The Mystery of American Identity

Although best known for his novel Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison’s essays, and the array of cultural and political agendas which prompt their conception, are integral to American literary theory and criticism. His essays defined the terms for ongoing debates around nineteenth and twentieth century American fiction, modernist aesthetics, and American culture. This chapter charts the various cultural, literary, and political interventions made by Ellison’s essays. Like James Baldwin (chapter 4), Ellison confronts the question of American identity, but he recasts it in terms of culture rather than of the individual. Through Ellison’s use of the vernacular process, which blends high and low styles, he maps cultural concerns onto the political stage. By emphasizing the cultural contributions made by African Americans, Ellison’s work complicates, reworks, and redefines our understanding of American culture.

Voices of Thunder

This chapter accounts for the centrality of nineteenth-century black oral culture to the development of the essay as a distinct African American literary genre. The author illustrates how the sermons and orations of nineteenth-century men and women such as David Walker, Maria Stewart, Henry Highland Garnet, Frances Harper, and Fredrick Douglass laid the foundation for the African American essay. It is shown how these authors combined accounts of their personal experience with traditions of oral performance. Because the line between the spoken and written word was blurred by nineteenth-century conventions, these authors blended various rhetorical and performance strategies to shape the art of the essay. In doing so, these writers became “voices of thunder.”The essayists discussed in this chapter used biblical references and appropriated democratic discourse to advance anti-slavery agendas. They appropriated the rhetoric of the founding documents of the American republic and remade them into the rhetoric of counterrevolution. Their works emphasized the material realities of life in America for blacks, both enslaved and free. Their expressions of freedom, and the rhetorical strategies they modelled informed the work of their literary descendants.

On Art and Such

This chapter charts the debates on art and aesthetics that preoccupied writers during the Harlem Renaissance. It is argued that because African Americans had made slight political and economic progress they turned to the arts as the primary site for social justice. The questions generated by the ensuing aesthetic debates about the purpose of racial art, its form, its audience, and the efficacy of cultural difference, reverberated throughout the twentieth century. This chapter also analyzes the formal innovations made by African American essayists. It is shown through the examples of Alain Locke’s intellectual detachment, Langston Hughes’ fiery polemic, George Schuyler’s acerbic satire, and Zora Neale Hurston’s “jagged harmonies” that the essayists of the Harlem Renaissance both formulated and enacted the aesthetic they proposed in their writings.

On Freedom and the Will to Adorn

This chapter discusses how black essayists worked through and around ideas of freedom to produce new variations of the genre of the essay. The author shows how the African American essay serves as the medium through which authors make crucial political, social, and artistic interventions. At the same time the author is attentive to formal changes in the essay. Through a series of representative examples from authors such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, and Zora Neale Hurston, this chapter charts the way the essay at its best expresses both a determination to be free and the “will to adorn.” Although the emphasis changes, black essayists use three rhetorical strategies to make these crucial interventions: democratic eloquence, troubled eloquence and vernacular process. Frederick Douglass utilizes democratic eloquence to make crucial interventions in anti-slavery discourse. W.E.B. Du Bois’ troubled eloquence marks a historical shift in which freedom becomes aligned as much with individual identity as with a people’s collective freedom. Zora Neale Hurston uses a “vernacular process” to fuse high and low styles in her meditation on freedom and racial identity. It is through the use of these strategies that African American authors make a mark on the genre itself.

Epilogue

This chapter considers the status of the essay in the twenty-first century as it shifts its medium from print to digital. It is argued that given the ability for the essay to speak to moments of political and social crisis, comment on and define aesthetic debates, and reflect on the meaning of individual and collective identities, it remains a crucial genre for twenty-first century African American authors. Through analyzing the work of Brittney Cooper and Ta-Nehisi Coates amongst others, this chapter illustrates how black essayists continue to work through the subject of freedom and express the will to adorn. Deploying the vernacular process, one inflected with a hip-hop beat, these authors blur the line between the digital and print, and continue to highlight the centrality of the essay to the African American literary tradition.

On Women, Rights, and Writing

This chapter charts the relationship between two prolific African American essayists, June Jordan and Alice Walker. Unlike Ellison and Baldwin, who were contemporaries but not allies, Jordan and Walker corresponded with one another, lectured together, and commented on each other’s works. It is argued that Walker and Jordan’s essays record their lifelong quest for redemptive art and politics. This project is marked by a desire for a freer, more hopeful future that comes to terms with a painful, oppressive past. As both essayists came to political consciousness during the civil rights movement, they utilized the rhetoric of rights to redefine ideas of national belonging. In doing so, they expanded the scope of the essay to includeissues of gender and sexuality. Through analyzing their essays, this chapter illustrates how Jordan and Walker in distinct, yet complementary ways, shape the art of the essay.

Stranger at Home

This chapter analyzes the work of one of the most influential essayists, James Baldwin. It is argued that Baldwin’s essays engage with what it means to be an American. It argues moreover that Baldwin employs the form of the essay to provide crucial insights into the relationships among citizenship, race, the nation, and identity. At the beginning of his career, Baldwin deploys what the author deems “strategic American exceptionalism”. That is, he adopted the language of American exceptionalism to advance the political interests of African Americans. While this rhetorical strategy is deployed partially to be make his views comprehensible to the larger public, it also illuminated his belief in American democratic ideals. This chapter charts Baldwin’s engagement with national and democratic discourse to provide a political indictment of the failure of the U.S. to enact these principles as it engaged black Americans. This chapter charts Baldwin’s complex and ambivalent relationship to the nation and democracy.

Prologue

Despite the centrality of the essay to the African American literary tradition, this genre still enjoys little critical currency. Theprologue provokes and engages the question: What is the essay? Through analyzing authors as diverse as W.E.B Du Bois, James Baldwin, and Alice Walker, the book illustrates how black author sutilized the genre of the essay to make critical interventions in political and aesthetic debates. Freedom, it argues, is the subject which engages the black essayist across three centuries. The “will to adorn,” a phrase coined by Zora Neale Hurston, conveys the essayists’ attitude toward language—the desire to make language an expression of beauty. Building on three concepts: democratic eloquence, troubled eloquence, and vernacular process, the author signals a way, a method, for reading the African American essay. These terms do not follow a linear progression but are constantly in movement, and it is through their use that African American authors continued to offer new variations on the genre of the essay. The prologue argues for the centrality of the essay to the African American literary tradition. It moves the genre of the essay from the margin to the center.