Talk:African American literature

Article Checklist for "African American literature"

Workgroup category or categories	Literature Workgroup [Categories OK]
Article status	Developed article: complete or nearly so
Underlinked article?	Yes
Basic cleanup done?	Yes
Checklist last edited by	Hillie Plantinga 14:16, 29 March 2007 (CDT)

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Removed during Cleanup

Langston Hughes, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1936

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Richard Wright, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1939

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Ralph Ellison circa 1961

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Toni Morrison (circa 1977)

Balkanization of American literature?

Despite these views, some conservative academics and intellectuals argue that African American literature only exists as part of a balkanization of literature over the last few decades or as an extension of the culture wars into the field of literature. According to these critics, literature is splitting into distinct and separate groupings because of the rise of identity politics in the United States and other parts of the world. These critics reject bringing identity politics into literature because this would mean that "only women could write about women for women, and only Blacks about Blacks for Blacks."

People opposed to this group-based approach to writing say that it limits the ability of literature to explore the overall human condition and, more importantly, judges ethnic writers merely on the basis of their race. These critics reject this judgment and say it defies the meaning of works like Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, in which Ellison's main character is invisible because people see him as nothing more than a Black man. Others criticize special treatment of any ethnic-based genre of literature. For example, Robert Hayden, the first African-American Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, once said (paraphrasing the comment by the black composer Duke Ellington about jazz and music), "There is no such thing as Black literature. There's good literature and bad. And that's all."

This section is really just a summary of a number of right-wing attacks on the field of study of African-American literature from people who feel for extrinsic reasons that it is not legitimate. There is no such disagreement among literary critics, no "opposing view" to the proposal that Af-Am literature is a legitimate field. The criticisms of "identity politics" should be moved to an entry on Identity politics, where both sides of that debate can be described, but the fact that American conservatives object to Af-Am Literature, or Women's Studies, or other such fields isn't to my mind a fact about these fields, but a fact about American conservatism, and should be discussed there. Russell Potter 15:29, 20 April 2007 (CDT)