Hayes Edwards's The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (2003) and Michelle M. Wright's Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora (2004), for example, have theorized Black American subjectivity and Black American literature within the transnational context of an African diaspora. These internationalist perspectives within African-American literary criticism have helped reshape discussions of the Harlem Renaissance, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Richard Wright even as they recover black women intellectuals and authors who have always been a forceful presence in the making of African-American literature.

Bibliography

Dubey, Madhu. Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Edwards, Brent Hayes. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

Reid-Pharr, Robert F. Conjugal Union: The Body, the House, and the Black American. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Rushdy, Ashraf A. Remembering Generations: Race and Family in Contemporary African American Fiction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

Somerville, Siobhan B. Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000.

Spillers, Hortense J. Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Tate, Claudia. Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

shelly eversley (2005)