“Splintered beyond recognition.” Yogita Goyal on the Difficulty of Categorizing Contemporary African American Literature

A novel about a mother in southeastern Nigeria discovering her son’s body at her door that starts out as a murder mystery, but then unravels spiraling questions about trans and queer identity that shape the specter of the violent death. A short story about two middle-aged Black women exchanging increasingly mean-spirited letters about their daughters who attend an elite private school in California and “are the only two black children in the class.”

A dramatic exploration of Black masculinity and sexuality as a group of friends and lovers prepare for a hot wing festival. Another short story that imagines Black Friday sales over Thanksgiving as an actual bloodbath as customers trample over each other to grab coats and jackets on sale with murder on their mind. A meticulously researched historical novel about women in war, set during Mussolini’s 1935 invasion of Ethiopia.

A return to the passing plot, ranging over New Orleans and California, from the 1950s through the 1990s, tracing the disparate lives of twin sisters, one who passes and one who doesn’t. A future landscape on a continent called The Stillness wracked by earthquakes that cause seasons of total societal collapse. An Afrocentric Game of Thrones dark fantasy suffused with racial and sexual violence and alternate mythologies. A story of unexpected domesticity between a Black daycare teacher and his JapaneseAmerican boyfriend’s mother.

A collection of poems that captures an irreverent millennial consciousness with bold reinventions of Glenn Ligon, Zora Neale Hurston, and Adrian Piper, writing “the history of black people” as at once “a new series coming to BET twenty years ago” and as “an allegory for Denzel Washington’s continuous battle with various forms of transportation.”

Even these bald summaries of some of the most celebrated works of the last few years reveal the immense heterogeneity of what we call contemporary African American literature and the instability of meaning that attends the rubric.

What do Akwaeke Emezi’s The Death of Vivek Oji (2020), Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s “Belles Lettres” (2018), Katori Hall’s The Hot Wing King (2020), Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s “Friday Black” (2018), Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King (2019), Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half (2020), N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy (2015–17), Marlon James’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf (2019), Bryan Washington’s Memorial (2020), and Morgan Parker’s Magical Negro (2019) have in common that they can each be legible as illustrations of contemporary African American literature?

Uniform in neither genre nor geography nor theme, such works propose no common sense of what it means to be a Black writer today.

Yet we group all these works under the unwieldy category of contemporary African American literature and it is necessary to begin this introduction with an acknowledgment of the insufficiency of this rubric. Is contemporary African American literature a coherent entity? Are there distinct thematic characteristics that might capture developments in the tradition since the mid-1970s? Particular historical events that partition time and space, making legible distinct eras? Clear shifts from previous concerns?

It is difficult to hazard generalizations since literary output in recent decades diverges widely in terms of subject, experience, and style. It thus makes sense then that even a taxonomizing project like The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, which offers clear historical markers in terms of genre, event, and style for earlier periods (“The Literature of Slavery and Freedom, 1746–1865,” “Harlem Renaissance, 1919–1940,” “Realism, Naturalism, Modernism, 1940–1960,” “The Black Arts Era, 1960–1975”), refrains from ascribing descriptive value to the contemporary era, simply choosing the labels “Literature since 1975” and “The Contemporary Period” for the second and third editions, respectively.

The problems with capturing the contemporary in its volatile moment of emergence are well known. The history of the United States in the last four or five decades is so fraught that it makes the task harder. Do we narrate African American history since the Civil Rights Movement as one of incremental progress? As stasis? As a break from the past? As unending cycles of crisis? As boomerang?

When the literary terrain is so variegated, it is difficult to generalize themes, isolate trends and movements, or identify taxonomies of genre and generation. This is why it is necessary to trace multiple genealogies of the contemporary, as the first step toward defining the scope of our inquiry.

The end of the Black Arts era, usually dated to the mid-1970s, heralded a distinct shift in African American cultural production, making it possible to identify a body of work that could be called contemporary African American literature. While most scholars agree that the last few decades have generated new paradigms of racial formation and new patterns of cultural production, circulation, and reception, it has proven trickier to generate consensus about definitions of contemporary African American literature or to establish clear lines of genealogy.

If there is anything scholars agree on, it is that existing notions of black identity, community, and culture have diversified and splintered beyond recognition, finally putting an end to what Stuart Hall famously termed “the innocent notion of the essential black subject.” That is to say, the heterogeneity and multiplicity of Black aesthetic and political concerns is perhaps all that can be taken for granted in our historical conjuncture.

Changes in political economy both at home and abroad, in publishing circuits, and in the desires of ever more diverse audiences demand new frames of analysis, even as the uncertain gains of the Civil Rights Movement (including the rise of a substantial Black middle class) and the continuing nationalist legacies of the Black Power Movement and its aesthetic prescriptions require further analysis.

Beyond the immediate context of the Black Arts Movement, the contemporary era thus also demonstrates a longer arc, returning to a reckoning with the history and afterlife of slavery, meditating on the many migrations that index changing demographics and corresponding ideas of nation and globe, as well as the impact of wars and legislation on immigration and border control.

In what follows, I first consider the valence of some of these changes, including efforts to find new vocabularies that would be sufficiently supple to account for such heterogeneity. I then examine various forces shaping the creation of new and emerging genres, including the striking turn to the afterlife of slavery, the pull toward protest in the era of Black Lives Matter, the impact of new and expanded geographies and methods, as well as the ongoing draw of play and experimentation.

None of these impulses should be regarded as hegemonic, given the sheer range and multiplicity of contemporary African American literature but, considered together, may help provide an overview of the field’s possibilities and futures.

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The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary African American Literature edited by Yogita Goyal is available via The Cambridge University Press.