Race and the Literary Encounter: Black Literature from James Weldon Johnson to Percival Everett

By Lesley Larkin

What effect has the black literary imagination attempted to have on, in Toni Morrison's words, "a race of readers that understands itself to be 'universal' or race-free"? How has black literature challenged the notion that reading is a race-neutral act? Race and the Literary Encounter takes as its focus several modern and contemporary African American narratives that not only narrate scenes of reading but also attempt to intervene in them. The texts interrupt, manage, and manipulate, employing thematic, formal, and performative strategies in order to multiply meanings for multiple readers, teach new ways of reading, and enable the emergence of antiracist reading subjects. Analyzing works by James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Jamaica Kincaid, Percival Everett, Sapphire, and Toni Morrison, Lesley Larkin covers a century of African American literature in search of the concepts and strategies that black writers have developed in order to address and theorize a diverse audience, and outlines the special contributions modern and contemporary African American literature makes to the fields of reader ethics and antiracist literary pedagogy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 14, 2015
• ISBN: 9780253017895

Book preview

Race and the Literary Encounter

BLACKS IN THE DIASPORA

editors

Herman L. Bennett

Kim D. Butler

Judith A. Byfield

Tracy Sharpley-Whiting

race and

the literary

encounter

Black Literature

from James

Weldon Johnson

to Percival Everett

Lesley Larkin

This book is a publication of

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS

Office of Scholarly Publishing

Herman B Wells Library 350

1320 East 10th Street

Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA

iupress.indiana.edu

© 2015 by Lesley Larkin

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences–Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Larkin, Lesley.

Race and the literary encounter : black literature from James Weldon Johnson to Percival Everett / Lesley Larkin.

pages cm. – (Blacks in the diaspora)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-253-01758-1 (cloth : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-253-01787-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-253-01789-5 (ebook) 1. American literature – African American authors – History and criticism. 2. Race in literature. 3. Books and reading – Social aspects – United States. 4. African Americans – Books and reading. 5. African Americans in literature. 6. Identity (Psychology) in literature. I. Title.

PS153.N5L37 2015

810.9'896073 – dc23

2015033429

1  2  3  4  5     20  19  18  17  16  15

This book is dedicated to my mother, Kathleen Alexandra Frank, whose unconditional love animates everything I do.

The pleasure which I derived from reading had long been a necessity, and in the act of reading, that marvelous collaboration between the writer’s artful vision and the reader’s sense of life, I had become acquainted with other possible selves – freer, more courageous and ingenuous and, during the course of the narrative at least, even wise.

RALPH ELLISON, SHADOW AND ACT

Contents

·ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

·Introduction: Scenes of Reading, Scenes of Racialization: Modern and Contemporary Black Literature

1Unbinding the Double Audience: James Weldon Johnson

2Speakerly Reading: Zora Neale Hurston

3Close Reading You: Ralph Ellison

4Erasing Precious: Sapphire and Percival Everett

5Reading and Being Read: Jamaica Kincaid

·Epilogue: Toward a Theory and Pedagogy of Responsible Reading: Toni Morrison

·NOTES

·BIBLIOGRAPHY

·INDEX

Acknowledgments

FIRST, THANK YOU TO THE EDITORS AND STAFF AT INDIANA University Press, including Robert Sloan, Jenna Whitaker, Darja Malcolm-Clarke, and Eric Levy, for believing in and supporting this project. You have been a pleasure to work with. Support for this book has also been provided by several institutions. I would like to thank the University of Washington for a Preparing Future Faculty grant and travel funding, Seattle Pacific University for a research and teaching fellowship, and Northern Michigan University for three Reassigned Time Awards, a Faculty Research Grant, and generous travel support. This book would not exist without the largesse of these institutions. I am also grateful to have taught, at each of these schools, smart and engaging students whose effort to engage in dialogue with African American literature is my primary inspiration.

