Why Victorian Literature Still Matters
What is African American Literature?
Margo N. Crawford
This edition first published 2021
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Name: Crawford, Margo N., 1969– author.
Title: What is African American literature? / by Margo N. Crawford.
Description: First edition. | Hoboken : Wiley‐Blackwell, 2020. | Series: Wiley Blackwell manifestos | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020021084 (print) | LCCN 2020021085 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119123347 (paperback) | ISBN 9781119123378 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119123361 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: American literature–African American authors–History and criticism. | Affect (Psychology) in literature. | Slavery in literature. | African Americans in literature.
Classification: LCC PS153.N5 C76 2020 (print) | LCC PS153.N5 (ebook) | DDC 810.9/896073–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020021084 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020021085
Cover Design: Wiley
Cover Image: African American woman, half‐length portrait, facing left, reading book by Fæ is licensed under Creative Commons CC0
Acknowledgments
This book was greatly inspired by Cheryl Wall’s groundbreaking study Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition (2005). African American literary traditions (as Cheryl Wall taught us) are a worrying of lines (lines being understood as lineage, intertextuality, improvisation, and the elasticity of blackness).
In these early years of the twenty‐first century, scholars of African American literature and theory have been gathering, at a wide range of conferences and other events, to begin to theorize the emergent forms, moods, and stories that distinguish twenty‐first century African American literature from earlier flows. These forums, looking at new directions in African American literature and theory, propelled the questions explored in this book’s reshaping of the title of Kenneth W. Warren’s What Was African American Literature? (2011) into the question of what it is (on the lower frequencies).
So many scholars make me hear these lower frequencies of black aesthetics. I thank Cheryl Wall, Eleanor Traylor, Hortense Spillers, Haki Madhubuti, Houston A. Baker, Dana Williams, Kokahvah Zauditu‐Selassie, Fred Moten, Farah Jasmine