What is African American Literature?

The Los Angeles Review of Books is having a symposium exploring that very question.

From an essay within said symposium by Walter Benn Michaels...

At the center of Warren’s understanding of African American literature is the idea that it was written by people for whom the fact of their supposed racial difference from whites was both absolutely unproblematic (since it was everywhere and at all times enforced by white racism) and just as absolutely problematic (since the reason they were writing was to discredit white racism). In other words, once white racism actually was overcome, what would be the point in continuing to write as an African American? More generally, Warren asks, how would or should “black difference” — other than as a mere matter of skin color — “persist absent the systematic social and political constraints imposed on the nation’s black population” by white supremacists? A black man, Du Bois famously said, was “a person who must ride Jim Crow in Georgia.” So once no one had to ride Jim Crow in Georgia, what would a black man be? And if African American literature was a response to state-sponsored “racial subordination and exploitation,” how, once state-sponsored racial subordination and exploitation came to an end, would African American literature also not come to an end? How can there – why should there — still be African American literature?

The most obvious and popular response to this question (on display most recently in every Obama-to-the-contrary-notwithstanding reminder that we don’t live in a post-racial world) has been to argue that racial subordination and exploitation have not in fact come to an end and that our era is one in which “the most obvious expressions of segregation and discrimination” characteristic of Jim Crow have only been replaced by “more covert but equally pernicious manifestations of racism.” Thus the question of what Warren calls continuing “black particularity” in the absence of white racism doesn’t need to be answered because the conditions under which it would need to be asked (the disappearance of white racism) don’t yet exist. And Warren himself is quick to agree that the effects of white racism are widespread in American society today. The black man who is no longer forced to ride Jim Crow is still, he points out, unlikely to be able to “afford to ride first class in Georgia or in Illinois or in California,” and may even be unable “to afford the price of any ticket whatsoever.” African Americans today are about 13% of the population but about 23% of the poor. Whites today make up about 65% of the population but only 42.5% of the poor. The most recent unemployment rate for black men is 16.8%; for white men, it’s 7.7%. So, at the very least, the post-Jim Crow black man is still much more likely to be poor and/or out of work than any white man, and much less likely to have decent health care or go to college or participate in the benefits of middle-class American life.