Answer for a Chinese Scholar


Interview answer, August 12, 2017



Wang:  Would you please elaborate briefly on the impact of Donald Trump's triumph in the presidential election over the ethnic groups and the ethnic literatures.  Will Trump's presidential triumph produce a dramatic difference for African American literature and literary criticism?

Ward:  What you call Trump's triumph is one part of a dramatic change in what many American citizens believe and think about the political ecology of our democratic experiment, our identity as a nation in the world order.  One of the reasons for Trump's debatable "triumph" is the resurgence of ethnic hatred, a probable backlash against President Barack Obama's eight years of trying to promote the audacity of hope.  President Trump and those American citizens who "love" him unconditionally are creating an environment in which nonsense is normal and despair is necessary.  Thus, it is logical to speculate that the new American politics, a slow drifting from democratic ideologies into palpable neo-fascism, will have some impact on the topics writers deal with in African American literature and on the assumptions literary critics make about the function of their discourses.

Consider the topics some writers have addressed recently.  Colson Whitehead's novel The Underground Railroad (2016) expands the genre of slave narrative (narrative of the enslaved).  He transforms the metaphor of underground railroad as we have used it since the 19th century into a material description of rails and tunnels that might be operative in movement from slavery to freedom.  The transformation of metaphor is crucial.  Counting Descent (2017), Clint Smith's powerful, accessible, and beautiful collection of poems, inspired the poet Gregory Pardlo to write that the book immerses "us in the America that America so often forgets."  In my mind, Smith's book alerts us to how President Trump is tweeting America into oblivion as he invites us to make a compact with insanity.  Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017) by Roxane Gay is a poignant meditation on why she will always be "fat, first and foremost."  Her book anatomizes the innate cruelty of stereotypes.  In the arena of literary and cultural criticism, Lawrence P. Jackson's excellent Chester B. Himes: A Biography (2017) explores the role of literary politics in Himes's life and works.

I do not claim these books are "representative" of dramatic difference; they suggest directions the difference may take.  They provide clues about the environment wherein African American literature and literary criticism shall continue to grow, although it is impossible to say what shapes the plants shall assume.  All American ethnic groups feel the heat of Trump's eccentricity in some degree.  All of them must choose between remaining silent about the "triumph" or resisting its impact bravely and relentlessly.  Much of the resistance might involve a calculated use of aesthetics.  And literary critics who have some expertise with digital humanities will use a new array of methods and methodologies.  It is probable writers and critics will express more concern with the interrelatedness of American morality, ethics, and politics.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            August 12, 2017

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