In What Was African American Literature? Kenneth
Warren provides a concise historical context for defining and understanding
African American literary production and, moreover, provocatively announces its
death. For him, African American literature was specifically “a
postemancipation phenomenon that gained its coherence as an undertaking in the
social world defined by the system of Jim Crow segregation, which ensued after
the nation’s retreat from Reconstruction” (1). While acknowledging that his
contention that African American literature has eroded since the “legal demise
of Jim Crow” goes against much of the scholarship in African American and
transatlantic studies, which “has sought to justify taking a longer historical
view of African American literary practice,” Warren nevertheless asserts that
“[t]o insist that African American literature ‘was’ is [also] to raise the
question of what all of this ongoing production ‘is’” (3, 4). His research is
animated by the belief that there have been fundamental sociopolitical and
cultural changes that contest claims that “Jim Crow has not ended” and by
extension “equally pernicious manifestations of racism” exist today; Warren argues
that even though racism has not disappeared, pointing out its endurance “is not
to make a particularly profound social observation or to engage in trenchant
political analysis” (5). For him, historical periodization of African American
literature functions as a valuable interpretive tool that allows us not only to
recognize “some of the factors that almost unavoidably oriented African
American literary practice during the Jim Crow era,” but also enables us to examine
the critical possibilities that open up if we recognize that African American
literature “was” (9-10).
