A Response to Xiomara Santamarina
2007; Oxford University Press; Volume: 20; Issue: 1-2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/alh/ajm047
ISSN1468-4365
Autores Tópico(s)Literature: history, themes, analysis
ResumoLooking back on the still young history of African-American literary studies begs the question: Are we there yet? Xiomara Santamarina's answer to this question brilliantly leads us through the major schools of thought in African-American literary studies, both today and yesterday. We move back in time, to the Harlem Renaissance and further, to the “not quite Jurassic” moment of African-American literature, where we also find, grazing among the other soon to be extinct literary animals, the toothless critical dinosaur-dispositions of today, those canon-formation carnivores that can no longer cut it and that we have been trying to put out to Jurassic pasture for what seems like millennia. Perhaps the best way to do this is not to condemn them to the dustbin of literary-evolutionary history, but to dislocate them from the timeline (yet another allusion to the work of Michael Crichton) by relocating the African-American literary tradition all along those historical ways and routes that cross the black Atlantic and lead to various diasporic ports-of-call. We are traveling through a dimension of time and space, and the next stop is not the twilight zone of criticism. It has become critical that we actually get somewhere as opposed to the nowhere indicated in the question: Are we there yet?
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