Robert Elliot Fox

Department of English
Southern Illinois University
bfox@siu.edu

 

The Norton Anthology of African American Literature.Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay, general editors. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. Includes an audio companion compact disc with 21 selections.

 

Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition. Patricia Liggins Hill, general editor. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. Includes an audio companion compact disc with 26 selections.

 

The publication of these two massive anthologies–each is over 2,000 pages long–is a milestone in the history of African American Studies and testifies to the significance and strength of the African American tradition of literature.

 

Many of us long have been aware of the Norton anthology project, initiated by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., which was in the works for a decade and was eagerly, even impatiently, awaited by those who recognized the importance of the venture. I first learned of the Riverside project, however, when I received an advertising flier about the book early in 1997. Though there inevitably is a good deal of overlap in terms of authors and works, it would be wrong to see the existence of these two anthologies as a case of redundancy. (Indeed, these are not the only African American literature anthologies currently available, but they are, by a longshot, the most formidable.) Certain ongoing skirmishes notwithstanding, by now there is widespread agreement on the merits of many of the works chosen or proposed for inclusion in the African American literary canon, but there is not the same sort of consensus regarding the inner dynamics of that canon, the logics of its unfolding, its possible unifying principles. We have here two lengthy takes on the very important and surely controversial topic of what we might term the shape (and the shaping forces) of the canon.

 

For those who wish to keep score, the Norton anthology contains the work of 120 writers, of whom 52 are women. The Riverside anthology features over 150 authors, including more than 70 women. There will be (there already have been) complaints about the exclusion or inclusion of particular authors or works, a controversy of tastes, temperaments and allegiances that no anthology or anthology-makers can hope to avoid. (I’ll toss a few cowries of my own into this debate later in this review.) But this is a battleground for critics and partisans. Strictly from a pedagogical perspective, there’s little to detain us, since the two collections are, on the whole, so extremely rich. In any event, time constraints in courses in which these texts are likely to be utilized unavoidably require a good deal of selectivity, and many teachers will want to supplement any sweeping anthology with additional materials of their own choosing, so debates over what’s in and what’s out in the end have more to do with the politics of canon formation than they have to do with the practical business of conducting a course.

 

The Norton anthology is organized rather straightforwardly into seven periods: The Vernacular Tradition; The Literature of Slavery and Freedom: 1746-1865; Literature of the Reconstruction to the New Negro Renaissance: 1865-1919; Harlem Renaissance: 1919-1940; Realism, Naturalism, Modernism: 1940-1960; The Black Arts Movement: 1960-1970; Literature Since 1970.

 

The Riverside anthology is divided into six major periods of “African American History and Culture”: 1619-1808, 1808-1865, 1865-1915, 1915-1945, 1945-1960, 1960 to the Present. In keeping with the volume’s title, the internal organization of each of these divisions reflects the call and response patterns that the editors see as characterizing, not just black performance modes, but the evolution of African American tradition itself. For example, the second period has the heading, “Tell Ole Pharaoh, Let My People Go,” and is structured around a “Southern Folk Call for Resistance” and a “Northern Literary Response: Rights for Blacks, Rights for Women,” while the last section, dealing with literature since 1960, is called “Cross Road Blues,” and is structured around a “Folk Call for Social Revolution and Political Strategy” and a “Call for Critical Debate,” answered by “Voices of the New Black Renaissance, Women’s Voice’s of Self-Definition, Voices of the New Wave.” (Those wishing to view the entire list of contents for this anthology should go to the Houghton Mifflin Web site at

 

http://www.hmco.com/cgi-bin/college/catalog_1999_4/
college.cgi?FNC=GetTitleDesc_Atitle_html_241.0.)

 

The musical allusions in the section titles in the Riverside anthology recall the musical phrases, taken from what he calls the sorrow songs, which W.E.B. DuBois sets at the head of each chapter of his monumental text The Souls of Black Folk (three chapters of which are to be found in the Riverside, whereas the work is included in its entirety in the Norton anthology). These quotes from the spirituals serve as a powerful reminder of the extent to which oral/aural expression animates black aesthetics and is embodied in the tradition of black writing. The Norton anthology gathers its vernacular selections (spirituals, gospel, rap, etc.) together at the beginning, before the literature sections. The Riverside, too, puts a variety of vernacular materials at the front of the book, including some African examples; but in addition, the Riverside situates vernacular elements throughout the text, so that, for example, blues lyrics, worksongs, etc. precede the Harlem Renaissance writers, and contemporary folktales and rap lyrics (including a rap from John Edgar Wideman’s novel Philadelphia Fire [1990]) lead off the section dealing with the contemporary period. The black vernacular tradition in its fullness has had much to do with the freedom of black writing, and with the depths of our understanding as readers of the greater African American cultural text of which black literary texts are but one mode of expression, and the Riverside anthology does a better job of highlighting these crucial intersections.

