Ground Provisions (original) (raw)

Pitch Black, Black Pitch: Theorizing African American Literature

Abstract: This essay proffers that African American literature, especially that of the contemporary moment, seeks a non-canonical canon, that is, unlawful laws, unruly rules, reading lists that morph and shake serial listedness. Furthermore, African American literature as theorized here is concerned with three constitutive nodes: first, a certain kind of memory, one that is not simply revisionist or a Morrisonian “rememory” but what I call “memoricity,” that which carries the historicity of moments, the very subjectivity of things not past but deeply contemporary. It denotes the historicity of the contemporary, and simultaneously the contemporaneity of history. Second, the underground, snugly fitting within familiar notions of the underground in African American literature, but here proffered as more than a site of secrecy or dormancy; it is, rather, a liminal, mezzanine space of generative disruption and, too, vibrant, volatile epistemic radicality. Thirdly, seeing: not to be reduced to ocular perception, it is a seeing that encapsulates a more capaciously embodied practice that engages more than simply the eyes, a seeing that is a matter of full corporeality. These three nodes are, in African American literature, characterized under the helm of a Black synesthetic practice—seeing-without-light, knowledges “muzzled to those shores,” a lexicon in the dark, unintelligible to the logic of the light, underground epistemologies. To be examined are six texts: Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn (2016), Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016), Ben H. Winters’ Underground Airlines (2016), Natasha Trethewey’s Thrall (2012), Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon’s Open Interval (2009), and Joshua Bennett’s The Sobbing School (2016). Copyright: This work originally appeared in CR: The New Centennial Review 18.1, winter 2018, published by Michigan State University Press.