Chapter 24: “A People Must Define Itself”: African American Literary Criticism as a Mode of Critical Race Theory

This essay will show how African American writers and academics employed literary criticism as a means of what came to be called critical race theory. In five parts, the essay will chronicle the history of African American literary theory from the struggle against segregation of the 1950s to the Black Lives Matter moment of the 2010s.

Although it would be wrong to say that American literary criticism of the 1950s and 1960s was explicitly racist, there certainly was little in it for African American authors or concerns. As Matthew X. Vernon has demonstrated, the traditional emphasis on linguistics and the medieval in English studies was critically appropriated by African American scholars in an act of “surrogated kinship” (p. 29). The new pedagogy of close reading, spearheaded by the “New Critics,” the most influential group of American literary readers in the 1950s, should have allowed literature to speak more directly on the merits of its own verbal achievement, yet the shift from philology to close reading did not affect the white, male dominance of the canon. Whereas Irish and Jewish writers were permitted to enter into mainstream literature as part of international Modernism, African American writers even of the caliber of Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison were sidelined, in the case of Wright by accusations of parochialism and social melodrama, in the case of Ellison by a sterile debate as to whether his work was universal or polemical in its advocacy of civil and human rights for African Americans, as if these two concepts were antithetical. It is not an exaggeration to say that Black people were excluded from the American rendition of international Modernism. Richard Wright’s prologue to Native Son, “How Bigger Was Born,” (1940) cast the use of violence in fiction not as, but for the heightened aesthetic effect of shock and awareness. Wright relied on similar devices of style and technique as did writers acclaimed by Modernism such as Henry James or Gustave Flaubert, and; constructed an American novelistic tradition of Gothic terror quite similar to what Richard V. Chase, a white academic critic, advocated in the 1950s when he spoke of the American “romance.” Yet Wright was not brought into the conversation in the US midcentury English department because of the exclusion of African American voices from the idea of “literature.” In Twentieth Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity (1953), Ellison spoke of the “segregation of the word” (p. 81) as the “most insidious” form of segregation. The reception of his essay exemplified this verbal segregation, as even though Ellison’s recognition of the “ambivalence” of literary language was well in line with the New Critical emphasis on literary “texture” and “ambiguity,” his essay, though receiving considerable praise, was not brought into an English-department classroom space that presumed the exclusion of Black voices. Moreover, even though the CLA Journal, founded in 1957 by teachers at historically Black colleges and universities, addressed literature in a universal and inclusive spirit, as its founding editor, Therman J. O‘Daniel, made clear, the white establishment rarely reciprocated this sense of inclusiveness.