In a series of lectures, the late Pulitzer Prize winner Toni Morrison speaks of "extending" the American literary canon. Rather than limiting or omitting literary works written by black writers, and effort is underway to ban any literary production that has to do with black existence in the US. Just when more Americans began to read slave narratives, among the first literary production of a nation dependent on the enslavement of blacks, novels and poetry as well as critical theory written by Black Americans, that proverbial door of opportunity is closing.
Why? Is it yet again the rising fear, expressed by white nationalists and white supremacists, that when it comes to "Black Matters," white America should be very afraid? In this nation profession to be a beacon of democracy, what is at stake if the freedom to extend the study of American Literature isn't stymied by those intent on realizing a fascist dictatorship here in the US?
I worry that this seemingly "small" population of fascist-minded Americans is more likely a vanguard for a larger percentage of Americans, including liberals who don't want to see the opportunities of their progeny diminished by the inclusion of black people. This vanguard has made its presence known in the American literary canon, a literature that has always been about the study about the white self and its encounter with blackness.
In her lecture entitled, "Black Matters," Morrison begins a discussion on how writers of literature "imagine others". As an aspect of her task as a writer, she is drawn to the ways "all writers do this", that is, imagining another human being or another people. Specifically, she asks, "What prompts and makes possible this process of entering what one is estranged from"? What prompts white American writers, if I may speak plainly, to imagine the presence of blacks in their novels? How much of one's "social grounding" is transformed "into aspects of language"?
Because there is either a black presence or an absence, a deliberate, absence. There's a marginalizing or silencing, a sacrifice of the black presence for the sake of maintaining the perception of white supremacy. Persevering, in fact, a contradiction rather than a reality that suggests otherwise.
And, yet, thinking about claims by literary historians and critics that the American canon "is free of uninformed, and unshaped by the four-hundred-year-old presence of, first, Africans and then African-Americans in the United States," she hears something ringing hollow. Africans and then African Americans "shaped the body politics, the Constitution, and the entire history of the culture." And yet, this presence, according to this hollow claim, has "no significant place or consequence in the origin and development of that culture's literature"?
If this is the case, then why the fuss today, in 2023? Why all the frenzy to ban as many books as possible, books having anything to do with slavery, black people, black trans? Why all the draconian policies hearkening back to Jim Crow legislation? Why the rush to rid, state by state, school board by school board, "woke" thinking? Why the insinuation that to be "woke" is to be evil?
The contemplation of a black presence must have touched a nerve!
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