I must also acknowledge the help and encouragement imparted by numerous mentors, colleagues, and friends. The English faculty at Linfield College – particularly Lex Runciman and Barbara Seidman – taught me that literature does real and lasting work in the world. I also owe tremendous thanks to the English and Comparative Literature faculty at the University of Washington, with special credit due to Carolyn Allen, Katherine Cummings, Gillian Harkins, Chandan Reddy, Cynthia Steele, and Alys Eve Weinbaum for shepherding me through the courses, projects, and dissertation that laid the groundwork for this book. To Alys, especially: your intelligence, empathy, rigor, and commitment continue to guide me. To the talented minds I studied alongside at the University of Washington, including Jeff Chiu, Lana Dalley, Jill Gatlin, Stacy Grooters, Kellie Holzer, Jennifer Ladino, Tamiko Nimura, Andrea Opitz, Amy Reddinger, Vince Schleitwiler, Todd Tietchen, Steve Tobias, and Ji-Young Um: thank you for your brilliance. Special acknowledgment is due to Jeff Chiu and Kellie Holzer, who read and responded to the earliest versions of this project with insight, creativity, and endurance. I am also deeply indebted to the inimitable Amy Reddinger, whom I have followed to the Upper Midwest and who has provided invaluable feedback on this project – as well as food, shelter, and friendship during the long writing and revision process. To the English faculty at Seattle Pacific University – particularly Fan Mayhall Gates and Doug Thorpe – thank you for taking me under your wing as I began to work on this project in earnest. And to my accomplished, engaging, witty colleagues (former and current) at Northern Michigan University, including Lupe Arenillas, Shirley Brozzo, Stephen Burn, Sandy Burr, Lisa Eckert, Amy Hamilton, Alisa Hummell, Austin Hummell, April Lindala, Jaspal Singh, Linda Sirois, Raymond Ventre, and David Houston Wood: thank you for your friendship and intelligence. David Houston Wood deserves special thanks for his insightful comments on sections of this book and for his savvy professional advice, as does Stephen Burn for his extraordinary professional generosity and ongoing mentoring and collaboration. Above all, immeasurable thanks to Amy Hamilton, my constant interlocutor, co-conspirator, and friend. Thank you for arriving at NMU at just the right moment.

To the many friends who have put up with me over the last ten years (or more!), thank you for your humor and patience. Special thanks to Becky Bergman, Alisa Hummell, Sandy Sun, Sarah Wilson, and Vicki Wood for sticking with me even when I seem to drop off the face of the earth. To my parents, Thomas and Kathleen Frank: thank you for supporting everything I have ever done (however ill-conceived), for teaching me what really matters in life, and for your deep and abiding love of reading. Mom, I wish you were here to read this. Thank you to my sisters, Lyndsey Lynch and Whitney Frank, for always being there when I need you and for forgiving me when I haven’t been there for you. Thank you to my husband, Kellie Larkin, for supporting me through the long process of earning a PhD, landing a tenure-track job, and writing this book. Your willingness to talk with me about this project for over a decade is truly remarkable. And to my children, Killian and Alex: you are everything.

Race and the Literary Encounter

Art can, in other words, move into life. Not merely . . . by opening our eyes to life, not merely by giving us models of action and response, but by, quite literally, creating us.

ROBERT PENN WARREN, THE UNITY OF EXPERIENCE

Think of our lives and tell us your particularized world. Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created.

TONI MORRISON, THE NOBEL LECTURE IN LITERATURE

Introduction

Scenes of Reading, Scenes of Racialization: Modern

and Contemporary Black Literature

ONE OF THE MOST CONTROVERSIAL FILMS OF THE LAST FIVE years, Lee Daniels’s Precious (2009) chronicles an abused African American teenager’s development as a reader and writer. Adapted from Sapphire’s 1996 novel, Push, Precious’s story was heralded by many critics for its authentic[ity] (Ebert) and grit (Schmader). Others, however, asserted that the film reinforced racist stereotypes. Armond White called it a carnival of black degradation, and Melissa Harris-Lacewell wrote that the popular embrace of the film had troubling political meaning.¹ The debate over the political meaning of Sapphire’s narrative is a powerful reminder that, despite popular claims of America’s postracial status, American racial obsessions are alive, well, and very much on the minds of contemporary artists and critics.² This debate also recalls longstanding arguments about how black artists should represent black people, especially where nonblack audiences are concerned. In the case of Push, the debate is, more dizzyingly, about how black writers should represent black readers.

