Another post for my students. I mentioned this in class today, and several folks were interested, so here it is: “Wasness” by Aldon Lynn Nielsen. The essay takes on a recent book claiming that there is no more African-American Literature because AAL was a very specific sort of literature responding to very specific conditions at a very specific time. At that time has passed, etc., etc....
Nielsen is a very good scholar of African-American Literature, and a poet as well. He’s probably best-known for his book Black Chant that came out in the 90s. In it, Nielsen, tries to direct our attention to postmodern African-American writers. (So you can guess that he thinks African-American literature still exists.)
As I said in class, this brief blog-entry/essay is a good introduction to how the texts we’ve been reading and the issues we’re considering fit into current scholarly discussion of literature. It also makes plain that some of the stakes and mistakes are still the same!
