Black (African-American) Literary Criticism

"Black" or "African-American" criticism is marked by the following considerations:

A sense that black writing comes out of a sociological, political, ideological and cultural situation marked by oppression and marginalization. 'Black' reading then must negotiate the difficult boundaries between textual and cultural meanings, between 'aesthetic' and ideological impacts.
A sense that criticism is inevitably ideological and political, and that black experience and the expression of that experience is a historical, cultural formation of oppression. The 'art' of black art is inevitably, then, a very complex cultural formation. Black criticism has substantial ties to post-colonial criticism, and to the issues in it of the representation of the 'other', the reclamation of identity in the forms and language of the oppressor, and the notions of parody, mimicry and hybridity.
An awareness that black experience is historical and cultural: that it has ties to African language, cultural practices and attitudes, that it is formed through the experience of slavery and violence, that it has endured a long and troubled negotiation with white culture, so that black aesthetic production in white cultures is marked by white culture positively and negatively. As Barbara Johnson puts it,

New logical models are needed for describing the task of finding a 'vernacular' theory, models that acknowledge the ineradicable trace of Western culture within Afro-American culture (and vice versa) without losing the 'signifying black difference.'...And [that] the 'master's home' could not be what it is without all that was stolen from the slave.
There are differing focuses on different aspects of black experience -- on the African heritage, on the evolved American black culture, on the possibility of adaptation to a new non-racial cultural formation.
An attempt to recognize and celebrate that which is distinctively and positively black in black art, that is, which owes its meaning and expression to the particular expressions and traditions of black culture and experience. The most influential black aesthetic contribution, jazz, forms for many a model or metonym for black aesthetics and culture.
A struggle over the relation of race, reading and critical theory, similar in some respects to that of feminist theory: who 'speaks for' blacks?; can only blacks 'read' black literature?; can black literature be read with the tools of contemporary criticism or does it demand a more basic, moral and ideological commitment? In the opinion of one of the most influential poststructural black theorists, Henry Louis Gates Jr., "For non-Western, so-called non-canonical critics, 'getting the man off your eye-ball' [a phrase from Alice Walker's The Color Purple] means using the most sophisticated critical theories and methods available to reappropriate and redefine our own 'colonial' discourses. We must use these theories and methods insofar as they are relevant to the study of our own literatures" He cites the danger of the 'Naipaul fallacy' (after the writer V.S. Naipaul) of attempting to demonstrate that post-colonial literature is worthy of study because it is fundamentally the same as European literature (a characteristic of much black criticism before the mid-70's): "We must, I believe, analyze the ways in which writing relates to race, how attitudes toward racial differences generate and structure literary texts by us and about us. We must determine how critical methods can effectively disclose the traces of ethnic differences in literature."
A reading of white writing in racist countries which illumines the nature of the oppression of blacks -- something akin to the feminine critique. Toni Morrison, for instance, argues that American culture is built on, and is premised by, and always includes, the presence of blacks, as slaves, as outsiders. Morrison likens the unwillingness of academics in a racist society to see the place of Africanism in literature and culture to the centuries of unwillingness to see feminine discourse, concerns, and identity. She posits whiteness as the 'other' of blackness, a dialectical pair (each term both creates and excludes the other): no freedom without slavery, no white without black. She ties in the 'blackness' of blacks to the blackness of the territory of the unknown and evil in the romance tradition:
There is no romance free of what Herman Melville called 'the power of blackness,' especially not in a country in which there was a resident population, already black, upon which the imagination could play; through which historical, moral, metaphysical, and social fears, problems, and dichotomies could be articulated.
Morrison believes that one can read blackness in white American writing because, in cultural, ideological, political terms, race is intrinsic to America: if one says someone is an African, one then says they are a white or a black African -- you designate either; if one says someone is an American, that means they are white, unless otherwise noted -- the 'white' is automatic. In the terms of the European theorist Jurgen Habermas, the violence against blacks is embedded in the uses of language and in the cultural practices of the nation.
An attempt to come to terms with the whole issue of what 'race' is. Historically race has been seen as something essential. That race is inherent, a matter of 'blood', was and is firmly believed by Americans, is clear from the recent autobiography of an American, Gregory Howard Williams, now Dean of the Law School at Ohio State, Life on the Color Line, a man who looks white, and whose father passed as Italian in Virginia, where his family was not known. He was in virginia accepted and treated as white, but he was treated as black (and hence was the victim of exclusion and other prejudicial behavior) when the family returned to their home town of Muncie, Indiana: there they knew that his grandmother was black -- therefore he was black. When is white black?-- When you have some 'black blood' -- check that: when people know or think you have 'black blood'..