Importantly, the Push/Precious debate is not only about representation. It is also about reception. The responsibility for the circulation or interruption of stereotype applies to both filmmakers and audiences, writers and readers. Assertions of reader agency, made by reader-response, reception-studies, and poststructuralist scholars, are also implicit in many modern and contemporary black literary works. Indeed, many such works respond to concerns about racial literacy and the social politics of reading by, as in the case of Push, writing about reading itself and challenging readers to take social and political action. In this book, I read a series of literary works (many at the center of critical controversies) for their contributions to the understanding of literary reception as a site of racial formation and reader agency. My central claim is that modern and contemporary black literature is uniquely positioned to articulate responsible and effective strategies for rereading race and reimagining the reading subject. Circumventing debates about whether individual texts are resistant to or complicit in racist ideology, I instead approach these texts as agents that attempt to engage readers in antiracist ways of reading.³ I argue that these works should be analyzed as performative subjects, rather than as static objects, and that their readers should be understood to be agents at the literary encounter, rather than passive receptors.

Reading has been a central theme in African American literature since slave-era prohibitions marked literacy as a paradoxical sign of both outlaw status and freedom. Learning to read is a prominent feature of slave narrative and its descendants, from Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs to Malcolm X and Sapphire.⁴ Often, such narratives have introduced literate African American subjects to audiences dominated by readers ill-equipped to receive them.⁵ In her groundbreaking critical work Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison asks what effect this situation has had on the literary imagination of black writers: "What happens to the writerly imagination of a black author who is at some level always conscious of representing one’s own race to, or in spite of, a race of readers that understands itself to be ‘universal’ or race-free? (xii).⁶ I ask a related set of questions: What effect has the writerly imagination of black authors attempted to have on the literary imagination of a race of readers that understands itself to be ‘universal’ or race-free? What techniques and strategies have modern and contemporary black writers employed in order to manage a potentially wayward or hostile readership? How have they worked to manipulate, retrain, and develop readers toward specific critical and ethical ends? How might their narratives interrupt the reproduction of racial hierarchy at the literary encounter? And how have they challenged the longstanding notion that reading is a race-neutral act and the reader" a subject abstracted from mundane particularities such as race?

In their pronounced meditation upon the intersection of literacy, agency, and racialization, the modern and contemporary narratives under consideration in the chapters that follow constitute a significant thread in the African American literary tradition. Like their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century predecessors, these works interpolate reading as a major theme, address specific historical and contemporary conflicts regarding education and the publishing industry, signify upon the familiar association of reading with freedom, dramatize scenes of reading as scenes of racialization, and anticipate the experiences and responses of actual readers. Furthermore, these works exhibit an impressive range of aesthetic and performative strategies designed to intervene in actual reading encounters. These are texts that not only narrate scenes of reading but also act upon scenes of reading, interrupting, managing, and manipulating the way readers read in an effort to teach new ways of reading and enable the emergence of antiracist reading subjects.

My central goal is to derive a theory and a practice of critical reading from major works in the modern and contemporary African American literary canon. The concepts introduced in the chapters that follow include speakerly reading (a dialogical practice of self-revision), collaborative reading (reading alongside and in dialogue with others), and critical self-reflexivity (a mode of identification that encourages self-critique rather than self-coherence).⁷ These concepts are both ways of thinking about reading and models for how to read. They challenge the longstanding model of reading as private and solitary and the reader as singular and unraced. And they suggest ways of reorganizing institutional scenes of reading, including those arranged by the education and publishing industries, toward racial justice. At the heart of these interventions is a keen sense of the socializing force of literature, its capacity to do good or ill in the world, and the particular role it plays in bringing into being racialized subjects. Casting scenes of reading as scenes of racialization, the texts selected for this study, I argue, obligate readers to acknowledge the role they play not only in the production of literary meaning but also in the reproduction of the racial meanings that structure our lives. This book thus offers a critical methodology derived from modern and contemporary black literature that insists on both the performativity of literary works and the agency of readers at the scene of literary encounter.

