Literary Scholars Remake Black Studies

Henry Louis Gates, the preeminent literary scholar within Afro-American studies today according to many of his colleagues, last week took the stage in Boylston Auditorium to talk about the problems of canon formation within the Afro-American literary tradition.

But the speech was far from a purely academic one. Gates, who is currently editing a Norton Anthology of Afro-American Literature, cautioned his audience against any Ivory Tower approach to Black literature. Instead of remaining sheltered "in the swaddling clothes of our academic complacencies," Gates said scholars must be aware of "the yawning chasm between our critical discourse and the traditions they discourse upon."

In Gates' talk, one could hear both the confidence of Black literary criticism and the doubts which have accompanied its rise in the field of Afro-American studies. For while Black studies is increasingly moving towards literature and away from history, some scholars worry that in the process, the political relevancy of the field may be diminshed.

This shift in the direction of Black studies away from history and towards literature will surely be felt at Harvard over the next few years, as the University's Afro-Am and English Departments both begin to rebuild their senior faculties.

Indeed, it may be symbolic of the new connections between literature and Afro-American studies that Gates has just been appointed chair of Harvard's Afro-Am Visiting Committee, a position he says he will use to help Harvard emerge as a leader in the field.

Another clue as to the future direction of Black studies at Harvard is the recent tenure offer to a major scholar of Black literature at Columbia.

Now that the shift has become a fact, many scholars in the field are trying to explain just why it occurred and just what the effects will be.

At a dinner with members of Harvard's Afro-Am Department following his talk, Gates and DuBois Professor of History and Afro-American Studies Nathin I. Huggins engaged in a long discussion on precisely this topic. Professors who atteneded the dinner said the night represented a kind of passing of the torch in Black studies from the older historian to the younger literary critic.

Professor of Law Derrick A. Bell, who has himself turned to fiction in his recent work on civil rights law, recalls the discussion between Gates and Huggins: "Basically, they said that the great thrust of Afro-American history was to correct the record--to show that Black folk played a very important role," Bell says. "But the historical role tended to be a correction of the record, while the literary people can provide a continuous range of views about the record."

When the first Afro-American Studies departments were born out of the turbulent student activism of the 1960s, it was the historians such as John Hope Franklin and John Blassingame--the first head of Yale's Afro-Am Department--who led the march toward developing the new discipline.

In a report that Huggins wrote for the Ford Foundation in 1985 on the state of Afro-American Studies, the Harvard historian says that "I have written here mainly of historians, in part because they were asked to play a major role in [the founding of] Afro-American studies." Huggins, whose report examines the future of the discipline as well as its past, went on to say that "to the extent there was a field, it depended on [the historians]."

Primarily, those historians saw their mission as righting the historical record of Black America's past, by reexamining studies of slavery and Reconstruction to emphasize the point that Blacks had indeed made their own history.

In attempting to explain the shift towards literature within Afro-American studies, scholars focus on three areas: the increasing complexity of the political issues surrounding Black Americans, the theoretical sophistication offered by feminist and deconstructionist approaches to literature and changes in the composition of academia.

As a consequence of the theoretical work being done by the literary critics, for the first time, many professors say, the field has really become defined as an academic, rather than political, discipline.

As Houston Baker, a University of Pennsylvania professor whose name is often mentioned with Gates, says, "The question by the end of the 1970s was how do you move largely political assertions about the autonomy of Afro-American culture and literature toward a more theoretical plane?"

The answer that Baker and other academics came up with was literary criticism--a decision that has made a great impact on defining Afro-American studies.

"There has definitely been a shift from a predominant concern with history in Afro-American studies that peaked in the 1970s with several prize-winning books," says Harvard's Afro-Am Department Chair Werner Sollors.

Those books "represented a big assault on the previous historiography," Sollors says, although he conjectures that the influential history texts may have had the "funny effect" of silencing important historical works by other Afro-American scholars.

Sollors adds that up through the Civil Rights movement "so many energies were tied up in simply fighting segregation" that scholars didn't really have the chance to explore the complexities of the Afro-American literary tradition. "But now that the dust from that has settled a little bit, the texts are being recuperated in a new way," he says. "That's not to say there isn't a political agenda still, but rather that different questions can now be asked."

And as the historians reached the end of their era of domination within the discipline, interest in literature burgeoned with the emergence of Black women writers and new methods of literary criticism, many scholars say.

"The conjunction of the women's movement and the prominence of Black women writers provided a very powerful source of interest," Professor of Romance Languages and Literature Barbara E. Johnson says. "People who were trained in literary theory have become interested in questioning the authority of the establishment."

Gates argues that the trend towards literature in Black studies stemmed in part from the publication of novels by Black women in the mid-1970s, just the time when Afro-American Studies departments were in a period of crisis.

