For those of us who were students or professors of African or African American literature in the late sixties or through the seventies, it is a thing of wonder to behold the various ways in which our specialties and the works we explicate and teach have moved, if not exactly from the margins to the center of the profession of literature, at least from defensive postures to a position of generally accepted validity. My own graduate students often greet with polite skepticism an anecdote I draw on in the introduction to my seminars. When I was a student at the University of Cambridge, Wole Soyinka, recently released from a two-year confinement in a Nigerian prison, was on campus to deliver a lecture series on African literature (collected and published by Cambridge in 1976 under the title Myth, Literature, and the African World). Soyinka had come to Cambridge in 1973 from Ghana, where he had been living in exile, ostensibly to assume a two-year lectureship in the faculty of English. To his astonishment, as he told me in our first supervision, the faculty of English apparently did not recognize African literature as a legitimate area of study within the “English” tripos, so he had been forced to accept an appointment in social anthropology, of all things! (Much later, the distinguished Nigerian literary scholar Emmanuel Obiechina related a similar tale when I asked him why he had taken his Cambridge doctorate in social anthropology.) Shortly after I heard Soyinka's story, I asked the tutor in English at Clare College, Cambridge, why Soyinka had been treated this way, explaining as politely as I could that I would very much like to write a doctoral thesis on “black literature.” To which the tutor replied with great disdain, “Tell me, sir, … what is black literature?” When I responded with a veritable bibliography of texts written by authors who were black, his evident irritation informed me that I had taken as a serious request for information what he had intended as a rhetorical question.

During the African American literary renaissance of the 1850s, the act of narrating was novelized in many slave narratives. But Frederick Douglass's Hemic Slave (1853) and William Wells Brown's Clotel: Or, The President's Daughter (1853) are particularly noteworthy because they assert the importance of the fictive to the representation of facts in ways that empower these texts as novels, not as autobiographies. Brown and Douglass problematize the relative status of the factual and the fictive in their texts in order to raise questions about the nature and source of authority in narrative. These texts suggest that authority is not an inherent part of narrative discourse (whether factual or fictive) but rather a function of discourses as facilitated by the narrating voice.

Published to critical acclaim in 1928 and praised by W. E. B. Du Bois as the “best piece of fiction that Negro America has produced since the heyday of Chesnutt,” Larsen's Quicksand has since been criticized for its focus on the narrow world of the black bourgeoisie. But her treatment of race, gender, and culture is far more complex than these pronouncements suggest. This essay shows how Larsen's emphasis on the aesthetic—objets d'art, clothing, fabrics, decor—highlights problems of cultural constructs and self-representation. Often compared with her prolific contemporary Jessie Fauset, Larsen goes beyond Fauset in both stylistic experimentation and psychological insight, daring to explore the failure of her protagonist to transcend cultural concepts of race and gender at a time when one-dimensional success stories were the rule in black women's novels of racial uplift.

While other New York writers despaired of finding home in America's wasteland after World War i as War I, African American writers like Langston Hughes, Claude MacKay, Nella Larsen, and Rudolph Fisher created a powerful urban image of home in Harlem. Their Harlem home was at once place, community, and aspiration. As collectively articulated in their various writings, its vitality was most palpable, least constricted, in Harlem's well-peopled streets. It was evoked wherever—albeit only where—African Americans could come together. It was expressed by their art's profound yet deceptive masquerades. The Harlem Renaissance thus challenged America's established association of home with rural permanency. We ignore a fitting image of home for mobile, urban America when we fail to recognize these civic dimensions of Harlem Renaissance art—as Greater New York also failed to accept a public statue of James Weldon Johnson, memorialized by a literary archive at Yale instead.