The critical methodology I elaborate builds on three intertwined premises: the politics of reading and literacy constitutes a significant theme in the modern and contemporary black literary tradition; this tradition exhibits a wealth of aesthetic and performative strategies designed to intervene in scenes of reading, which are understood to be scenes of racialization; and modern and contemporary African American literature is specially poised to contribute theoretically to the study of reader ethics.

The first of these premises is the most straightforward. Many scholars have explored literacy as a key theme in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century black literature. It is an especially prominent trope in the literatures of abolition and racial uplift, particularly slave narrative, which often presents the acquisition of literacy as a crucial step on the path to freedom and self-realization. Learning to read and write also demonstrated black intelligence and humanity, according to racist standards, hence the requirement that slave narratives be authenticated by prominent white citizens. This requirement led to a preference, among publishers and readers, for narratives written by formerly enslaved persons who were literate (Andrews, Introduction 8). Frederick Douglass’s powerful evocation of the idea of literacy as the key to individual dignity, freedom, and opportunity echoes throughout the tradition that followed him (Andrews, Introduction 8). Because this emphasis in black writing developed in part as a response to white prejudice, it bore a critical edge. Playing upon the traditional association of literature with humane or polite learning, Henry Louis Gates Jr. has described slave narratives as exemplary of impolite learning: They rail against the arbitrary and inhuman learning that masters foisted upon slaves in order to reinforce a perverse fiction of the natural order of things (Preface ix). And recently, Robert Stepto has argued that Afro-American literature has developed as much because of the culture’s distrust of literacy as because of its abiding faith in it (A Home 139).⁸

Clearly, the theme of reading in slave narrative is intertwined with its fraught relationship to nonblack audiences. Slave narratives were a key weapon in the antislavery movement, especially during the era of radical abolitionism, which meant convincing white readers to join the cause (Starling 106). The great nineteenth-century slave narratives, writes William J. Andrews, typically carry a black message inside a white envelope (Introduction 6). The evasive and signifying techniques of the slave narrative used well-known strategies for eliciting sympathy from white readers who, though moderate or even liberal toward the slavery and race questions, were nonetheless often little inclined to view black people as fully human or to see a literate slave as anything other than a contradiction in terms (Morrison, Site 69). Harriet Jacobs, for example, employed complex and often paradoxical techniques in an attempt to encourage an empathetic response among white female readers without disturbing their sense of decorum (V. Smith, Self-Discovery 35–43). And the silences that abound in slave narratives serve as a record of the limited empathy and limiting expectations held by white readers: In shaping the experience to make it palatable to those who were in a position to alleviate it, the authors of slave narratives were silent about many things, and they ‘forgot’ many other things (Morrison, Site 70).⁹

I highlight slave narrative in my discussion of scholarship on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century African American literature because, as Elizabeth McHenry argues, it has been identified as the founding paradigm of black literary production and therefore has received the most scholarly attention (6). However, as McHenry also points out, scholarly emphasis on this genre has come at the expense of other kinds of texts, including fiction and poetry, autobiographies, histories, appeals, and other forms of writing . . . as well as the writing that was published by religious presses or was self-published. Many such texts depict a diverse and positive picture of black literacy and remind readers that a literate and activist free black community had existed in America since at least the eighteenth century (Bizzell 148, 149).¹⁰ Indeed, ignoring the variety of texts published and circulated by black writers in the nineteenth century (often outside the mainstream publishing industry) also risks ignoring diverse black audiences and the collective, pedagogical, and activist reading practices they developed.¹¹ Anticipating diverse audiences with varying levels of knowledge about African American experiences and cultures, nineteenth-century black writers developed simultextual strategies that anticipated the doubled and multiplied discourses of modern and contemporary African American writing (Foreman 6).¹² As M. Giulia Fabi explains, The specificity of [post-slavery] African American texts rests in their deliberate multiple-voicedness, in their use of strategies of signifying, of coded communication, and in the systematic metanarrative ways in which the authors draw the readers’ attention to the process of interpretation, pointing to the treacherousness of the act of reading, foregrounding the unreliability of appearances, underlining the superficiality of traditional cultural scripts, and questioning the politics of production and transmission of knowledge (38). In other words, nineteenth-century African American literature is rich in complex meditations upon – and formal approaches to – the social politics of reading, literacy, publishing, and reception.¹³