"Women's studies and the feminist movement in general were very influential on the growth of Black Studies," says Gates. "Where the disciplines meet is on the terrain of Black women's studies. When people were starting to say that Afro-American studies was going to die, what kept it from dying was the infusion of Black women's literature."

But at the same time that the scholarship in the field has been changing, most professors say that the demographics of the profession have also affected the new literary scholarship. "The English profession was really in a slump in the 70s," Sollors says. "But today more people in general are drawn to literary orientations."

In general, English departments are witnessing higher undergraduate and graduate enrollments today than they did in the 1970s, while History departments have not been as attractive to young scholars, Gates says.

Yet some professors caution that the shift from history to literature may move Afro-American studies away from the political agenda that created such departments in the first place, thereby making them too esoteric.

Baker and Gates counter such charges, however, arguing that their work still involves the formation of clear political agendas. "I think that any scholarship that does not look to immediate social problems is not worth the paper it is written on," says Baker.

But he recognizes that by moving Afro-American studies to the theoretical realm of literary criticism, scholars risk undermining their own political projects. "What kind of coalition is it when [your scholarship] takes you out of contact with 95 percent of my people in this country?" Baker asks.

The line between being theoretical and being relevant is a thin one, and scholars say Baker and Gates are part of a new generation of Black academics whose own experience makes them suited to discern just what the line is.

As a group, these new Black literary theorists went to first-rate colleges or graduate schools in the formative period of Afro-American Studies during the late 1960s and early 1970s. They are familiar with both the practical politics of the Civil Rights movement and the rarefied academic politics of the university.

Johnson, who has concentrated her studies on Black women writers since 1980, says generational changes have a lot to do with the resurgence of literary studies within Afro-Am. "There are a lot of scholars who got interested in Black studies in the 1960s--many of them are now tenured someplace, and that has been formative in making a body of scholarship," she says.

"The scholars who are now in their 30s--like Gates--provide a kind of bridge," says Baker, who was a young professor at Yale when Gates was an undergraduate there. "They are the second generation, whose graduate education included exposure to the theoretical explosions of deconstructionism and post-structuralism."

Gates, an undergraduate at Yale from 1969 to 1973, says that he and many other scholars in the field were influenced by the historian Arthur Schomburg's reminder that "before we can progress, we have to understand our past." History was therefore the preoccupation of the first phase of Afro-American studies, he argues.

But, as evidenced by such works as his widely-celebrated The Signifying Monkey, Gates--and his fellow critics of Black literature--draw heavily on modern critical theory to interpret Black literature.

This new trend in Black studies should have a profound effect on the direction of Afro-Am at Harvard, which is beginning to build up after having lain dormant for nearly a decade.

A joint appointment with Harvard's English and Afro-Am Departments is in the works, according to professors. But Arnold Rampersad, the scholar at Columbia, may prove difficult to lure away.

Rampersad, whose recently published biography of Langston Hughes received national acclaim, is "a master scholar and is world class by any standards," according to Baker. But Baker cautions against placing Rampersad, who received his Ph.D at Harvard, in the same category with the literary theorists. "He doesn't really see the same urgency and incumbency to theorize," Baker says.

Several professors who asked not to be named say that Harvard has tried on and off for years to lure Gates, to Harvard as a tenured professor, but they say those recruiting efforts have never resulted in a formal offer. Gates, a Cornell professor who holds appointments in the Africana Studies, Comparative Literature and English departments there, has written several books in recent years that have greatly expanded the reach of Afro-American literary criticism, scholars say.

But whether or not Harvard succeeds in hiring Gates or Rampersad, Sollors, who himself focusues on Black literature, says the recent innovations in literary studies will have an impact on the future of the field at Harvard. "We have a very interesting recent mountain of good books upon which to build," he says.

Sollors says the agenda for Harvard's Afro-Am Department is straightforward for the next few years: to hire a musicologist to replace Eileen Southern, professor of music emeritus, to find social scientists and finally, to strengthen the study of history and literature.

That agenda, he says, "is fairly typical of Afro-American studies across the country." If Harvard can successfully recruit candidates to fill those posts, then the department will be in "excellent" shape over the next 10 years ago.

But whatever the fate of individual departments of Afro-American Studies, scholars say the dramatic recent shift in the field has given new life to Black Studies as an academic discipline. The question that remains is whether the soul of the field will be lost in the process.

"It has been a long struggle really--players have changed, standards have changed, conditions have changed. Today, Afro-American studies in literature have levels of prestige never before attained. We are in a mini-Golden Age," Rampersad says. "But we've got to remember the struggle--the Black academic community must understand what the field is all about."