The first paper will be “The Black World of Sound: The Performance of Black Aesthetics as the Black Freedom Impulse.” Margo Crawford, in this paper, analyzes Traylor’s 2014 performative lecture that dramatizes the tonal changes of Amiri Baraka as he discovers a “Black World” of sound. Crawford uncovers Traylor’s embodied practice of theorizing “an enunciation of language in the midst of the devastation of a world where word has been torn from flesh.” Through a careful analysis of Traylor’s inclusion of song and poetic rhythm in this public lecture, Crawford shows the nuances of Traylor’s idea of Baraka’s attack on a “machine of language” and his call for a “human language.” In the last layer of this paper, Crawford uncovers Traylor’s discourse-altering space where Baraka and Toni Cade Bambara meet through “life-affirming screams that allow a movement.”
The second paper will be Meta DuEwa Jones' "Three Graces: Eleanor Traylor and the Two Toni's: Morrison and Bambara." Eleanor Traylor conjured the phrase "An Everlasting Yes!" when introducing the twenty-first century reissue of Toni Cade Bambara’s landmark anthology, The Black Woman. In 1970, Toni Cade posited an “afrafemme” worldview in her original preface. Traylor’s prefaces and forewords, essays and talks, create a worldview that is also a window. The frame of Toni Cade Bambara’s view, in this instance, was widened by Traylor’s expansive historical and contemporary renovation of the house that Black feminist aesthetics built. Traylor engages the contemporary writer and scholar Farah Jasmine Griffin’s treatise on the impact that the photographic image of an gorgeously dark brown, Afro-coiffured Black woman on the cover of the original issue of The Black Woman made on Griffin’s black-girl-psyche. Traylor has not only engaged through scholarship, through museum scrip curatorial essays, and through talks, the qualities of the “enunciatory” in major Black writers including James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka and Maya Angelou. These are all towering figures on top of the racial mountain; yet it is to Traylor’s relationship and work on the two Toni’s: Toni Cade Bambara and Toni Morrison that Jones' talk will primarily focus. Jones seeks to place Traylor’s Black feminist aesthetics, her womanist worldview, and her collaborative work as a co-writer, and friend to Morrison and Bambara in literary, historical and theatrical context.
The third paper will be Dana Williams' "A Backward Glance at the Future of African American Literary Studies": The Aesthetic Vision of Eleanor W. Traylor." When Toni Cade Bambara and Toni Morrison received inquires about critics who should be tapped to write reviews of new books in African American literature (novels by Black women especially), in their view, there was only one scholar who fit the bill--Eleanor Traylor. In Bambara's view, Traylor was "the best reader we got." For Morrison, Traylor was one of the critics who best answered the expectation Morrison articulates in "Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation"--that literary criticism reflects the culture out of which the literature emerges. Though she was actively a part of the "reconstruction of instruction" community that ushered in African American literature as a distinct field of study in the 1980s, Traylor resisted the theory-heavy move toward African American criticism and trended more toward aesthetic criticism that has now become the standard for African American literary criticism and cultural studies more generally. Christina Sharpe's idea of "the wake," for example, is not unlike Traylor's long-time use of a primary text metaphor to explore a concept. This is not to suggest that Sharpe's idea is derivative. Rather, it is to say that Traylor's scholarship foreshadows how we have come to do literary criticism today. This paper explores this legacy.