While these issues have been explored in great detail in relation to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century black literature, they have received less critical attention in relation to modern and contemporary works. In response to this asymmetry in the scholarship, this book explains how twentieth-century and contemporary African American narratives, enacting what Henry Louis Gates calls tropological revision (Signifying xxv), reiterate these familiar themes for new historical moments and toward new aesthetic, theoretical, and political ends. Far from merely reprising the elements of the slave narrative that have to do with reading, these literary works reimagine reading and readers themselves. Some modern and contemporary texts, such as James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man and Sapphire’s Push, appear to repeat the standard equation between literacy and freedom, though this equation is more complicated than it might at first appear even in earlier texts.¹⁴ Others, such as Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Percival Everett’s Erasure, are openly skeptical of the claim that learning to read is inherently or directly liberating, emphasizing instead the embeddedness of literacy, education, and literary publishing in asymmetrical social structures.¹⁵ Some works, such as Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Morrison’s Recitatif, employ strategic garrets, gaps, and ambiguities in their readerly address that set limits on the universalizing impulses of some readers. Others, such as Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, confront or antagonize readers directly, calling attention to problematic interpretive practices.¹⁶

Furthermore, like many of their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century predecessors, modern and contemporary black narratives frequently present reading not as a private, apolitical, ahistorical act, the transcendent meeting of self and text, but rather as a social practice grounded in material circumstances and framed by considerable political stakes.¹⁷ Shared circumstances of reception have led to a heightened concern with issues of literacy and interpretation among African American writers that can be traced throughout the last century. Indeed, twentieth- and twenty-first-century African American literary history can be organized in terms of debates about how to write within a context of racism (and white patronage) for an audience that includes misinformed, prurient, and antagonistic readers. Consider the debates and conflicts between George Schuyler and Langston Hughes in the 1920s; Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and Hughes in the 1930s; Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Wright in the 1950s and 1960s; Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, and Ellison in the 1960s and 1970s; Ishmael Reed and Alice Walker in the 1980s; and Percival Everett and Sapphire (and, in film, Spike Lee and Tyler Perry) in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s.¹⁸ Although the circumstances framing these debates are not identical, black artists throughout and beyond the twentieth century have been constrained by the exigencies of a white-controlled publishing industry as well as limits set by black audiences and artists themselves.¹⁹ As W. E. B. Du Bois put it in his 1926 essay Criteria of Negro Art, The white public today demands from its artists . . . racial pre-judgment which deliberately distorts Truth and Justice. . . . On the other hand, the young and slowly growing black public still wants its prophets almost equally unfree.²⁰

Whatever side of any given debate black artists have found themselves on, they have meditated on reception in a sustained fashion – even if many, in the end, call for artists to transcend audience approval, following the final lines of Langston Hughes’s 1926 manifesto, The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain: If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. . . . If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves (59). Or, as Percival Everett has put it more recently, I never think about audience at all. I just think about trying to be as truthful as I can to my experience and the culture. . . . I don’t deny the importance of audience. The work isn’t complete until somebody reads it. . . . But my job is not that. My job is making it (qtd. in A. Stewart 313–314). This book does not provide a comprehensive overview of debates among black writers about how to represent black people or whether or not art can be black, white, or political, though specific debates serve as the backdrop for several of the readings that follow. Rather, it demonstrates that reading and reception are fundamental concerns among modern and contemporary African American authors, and it analyzes several key texts for their thematic, aesthetic, performative, and theoretical engagement of the intersection of race and reader ethics.