 

In the opinion of Vince Passaro, who reviewed it along with Gates’s Colored People and Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, one transgression of the Norton anthology is that “the theme of ‘the vernacular tradition’ [is] abused in service of a favorite social theory of contemporary academics: a denial of the efficacy of actual individual authorship and a new definition of literature as a form of cultural production, the result of ‘call and response’ between speaker and listener, the expression of whole communities” (73-4). (One can only imagine Passaro’s reaction to the Riverside anthology!) Passaro goes on to say, “I, for one, have always preferred the late Harold Brodkey’s definition of literature, pure and explicit in its hegemonic tendencies: ‘I speak, you listen'” (74). Given the extent to which African Americans were for so long forced to attend silently to their putative masters’ voices, one certainly could sympathize with any black author who finally demanded an opportunity to be heard uninterruptedly (it’s “our turn,” as Ishmael Reed once avowed); yet deep within the black vernacular tradition, the notion of “I speak, you participate” is not an academic theory but an actuality. Furthermore, the extent to which early African American texts were necessarily representative texts made them, their individual authorship notwithstanding, expressions “of whole communities.” This is a circumstance the Black Arts Movement sought to underscore and also to exploit, though its chief polemicists erred in the prescriptiveness of their approach and in their unwillingness to take sufficiently into account the changed condition of “the changing same” one century down the road from slavery.

 

Passaro informs us that The Norton Anthology of African American Literature became the fastest-selling of Norton’s numerous anthologies, with more than 30,000 sold in the first month of publication. (I tried to get sales figures for the Riverside anthology from the publisher, Houghton Mifflin, but was informed, not too surprisingly, that this information was “proprietary.”) One reason for the terrific success of the Norton, in Passaro’s judgment, is that African American studies is “the most popular academic subject of our time” (70-71). If this is true (and it is an assertion that could be debated), such a triumph did not come easily. To begin with, African American literature entered the academy in the 1960s as a result of the struggle to implement Black Studies in America’s colleges and universities. But the victories achieved in these battles were never total. As Nellie McKay reminds us in her guest column in the May 1998 issue of PMLA, “From the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s, adversaries dismissed African American literature as a fad, warned interested white graduate students away from the courses, and discouraged and sometimes even refused to supervise Ph.D. dissertations that focused on black writers” (361). Nevertheless, Passaro is correct in his claim that African American studies has been “enormously influential” within the U.S. academy and in “the culture at large” (70). This is true in part because Black Studies blew down the doors, so to speak, that kept academia largely monocultural (not long ago, we would have said “white,” but whiteness, too, now has its studies, which are beginning to reveal its complexity as they unravel its construction).

 

Anthologies of African American literature have a genealogy that predates the Civil War. In an interview with Nicholas A. Basbanes, Gates notes that altogether there have been “perhaps as many as 160 anthologies of African American literature.” Those interested in a detailed survey of the most significant of these texts should consult Keneth Kinnamon’s informative article, “Anthologies of African-American Literature from 1845 to 1994,” in Callaloo 20.2 (1997). Although he begins by examining two collections from the nineteenth century, Kinnamon argues that the “pioneer general anthology in the field” is the Anthology of American Negro Literature (1929) compiled by V. F. Calverton, “a white Marxist critic” (461). But “[n]o single work has had greater influence in establishing the canon of African-American literature” than The Negro Caravan (1941), edited by Sterling A. Brown, Arthur P. Davis, and Ulysses Lee, a text Kinnamon refers to as “a true classic” (462). In a related essay in the same issue of Callaloo, “Arthur P. Davis: Forging the Way for the Formation of the Canon,” Jennifer Jordan writes that Davis, Brown and Lee “were engaged in a war to establish a literary tradition and to prevent its perversion by either cultural provincialism or racist distortion” (450). Many things occurred over the intervening half century that prevented the African American literary tradition from becoming established in a safe and settled manner, some of the most significant being desegregation and the more or less simultaneous advent of black power/cultural nationalism, Black Studies, and the Black Arts Movement. This is why, in a discussion which he and co-editor Nellie McKay had with David Gergen on The NewsHour on Public Television on March 7, 1997, Gates emphasized that “we are re-assembling the tradition” (my emphasis), thus underscoring the fluid and dialogical nature of both “the tradition” and the effort to claim it, shape it, understand it.

