African American Literary Thought 40 Years Ago

African American Literary Thought Four Decades Ago



December 4, 1981

Dear __________________:

                Please accept my thanks for your response to my questionnaire "Inquiry for the  1980's."  I have enclosed a pre-publication draft of the document I compiled for your information and approval.  Please let me know  immediately if you wish to make any changes in the remarks I quoted or in the wording of your contributor's note.

                I hope this document will inspire discussions in the African-American literary community; I hope too that others will undertake projects to provide the data we need in our efforts to explain African-American literature and thought.

Sincerely yours,

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

Chairman

Department of English  [Tougaloo College]



December 1, 1981

INQUIRY FOR THE EIGHTIES:  Prefatory Remarks

                This survey of thinking among African-American writers and critics originated from an earlier attempt to elicit comments about black writing from the readers of Callaloo.  In "Postview/Preview 1968-1978," I listed twenty-six questions, requesting that readers send answers.  The questions followed two deliberately provocative comments about the state of black writing in this country, and I suppose readers took the questions to be  a jeu d'esprit or a crab net.  Whatever the case, Lorenzo Thomas was the only person to respond.  I am very grateful to him.  Without his encouragement, I would not have pursued the inquiry from a different angle.

                After reducing the questions to fifteen, I mailed a cover letter and the questionnaire …to 121 writers and critics  Nine letters were returned, stamped UNDELIVERABLE.  Of the 121 people who received the questionnaire, 38 or 33.92% sent answers.  Actually, I got answers from 39 people, but one poet requested that the answers remain anonymous. [His] answers were not used.

                This survey permits us to skim the surface of crucial issues in African-American literature, especially those concerning its function in promoting literacy, its potential to preserve or to modify values, and its reception at present within a diverse black culture.  Honest, witty, cautious, sincere, astringent, the opinions, and the objections to the "hidden agendas" in several questions, direct us to the considerable work to be done in assessing the immediate and long-range value of black literature.

                The inquiry erases any "illusion of consensus" that we might  have had about literary opinion, with greater force, I think, than do scattered arguments in our journals.  The worldview of the Sixties confronts the worldview of the Eighties.  The clash is sobering.  For all of us  ---  writers, critics, and readers ---I can only hope this document will serve as the first step in a journey of a thousand miles.



Blog8.8.2017

1981 Questions in Search of 2017 Answers

( Thirty-nine writers answered the original questions in 1981.  Some of those questions have been revised.)



Which writers influenced your decision to write?  Rank them in order of importance.



Do you feel that significant aspects of African American experiences in the USA have been either ignored or insufficiently explored in black writing?



Have black writers given sufficient attention to new directions in non-print art?



Have international liberation struggles inspired you to reinvestigate history?



Have black writers created enough literature for children?  Have they created a body of materials that might be used in alternative education?



Has black writing served to increase the literacy rate in the USA?



Has gender in the USA had a permanent effect on writing?



Do black readers support black writers?



Have black critics created a sustainable environment for the development of black writing?



Is more attention now given to aesthetics than to an aesthetic?



Who were the most important black novelists in the twentieth century?



Who are the most important living black poets?



What are the most important collections of poetry published since 1980?



Who are the most important living black playwrights?



What should be priority topics for non-black writers in the twenty-first century?



** The blog was sent as an e-mail to 29 writers and critics.  As was the case with the Callaloo effort, only one person responded. Howard Rambsy  II, used some of these questions for his own blog "From  the black aesthetic to black aesthetics to form" (CULTURAL FRONT, Wednesday, August 8, 2017). I like the fact that many contemporary writers and critics in the Age of BLACK LIVES MATTER take a vow of silence and refuse to answer questions that seem to belong to a mission impossible; if writers answered  some of questions , they would risk being seen nude in a combat zone of political and  artistic ideologies.



***The people who responded to the 1981 inquiry were



Russell Atkins

Houston A. Baker, Jr.

Barry Beckham

Isaac J. Black

James Borders

Ed Bullins

Chakula Cha Jua

Cyrus Colter

Tom Dent

Melvin Dixon

Alexis DeVeaux,

David Dorsey

Mari Evans

Julia Fields

Calvin Forbes

Levi Frazier, Jr.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Michael D. Harris

Trudier Harris

William J. Harris

Theodore Hudson

Kirstin Hunter

Lance Jeffers

Etheridge Knight

Pinkie Gordon Lane

Clarence Major

E. Ethelbert Miller

R. Baxter Miller

Arthenia Bates Millican

Dudley Randall

James G. Spady

Robert B. Stepto

Clyde Taylor

Lorenzo Thomas

Julius E. Thompson

Ron Welburn

John Edgar Wideman

Ahmos Zu-Bolton







                The assumptions  made in the 1981 inquiry about identity, functional solidarity among Black Americans, and desire to  promote nationalist discourses (writing for one's people)  are dysfunctional in 2020. So too are some of the items in the questionnaire.  The questions would have to be reframed to highlight  relations or lack of relations among the colors black, red, yellow, brown and white and among the biological and psychological hues in the USA  produced by mixing.  They would also need to give more attention to the growing disconnection of the academic and the non-academic.  Any analysis of black writing worth having  would have to be based on responses from at least 2,000 people, the bulk of them being readers who have no special interests and obligations in the cloisters of Academe.  Moreover,  whether we want or need to have an inquiry regarding African American literature and culture  rather than asymmetrical, class-determined conversations is a subject for robust debate.  I make the very tentative and deliberately vague conclusion that what we want is not what we need.



Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            6/25/2020 5:00:38 AM