The historical and cultural contexts relevant to each work’s engagement of this intersection are described in the chapters to follow, but it is worth pointing out one abiding contextual influence that distinguishes twentieth- and twenty-first-century approaches to reading from their earlier counterparts. Modern and contemporary black musical innovations have influenced the thematic content and formal and performative strategies of several of the texts under consideration here. Ragtime, blues, jazz, and hip hop have provided black authors with new scenes of reception to dramatize, new vocabularies for addressing artist-audience transactions, and new techniques for engaging and challenging mixed audiences. The well-known history of nonblack appropriation of modern black musical forms provides a useful frame for engaging ethical issues pertaining to the literary marketplace, not least because music has brought nonblack audiences to other black cultural forms, including literature. The tension between the claim that music and literature are universal and the material asymmetries that structure the music and publishing industries is both the backdrop for the texts analyzed in this book and, often, a prominent theme in them.²¹

Black musical forms offer productive ways of confronting this tension. Syncopation, improvisation, call-and-response, and other techniques developed by black musicians have been adopted by black writers for engaging, distancing, challenging, and otherwise influencing reader responses. The enduring sensibilities of blues, jazz, and hip hop, all of which confront racism while insisting upon partial autonomy from it, also find their way into literary works subtly and powerfully. From the exploitation of the Ex-Coloured Man’s musical talent by his millionaire patron to the conflicted response of white characters to black music in Seraph on the Suwanee, and from the blues-inspired irony and improvisation that destabilize the prologue and epilogue of Invisible Man to the protofeminist hip hop bravado expressed by Precious and her classmates in 1980s Harlem, this book addresses literary scenes of musical performance in order to illuminate the ethical and theoretical questions about reading and reception posed by modern and contemporary African American texts, as well as the strategies these texts employ to address them.²²

We arrive, then, at the second central claim of this book: that modern and contemporary African American literature exhibits a wealth of aesthetic and performative strategies designed to intervene in scenes of reading, which are always also understood to be scenes of racialization. I outline these strategies in the chapters to come; here I will provide the theoretical underpinning regarding reading, narrative agency, and their relationship to racialization that supports my readings of specific texts. The theoretical apparatus from which this study proceeds is drawn from various schools, including poststructuralism and postmodernism, reader-response theory, feminism, and critical race theory, as well as from the African American literary tradition itself. This apparatus comprises four premises: (1) literary works are fundamentally dialogical and self-reflexive, (2) reception is as vital to literary meaning as literary form is, (3) scenes of reading are always also scenes of subjection, and (4) literary works should be read as agents at the literary encounter. A brief elaboration of each premise follows.

LITERARY WORKS ARE FUNDAMENTALLY DIALOGICAL AND SELF-REFLEXIVE

This study takes as a primary assumption, articulated by theorists like Mikhail Bakhtin and Julia Kristeva and expressed in the call-and-response and communal patterns characterizing black oral and literary traditions, that language and literature are fundamentally dialogical. Dialogical refers, in this volume, at once to the double-voiced nature of language, the interaction of the various and hierarchized languages that make up societies and their literatures, and the relation between speaker and listener, author and reader, and one literary work and another. As Bakhtin explains, meaning is to be found not in abstract linguistic rules but in the concretization of language as it is used by speakers, listeners, authors, characters, and readers in specific contexts: Language – like the living concrete environment in which the consciousness of the verbal artist lives – is never unitary. It is unitary only as an abstract grammatical system of normative forms. . . . Actual social life and historical becoming create within an abstractly unitary national language a multitude of concrete worlds, a multitude of bounded verbal-ideological and social belief systems; within these various systems (identical in the abstract) are elements of language filled with various semantic and axiological content and each with its own different sound (288).