 

McKay, in her PMLA piece, also refers to The Negro Caravan as “splendid,” and goes on to cite Kinnamon’s own Black Writers of America (1972), co-edited with Richard Barksdale, as “[a]mong the best of the comprehensive texts,” arguing that it “has only been superseded in importance by the new anthologies of the 1990s” (367). Kinnamon himself states that Black Writers of America “has sold well over 70,000 copies” (“Anthologies” 464), presumably a respectable figure; but contrasting this number of 70,000 sold over a quarter of a century with the 30,000 copies of the Norton anthology sold in one month (the latest figures I have are 50,000 copies in print by early 1998), one gains some sense of the heightened “charge” that has gathered around the field of African American letters and the broader discipline of Africana studies (which includes Africa and the Caribbean). Nobel prizes for literature awarded to Wole Soyinka (Nigeria) in 1986, Derek Walcott (St. Lucia) in 1992, and Toni Morrison (United States) in 1993 have been acknowledgements of the superlative degree of achievement of authors across the African continuum. (It might have been expected that the first black author to win a Nobel prize would be an American, given the “press” of American influence on the global scene and the importance of the black presence in America, but there is more than poetic justice in the fact that, coincidentally or not, the order of the awards followed the historical trajectory of the black experience, from Africa to the Caribbean to the United States.) At the same time, these awards (and others, including various Pulitzers, National Book Awards, and MacArthurs) clearly have helped to elevate the stock of black writing to a heretofore unprecedented level.

 

The individual most responsible for helping to bring African American Studies more into the foreground of public consciousness is the aforementioned Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who, between the time he first conceived the Norton anthology project and its actual appearance more than ten years later, has seen his own intellectual stock skyrocket dramatically, from ivory tower stardom to international eminence. Gates has brought an entrepreneurial energy and zeal to the field of African American studies (Cheryl Bentsen, author of the controversial profile of Gates in the April 1998 issue of Boston magazine, titled “Head Negro in Charge,” calls him “[a]rguably the foremost intellectual entrepreneur in the world”) but he has always combined it with terrific natural insight and brilliant scholarship. Gates’s agenda is foundational and comprehensive. As he put it in his May 1997 interview with Harvey Blume in The Boston Book Review, “We need to consolidate and codify the intellectual attainments of our people–encyclopedias, dictionaries, concordances, bibliographies, works of scholarship–so that they stand next to the attainments of other people. That, at least, is how I interpret my role.”

 

One obvious result of Gates’s celebrity and corresponding clout is that the Norton anthology has been guaranteed plenty of publicity, while the Riverside anthology apparently has had very little. The Norton also has been far more widely reviewed. I did find a review of both books in the Spring 1998 issue of the journal Crosscurrents that had good things to say about each of them, though the author, Alfred E. Prettyman, concluded that “for now I’ll probably refer to the Riverside anthology more often.” His preference for the Riverside is significant because, given the lopsidedness of the attention being paid to these texts, it is likely that the Norton will become the anthology of choice by default. This possibility concerns me, not because I have any serious problems with the Norton, but because I think it is a very good thing that there be competition and continued struggle in the canon formation arena, and having two collections with differing approaches to the unfolding of the African American literary tradition helps to facilitate this.

