Introduction: “Tell Me, Sir, … What Is ‘Black’ Literature?”

Abstract

For those of us who were students or professors of African or African American literature in the late sixties or through the seventies, it is a thing of wonder to behold the various ways in which our specialties and the works we explicate and teach have moved, if not exactly from the margins to the center of the profession of literature, at least from defensive postures to a position of generally accepted validity. My own graduate students often greet with polite skepticism an anecdote I draw on in the introduction to my seminars. When I was a student at the University of Cambridge, Wole Soyinka, recently released from a two-year confinement in a Nigerian prison, was on campus to deliver a lecture series on African literature (collected and published by Cambridge in 1976 under the title Myth, Literature, and the African World). Soyinka had come to Cambridge in 1973 from Ghana, where he had been living in exile, ostensibly to assume a two-year lectureship in the faculty of English. To his astonishment, as he told me in our first supervision, the faculty of English apparently did not recognize African literature as a legitimate area of study within the “English” tripos, so he had been forced to accept an appointment in social anthropology, of all things! (Much later, the distinguished Nigerian literary scholar Emmanuel Obiechina related a similar tale when I asked him why he had taken his Cambridge doctorate in social anthropology.) Shortly after I heard Soyinka's story, I asked the tutor in English at Clare College, Cambridge, why Soyinka had been treated this way, explaining as politely as I could that I would very much like to write a doctoral thesis on “black literature.” To which the tutor replied with great disdain, “Tell me, sir, … what is black literature?” When I responded with a veritable bibliography of texts written by authors who were black, his evident irritation informed me that I had taken as a serious request for information what he had intended as a rhetorical question.