The impossibility of abstracting linguistic utterances from social context is of special relevance to a study of how modern and contemporary African American narratives exploit the multiplicity of language not toward the dissolution of meaning (as some characterizations/caricatures of postmodern writing would have it), but rather toward specific social and political ends.²³ As Mae Gwendolyn Henderson has argued, adapting Bakhtin, a pronounced dialogism characterizes black women’s writing in particular, reflecting not only a relationship with the ‘other(s),’ but an internal dialogue with the plural aspects of self that constitute the matrix of black female subjectivity (349). Black women’s writing, necessarily multivocal, speaks in adversarial and communal modes to its plural audiences, engaging both hegemonic and ambiguously (non)hegemonic discourse and employing both glossolalia (the use of a closed, private language) and heteroglossia (the use of multiple languages at once). Although Henderson’s insights are specifically derived from black women’s writing and experiences, they are suggestive for black writing generally, which, as Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Signifying) has argued, is characterized by tropes and techniques of multiplication (doubling) as well as the dialogical vernacular practices of black song, story, and spirituality.

This study also adopts the postmodern insight that literature is fundamentally self-reflexive – that literature always draws attention to its own textuality, is always engaged in the processes of reading and writing. Again, some texts are more overtly metatextual than others, piercing the illusion of invisibility that realist texts generally seek to create (the sense that the ink on the page has disappeared in favor of a reader’s imaginative realization of the literary work); these are works that tend to be labeled modernist or postmodern. However, although some texts draw attention more readily or intentionally to their own writtenness or their own dependence upon readerly realization, all texts are so dependent and, therefore, comment in some way upon reading and writing. The political urgency of such commentary is heightened for texts that are marked by minority status. In Postmodern Blackness, bell hooks explains how the critique of master narratives (in favor of multiplicity, dialogue, and difference) is relevant to black people: ‘Yearning’ is the word that best describes a common psychological state shared by many of us, cutting across boundaries of race, class, gender, and sexual practice. Specifically in relation to the post-modernist deconstruction of ‘master’ narratives, the yearning that wells in the hearts and minds of those whom such narratives have silenced is the longing for critical voice (27). Here, hooks reminds her readers that the dialogical and metatextual characteristics of language and writing must be approached not as abstractions but rather in relation to material, social, and political contexts.²⁴

RECEPTION IS AS VITAL TO LITERARY MEANING AS LITERARY FORM IS

Although black writers have long discussed the significant role played by readers in the creation of literary meaning, this insight only gained widespread prominence when it appeared in the 1960s and 1970s in post-structuralist and reader-response formulations. If origins are mythical and authors a discursive construction, then literary texts must be, some argued, the production of readers.²⁵ As Roland Barthes famously put it in 1967, The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author (Death 57). Several decades prior to Barthes’s announcement, Louise Rosenblatt also articulated an early reception theory, asserting that the meaning of any particular literary work does not inhere in authorial intention or in the text itself, but rather arises in the circuit created between reader and text. Change one node and the meaning of the work changes. The reader is creative too, writes Rosenblatt. The literary experience must be phrased as a transaction between the reader and the text (34–35).

Following Rosenblatt, I understand literary works to emerge at scenes of reading by way of transactions between readers and texts. This is not to say that readers are free to create totally idiosyncratic interpretations. For one thing, wildly abandoned interpretations are not strictly possible. As Stanley Fish explains, While it is true to say that [readers] create poetry . . . , we create it through interpretive strategies that are finally not our own but have their source in a publicly available system of intelligibility (322). In other words, interpretation can only occur within social institutions, which necessarily constrain what any given signifier can mean. Stuart Hall has explained that the meaning of a message is shaped by the institutional power relations within which it is encoded, disseminated, and decoded. Although each stage in this process is relatively autonomous, a fact that makes possible transgressive deviations (Encoding 129), the overall process is structured in dominance, thus limiting wayward interpretation (Race 305).

Acknowledging the practical limits of reader agency does not mean, however, that readers cannot engage in reinterpretation. Such creativity keeps literature alive beyond its original contexts and is especially urgent for readers who, historically, have been denied access to both literacy and literary representation. Judith Fetterley’s resisting approach to androcentric texts and Toni Morrison’s illumination of Africanism in canonical American literature are two important examples of critical resistance by readers who are neither ideal (Iser) nor authorial (Rabinowitz 42). Such approaches are aligned with what Chela Sandoval calls oppositional consciousness, a mobile and responsive critical