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Early Black American Writing and the Making of a Literature
Ist Teil von
Early American Literature, 2014-03, Vol.49 (2), p.553-569
Ort / Verlag
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press
Erscheinungsjahr
2014
Link zum Volltext
Quelle
Project MUSE
Beschreibungen/Notizen
Despite these impediments, Dion maintained hope that the "coming literary glory of colored Americans" would arrive, but only if black writers, critics, and readers endeavored concertedly, as "a great number of co-workers," to eradicate the racism of both the state and civil society as well as to facilitate the emergence of a sort of widespread black American "literary excellence" that would "remind the world of the days when dark-browed Egypt gave letters to Greece, and when the songs of Ethiopia-' black skinned and wooly-haired'-[ were] . . . at once the originators and conservators of science" (4). "Corporate enterprise" is the key phrase, here, because it suggests that the "literature" Dion sought could only materialize from the efforts of a collective both conscious of their collectivity and dedicated to their particular aims and sensibilities above those of everyone else. [...]following Dion's logic, a Wheatley or a Horton was too isolated to initiate a "literature" and too easily dismissed as exceptional, while texts such as slave narratives-which are notably absent from his essay-were too overdetermined by the affective and ideological demands of white readers to constitute a "colored American literature" (Dion 4).