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COPYRIGHT 1998 University of Wisconsin Press
Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism. Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture ser. 105. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. xiii + 288 pp. $59.95; $19.95 paper.
The three books under discussion in this review essay--Michael Davidson's Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word, Aldon Lynn Nielsen's Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism, and Jed Rasula's The American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Effects, 1940-1990--raise a number of provocative issues. Taken collectively, these books ask us to give serious attention to the place of poetry in the current curriculum and to poetry's relationship to our imagination of nationhood. Such considerations take place at a time when narrative is the preferred mode of expression, and complex and innovative poetry remains in disfavor. If, as Davidson suggests, "writing is a form of knowing" (70), we may wish to consider what role, if any, poetry plays in contemporary thinking.
The writing of literary history, particularly when that history attempts to address the present and the recent past, is a particularly slippery activity. It has been more customary to write books of criticism on contemporary poetry that have been organized around close readings of the work of individual poets, usually packaged in a one-poet-per-chapter format. These three books, however, pay much more attention to histories that take a form other than the story of superhero individuals, and thus these books call into question (implicitly) the importance granted to individual labor. These books (as Davidson notes most directly) appear at a time of transformation from a written/book culture to a digitalized/hypertextual culture. Indeed, as Davidson suggests, histories being written today occur at the end of a particular scholarly era. The archives that we study--the world of the author's papers--are undergoing a radical transformation (in formal and material senses). What these three books have in common is a concern for and a study of the roles of mediating institutions in the formation of literary history and individual literary reputations. Nielsen, Davidson, and Rasula each offer detailed analysis of the roles of mediating institutions in the politics of shaping what kinds of poetry are deemed essential, important, representative, and of value--indeed, which poetries are allowed to become or remain visible and audible.
The writing of literary history, particularly when the subject is contemporary American poetry, can be an anxiety-producing activity, especially if the writer thinks it might be possible to write a "correct" or "complete" history. As Charles Bernstein claims, "There are no core subjects, no core texts in the humanities, and this is the great democratic vista of our mutual endeavor in arts and letters, the source of our greatest anxiety and our greatest possibilities."(1) As Bernstein suggests--and his suggestion is most germane to Nielsen's book, and somewhat applicable to the books by Davidson and Rasula--a goal of literary studies is not to construct a new history which tries to get it "right," but to sustain a memory of and the excitement about what is possible: "In literary studies, it is not enough to show what has been done but what it is possible to do." When we begin to read and to discuss and to teach the range of possible poetries, we may find ourselves in a position similar to Bernstein's: "I often teach works that raise, for many students, some of the most basic questions about poetry: What is poetry? How can this work be a poem? How and what does it mean?" (178). Such questions arise quite readily from contact with innovative poetry. For Bernstein, these questions result from poetry's "dress": "when a text is dressed in the costume of poetry, that (in and of itself) is a provocation to consider these basic questions of language, meaning, and art. Inevitably, raising such questions is one of the uses of the poetry to which I am committed--that is, poetry marked by its aversion to conformity, to received ideas, to the expected or mandated or regulated form" (179).
Aldon Nielsen's Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism provides a fine combination of advocacy and intense, careful research. It constitutes an act of recovery comparable to Cary Nelson's Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910-1945, which demonstrated the importance of a wide range of forgotten poetry (often political poetry) of the modernist era, especially the 1930s. What makes Nielsen's book more shocking is that the forgotten poetry in his book is of the past thirty-five years and involves the disappearance of significant work by living poets. In an age of critical approaches to literature that have supposedly corrected and broadened classroom syllabuses (through developments in multiculturalism, postcolonialism, African American studies, and cross-cultural studies), Nielsen's book should serve as an important polemical warning and as equally important evidence for the significant bodies of poetry that are being neglected today. In his least polemical manner, Nielsen describes his project as follows:
At a time when the politics of identity have often guided critical readings
of American verse, the possible range of written subjectivities has too
often been narrowed in critical accounts by the elimination
from consideration of many poems that might stand in the world and
show themselves as alternative histories of (and) desires.
My concern at this early stage of a study of the poets of black
experiment has been to demonstrate the existence of discrete
communities supporting avant-garde work in African-American poetics in
the years following World War II and to give some indication of the
potential significance of these communities to possible histories of
African-American verse.
(165)
Nielsen presents many examples of challenging, complex, innovative poetries that have not been embraced in the newly broadened anthologies of American literature, beginning with William Melvin Kelly's Dunfords Travels Everywheres (1970), a book which Nielsen calls an audacious literary experiment. Nielsen comments that "a course of literary criticism that expels such works as Kelly's from among its collection of sample texts to be considered, let alone from its canon, ends by offering readers an anemic and inadequate account of both the history and nature of American literature in general and of African-American literature in particular" (4). The case of Kelly is an instructive one--and one of perhaps one hundred cases presented in Nielsen's rich overview. Why is Kelly not a part of our conversations about important African American writing? Nielsen suggests, "Kelly's experiments and Dunfords Travels often overturn assumptions about what white and black language are, and so it will remain easier for those committed to essentialist views of linguistic racial difference not to read Kelly" (6). Like Melvin Tolson, whose later poetry "had reclaimed a blackness within modernism and posited a populist black modernity in writing" (8), Kelly attempted "a resituating of modernist forms within the continuum of African art forms that had given so much inspiration to the modernist moment" (6).Thus Nielsen begins with the example of Kelly because it gets to the crux of an impoverished and caricatured version of African American expression, a narrowness that is reinscribed in each new edition of the major American literature anthologies. Nielsen points to a narrow stylistic gate through which a black writer must enter the American literary canon: "One implication in North American literary studies, to judge from the contents of most recent multicultural anthologies, has been that a requisite `realism' of language practice must be adhered to by black authors if they are to be canonized as proper literary representations of the experiences of social marginality" (8). Nielsen's book constitutes an effective critique of such aesthetically based censorship.
Nielsen makes an argument on several fronts. He points out again and again the narrow version of the American literary canon in the era of a multiculturalism that often depends upon an essentialist identity politics and an unacknowledged "realistic" stylistic bias. Nielsen argues for a new understanding of modernism and postmodernism that will include and take seriously the theoretical and experimental contributions of a number of African American poets. In making such an argument, Nielsen understands very well a particular "romantic" pitfall of projects of "textual recovery":
There is always the risk that a call for broadening our consideration of
African-American poetics by returning to the study of such neglected
works as Kelly's might be seen as another "colonizing" move, another call
for revalorizing works at the poetic "margins" of African-American studies.
It may, in fact, be impossible entirely to elude such a charge. But the
call for a rereading of marginalized texts does not value such texts because
they are marginalized; rather, the argument is that we cannot claim adequate
understanding of and theorizing about the course of black literary
history so long as we begin such historicizing and theorizing at a point
where we have eliminated from view, in advance, works that might,
should they remain in view, challenge our histories and theories.
(10)
Nielsen considers his own effort to be a beginning in the process of textual recovery, a beginning that points toward a better understanding of the groundwork in the 1950s and early 1960s for the Black Arts movement. He is aware that a "first step toward that fuller comprehension will have to be a project of reclamation, perhaps as daunting and rewarding a project as recent rediscoveries of nineteenth-century African-American texts, because the texts of this early period of black postmodernity are mostly fugitive, having passed out of print or never having been printed in the first place" (82). Projects such as Nielsen's textual reclamation also allow us to reopen (and indeed begin to understand) "the questions raised by black postmodernity" (106).
In the current culture wars and in the process of expanding the American literary canon, many of us may unquestioningly think of the processes of blindness,...
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