 

Despite the Norton’s unquestionable success in the market and despite Gates’s eminence–or possibly because of these factors–the anthology has not been received with complete deference by all critics. Passaro, for instance, believes that the Norton exhibits “a suffusion of editorial sentimentality and weak politics” (72). In fact, a number of reviewers have judged the Norton to be conservative in its content and presentation. This is interesting, since there are some who still would see the making of an African American canon–or any “minority” canon, for that matter–as a radical undertaking. Others may view it primarily as a commerical enterprise designed to exploit a “moment” of multicultural fervor. In any event, a canon formation project is necessarily conservative in the best sense of the term, since it is an effort to consolidate and preserve “the best” works and to delineate (contain) a tradition. A number of the complaints about the Norton seem predicated on a notion that an African American literary canon is required to be politically combative, a documentary of suffering and resistance–which for a long time was the dominant perception and expectation of black writing. Approaching it from such an angle, one might argue that the Riverside anthology is more “militant” than the Norton, though I think it is more accurate to read it as just paying closer attention to that old bugaboo of New Criticism, context.

 

In the Spring 1998 issue of Wasafiri, Julian Murphet takes issue with what he calls “Gates’ tone… of implacable certainty” that “this is it” (49), the African American canon for our time. (Note that what is being referred to here is not the canon, period, but the canon as it is, or ought to be, now. Extricating the canon from eternity by recognizing the politics and the temporality of its formation has only intensified the debate over whose interests the canon should serve; thus the canon of the moment may be the focus of more contention than the very idea of a canon itself.) Given the extent of their effort and expertise, Gates and his co-editors are entitled to feel reasonably confident that they have put together a workable canon, whether or not it proves durable over the long haul; still, one guesses that none of them displays the kind of “implacable certainty” of definitiveness that Harold Bloom (a notorious basher of “minority” canons) exhibited with regard to his own single-handed version of The Western Canon.

 

Murphet bemoans the fact that Richard Wright’s Native Son is not found in the Norton, “whereas ‘minor’ writers like Charles Johnson and David Bradley are amply represented” (49). (Native Son isn’t to be found in the Riverside, either. There, Wright is represented by a single selection, “Long Black Song,” which also is included in the Norton; but the Norton has, in addition, Wright’s important “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” two chapters from his autobiography Black Boy, the story “The Man Who Lived Underground,” and “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow.”) Despite the quotation marks around the word, I certainly wouldn’t consider National Book Award winner and recent MacArthur Fellow Charles Johnson to be a minor writer, nor would I put him in exactly the same bag as David Bradley, who has written one very good book (The Chaneysville Incident, excerpted in the Norton) and one pedestrian one (South Street). But designating Native Son as “the greatest black novel of the twentieth century” gives us a strong clue to Murphet’s ideological allegiances. My choice for the Great African American Novel would be Invisible Man (whose prologue is included in the Riverside; the prologue, first chapter, and the epilogue are in the Norton), which should offer a clue to my own allegiances. (Another way to designate these differences is to propose that Murphet is aligned with Franz Fanon, while I’m aligned with Albert Murray [for those unfamiliar with the latter, see The Omni-Americans (1970) and Conversations with Albert Murray (1997)].) One suspects Murphet would be comfortable with a book like Addison Gayle, Jr.’s The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America (1976), a product of the Black Arts Movement (so wondrously inciteful and so frequently wrongheaded), which argues that the “true” trajectory of African American fiction is (politically, but not especially aesthetically) a “revolutionary” one. In Gayle’s book, Ellison is little more than a (mishandled) footnote; yet though he has been reviled by Marxists as well as BAMers (with Larry Neal’s famous recantation and subsequent embrace of Ellison providing a most instructive exception [see “Ellison’s Zoot Suit” in Visions of a Liberated Future]), Ellison’s profound cultural/spiritual depth has always trumped more reductive pronouncements about what shall constitute “the people’s” “authentic” voice.

 

Murphet makes another questionable gesture when he asks what it means to put W.E.B. DuBois “in the same volume with such lamentable stylists as Terry McMillan and Gloria Naylor” (49). DuBois emphatically is a towering figure, and if he is the standard by which we measure who is major, then most people are going to appear to be minor, and our anthology (and perhaps our canon) is going to be a much leaner one. But to compare two present day fiction writers with DuBois, who did produce creative work but whose true greatness for the most part lies elsewhere, isn’t very kosher; and in my estimation, the differences between McMillan, whose work has more surface than depth, and Naylor, a novelist of much greater gravity, are far more substantial than the distinctions that could be drawn between Johnson and Bradley, both of whom are serious writers, but whose bodies of work do differ widely in their formidability. Here we have a failure to draw fine discriminations between writers who happen to be on a critic’s hit-list. (For the record, Bradley doesn’t appear in the Riverside collection. McMillan, Naylor and Johnson all do, though the selections from their work are different from those that appear in the Norton.)

