A critical platitude that dogged African American literature during much of the Jim Crow period is that it was too hampered by the race problem and thus too time- and place-bound to stand up to universalizing measures of literary greatness. This panel seeks to critique that historical critical tendency in light of the uncanny pertinence of early and mid-twentieth century African American literature to the current American scene. We will be suggesting that the current topicality of African American literature from the Jim Crow era stems not merely from the resurrection of supposedly buried issues, but from the fact that its racially-determined subject matter was, contrary to much critical wisdom, more universalist than limiting. In effect, insofar as its subject matter was the United States’s problem of the color line, African American literature was always about America’s politically fraught, ongoing identity crisis, which in turn affected the United States’s global reputation and questions about the meaning of its world-historical destiny. The participants believe the following 15-20 minute presentations should stimulate a lively discussion about how classic African American literature is essential to our understanding of this turbulent moment in American history.

Michael Nowlin’s paper, “The Marrow of Tradition and Contemporary Disenfranchisment,” will take issue with the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder ruling mainly for its expressed underlying assumption that it was putting an embarrassing past to rest once and for all. The logic of Chief Justice Roberts’s ruling was that the historical disenfranchisement of African American voters by white Southerners, for which the 1965 Voting Rights Act was a solution, was no longer a problem; continual enforcement of the law was tantamount to making the living continue to atone for the sins of the dead. But as elections since 2013 have made manifest, Shelby County v. Holder encouraged the return of racist voting regulations with a vengeance. That this resurrection has been highly visible in North Carolina resonates uncannily with the history epitomized by the Wilmington riots of November 1898, forever commemorated by that state’s native son Charles Chesnutt over a century ago in his novel The Marrow of Tradition. That novel begs to be applied to the current situation, Nowlin will argue, especially for what it reveals about the capacity of the nineteenth-century novelistic resources Chesnutt used to represent the far-reaching, dynamic social forces at work and the complex social and psychological motivation in play in the newly urgent battle over the franchise. Chesnutt’s novel was regarded as overly tendentious in its day and even somewhat old-fashioned. But that only makes its prescience more uncanny: prescience about fake news and false equivalencies, about the complicity and/or impotence of “conservatism” in the face of naked power grabbing and demagoguery, and about a national inclination to regard violent racism as a sectional aberration. To what extent can Chesnutt’s elaborate work of fiction serve as an antidote to complacency about a post-truth politics?

Noelle Morrissette’s paper, “‘Virginia as Narcissus': Understanding Charlottesville 2017 through Anne Spencer’s Manuscript Manifesto,” will demonstrate the way in which some of the hitherto private, archival later writings of Anne Spencer (1883-1975) might deepen our understanding of the recent violent conflict in Charlottesville. Spencer’s private negotiations of public matters demonstrate the interior effects of a global political ecology. World War II, Civil Rights, African decolonization; persistent segregation, class divisions and poverty: these historic events and ongoing struggles and problems shaped Spencer’s communal outlook, her view of the ecology of the nation in a global politics, that emerges from her later writing. This paper will present an argument for reading Spencer’s “Virginia as Narcissus” through a literary history that acknowledges persisting structures of poverty, inequality, and separate but unequal education in the state of Virginia. In this prose work written over two decades, from roughly 1940-1960, Spencer responded in particular to the way in which the institutionalization of an almost exclusively white modern American poetry into canonical monuments—most notably through the work of the Southern-based New Critics—coincided with continued segregation and racial terror. “Virginia as Narcissus” engages the American nation’s evolving regard for high modernist poetry while commemorating a South that acknowledges its black writers’ voices and creative spaces. Brought to bear on contemporary Charlottesville, Spencer’s “Virginia as Narcissus” freely acknowledges the white supremacist markers of everyday life, while directing readers away from the notion of a fixed status for history, poetry, and knowledge itself, emphasizing, rather than monuments, things that move: dynamic writing, interaction, and instruction that moves through place.

Shana Russell’s paper, “‘The Root is Rage’: Blackness, Violence, and the representation of Gender in Native Son,” argues for the problem still posed by the central African American female in Wright’s classic novel—the black domestic labourer Bessie Mears. In one of that novel’s pivotal scenes, Bigger sexually assaults then murders her, and shoves down the air shaft of an abandoned tenement. The implications of this scene have been difficult for our culture to process: not only have Bessie’s character and fate been under-appreciated in the novel’s critical heritage, but her character was eliminated altogether from the first production for the stage, and the pivotal scene in question has been eliminated from the latest film version as it was from the 1981 film adaptation. Focusing on the return of Native Son in 2019 by way of Rashid Johnson’s film, Russell will critically examine the update the novel is getting—as Suzan Lori-Parks’ screenplay situates it in the present—in relation not just to Black Lives Matter but to the #metoo movement. Parks has said that it is easier to see Bigger as a human being in 2019 than it was in 1940; yet while the new version seems committed to enriching the portraits of the African American women in Bigger’s life, it follows a tradition of popular media adaptations in evading one of Wright’s harshest scenes and arguably his native son’s most horrid deed. What are the contemporary reasons for this evasion?