What little critical discussion exists on Harlem Gallery (1965) has focused on the question of whether high modernist verse is appropriate to African American art. But Tolson's work is itself “about” modernism—and modernism's relation to African American culture; it is thus better read for its idea of an African American avant-garde than for the question of whether its technique is recognizably “modernist.” The poem's ideological commitment to modernism eventually involves the delegitimation of separatist populism, and Harlem Gallery achieves its argumentative (ideological) “certainty” largely by refusing to specify the historical and cultural position of the avant-garde it invokes—an avant-garde that had, by 1965, become part of the cultural lingua franca. In critical retrospect, however, Tolson's charged advocacy of modernism places him close and yet opposed to Houston Baker, whose Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance can be read as a postmodern, revisionary redefinition of what Tolson took African American modernism to be.

In “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” Martin Luther King, Jr., attributes his intellectual development to his reading of Marx, Gandhi, Rauschenbusch, Niebuhr, and other prestigious authors whose works he encountered during his graduate studies at seminary and at Boston University. To explain his responses to notable philosophers and theologians, King incorporates passages from seven writers whose names do not appear in the essay. While the network represented by these writers stimulated King's thought more profoundly than did the more respectable tradition that “Pilgrimage” invokes, the black church supplied him with the foundation of virtually all the ideas appearing in the essay. In addition, the black folk pulpit furnished the epistemology of voice merging that enabled King to compose an autobiographical essay and a self. Yoking black orality and print, King adapted the folk procedure of blending identities to create a magisterial public persona that could help reshape a nation.

While positive constructions of identity may be used in the service of historically oppressed groups, readings that isolate either “African” or “feminist” identity in the works of Nigerian novelist Buchi Emecheta highlight the problematics of both literary selfrepresentation and postmodern deconstruction of identity. An examination of Emecheta's autobiography Head above Water and her novel The Joys of Motherhood, however, suggests that Emecheta's works respond to a West African vernacular tradition of storytelling that resists the application of normative models of identity and instead demonstrates the importance of each individual to the community. This vernacular tradition, elaborated in Emecheta's work by a nonparadigmatic tension between “oral” and “literate subjectivity” (a tension potentially present to varying degrees in non-African subjectivity but “marked” in West Africa by multilingualism and the copresence of vernacular and literate languages), provides a critique of productivist, authoritarian discourse.

African American literary theory's quest for a distinctly black criticism implies the task of determining the contours and character of African American literary tradition. This task is, in fact, at once external and internal to that tradition, which arises in the very act of questioning its own possibility. African American literature deploys a topos for this simultaneous theorizing and enactment of tradition: the scenario of facing, wherein a protagonist experiences a pivotal moment of self-discovery by catching his or her reflection in the visage of an other (father, mother, master, etc.). Examples from Frederick Douglass to Alice Walker demonstrate the rhetorical and thematic nuances by which African American literature's facing motif establishes black tradition as a variegated scene of vision and revision.

Let us anchor ourselves, for a start, to some acceptable terrain of cultural definitions. I shall use an example from our not too distant encounters. Few will disagree with me today, if I propose that we reject the concept of culture as realized in that manifestation known as Festac 77 [Festac: Black and African Festival of the Arts, Lagos, Nigeria, February 1977]. For, in the main, our people were offered a narrowed-down, reductionist aspect of culture in a gargantuan orgy of ill-organized spectacles. That negative reference is meant to limit the field, to eliminate decisively what often imposes itself on public consciousness as Culture with a capital C, or as something pronounced into being by a Ministry of Culture. What Nigeria exhibited was Culture as a sum, not even of parts, but of spectacular parts. Now, “spectacle” need not be superficial. Revelry can attain profound Dionysiac proportions, involve an inner ennoblement, almost cathartic—but it requires a consciously organizing hand, with an integrated motif around which even disparate acts of revelry are drawn. In those extravagant fields of “Festacian” revelry, however, such complex, enriching offerings were relegated to token, or symbolic, expositions, starved of funds and given scant coverage even in the media, and were finally relegated to the archives of that supracultural monstrosity known as the National Theatre. The theater of which nation, by the way? Of Nigeria? Or of Bulgaria, from where the concrete carbuncle was lifted, then grafted onto Lagos marshlands? What, in that general's cap or Christmas cake of a structure, constitutes even a fragment of Nigerian or African architectural intellect, modern or traditional? But more on that building in another place.