 

How inclusive need a canon be? In the May 12, 1997 issue of The Nation, Kevin Meehan provides a list of fifty African American writers who are not included in the Norton anthology. Some of these are important: Alexander Crummell, Martin R. Delany, J. Saunders Redding, Henry Dumas, Gayl Jones (all but Redding are included in the Riverside anthology); others are quite obscure: B. K. Bruce, John Matheus, Cecil Blue (the Riverside includes Bruce). Altogether, eighteen of the authors Meehan cites as missing from the Norton are in the Riverside. One writer Meehan doesn’t mention who is not in the Norton but who has a story included in the Riverside anthology is William Melvin Kelley, who wrote some of the most interesting and innovative black fiction of the 1960s. (At the same time, Meehan notes the absence of Frank Yerby, whose work primarily lies outside the tradition of African American letters.) Obviously, every anthology project of serious scope requires an often painful exercise of selectivity, and there are times, too, when permissions can’t be obtained for works one badly wants. But Meehan scores a point when he observes that “often it is the voices left out of the canon-making text that have been most responsible… for generally doing the most to create conditions that make possible the emergence of a document like The Norton Anthology of African American Literature” (46).

 

In the end, even the best anthology is a convenience, a portable version of a discipline, a tradition, that in its fullness inevitably possesses a great deal of baggage. Within that baggage, for those willing to search deeper, are to be found, along with much dross, various overlooked riches, instructive “mysteries,” tangled threads waiting to be unknotted. Nevertheless, I’m happy these anthologies exist. Even if, from the most rigorous perspective, they are not sufficient unto themselves, they are badly needed. They should not be our only tools, but they can serve as very useful ones.

 

With the exception of the so-called new literatures, most canonical anthologies seem based on an assumption of the greatness of previous writings to which we are perpetually appending footnotes and an occasional new monument. But if Gates is correct in his conviction that the Golden Age of black writing is in the present, not the past, then there are certain to be some dramatic displacements and reconfigurations in the future with regard to the African American literary canon. With the publication of these two anthologies we are witnessing not the battle’s conclusion, but the bringing on of the first really heavy artillery.

Works Cited

 

• Basbanes, Nicholas A. “Henry Louis Gates Jr. Plumbs African-American Heritage.” george jr. Feb. 1998. http://www.georgejr.com/feb98/gates.html.
• Bentsen, Cheryl. “Head Negro in Charge.” Boston Apr. 1998. http://www.bostonmagazine.com/highlights/gates.shtml
• Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon. NY: Harcourt Brace, 1994.
• Blume, Harvey. “Applying the Corrective: Henry Louis Gates, Jr.” The Boston Book Review May 1997. http://www.bookwire.com/bbr/bbrinterviews.article$2970.
• Gayle, Addison Jr. The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1975.
• Jordan, Jennifer. “Arthur P. Davis: Forging the Way for the Formation of the Canon.” Callaloo 20.2 (1997): 450-460.
• Kinnamon, Keneth. “Anthologies of African-American Literature from 1845 to 1994. Callaloo 20.2 (1997): 461-481.
• McKay, Nellie. “Naming the Problem That Led to the Question ‘Who Shall Teach African American Literature?’: or, Are We Ready to Disband the Wheatley Court?” PMLA (May 1998): 359-69.
• Meehan, Kevin. “Spiking Canons.” The Nation 12 May 1997: 42-44, 46.
• Murphet, Julian. Wasafiri Spring 1998: 48-49.
• Murray, Albert. Conversations with Albert Murray. Ed. Roberta S. Maguire. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1997.
• —. The Omni-Americans. New York: Outerbridge & Dienstfrey, 1970.
• Neal, Larry. “Ellison’s Zoot Suit.” Visions of a Liberated Future. Ed. Michael Scwhartz. New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1989: 30-56
• The NewsHour. PBS. 7 March 1997.
• Pasaro, Vince. “Black Letters on a White Page.” Harper’s July 1997: 70-75.
• Prettyman, Alfred E. “Ways to African American Literature.” Crosscurrents (Spring 1998). http://www.crosscurrents.org/bookss98b.htm#prettyman.