Black Configurations is the first volume of a three-volume study that
offers a fresh reading of African-American literary history by locating
within the literature itself the terms for a revisionary account of
black writing, terms pursued along three distinct but interlocking
pathways (each to be pursued in the Impact Series format): by charting
figurations of tradition among six of the most innovative practitioners
of black literary expression from Sterling Brown to Toni Morrison
(Volume 1); by following the haunting pathways of spectral dialogues
between slavery and African-American modernism (Volume 2); and by
interrogating interlocking topoi of critique and assertion (naming;
facing; voicing) across the history of African-American literary
expression (Volume 3). The critical trilogy presents thereby a narrative
of African-American literature as a continual, dialectical process,
blending confrontation with traumatic origins and the quest for
expressive transformation.
This project arises from the question: how does one construe and narrate
the story of a tradition for which the conventional structure of
literary history--that is, the relation between discourse and its
referents--is itself such a politically and thematically charged issue?
On one hand, the ideological exclusion of the African-American subject
from authorized spheres of meaning and signification gives value to
narrating black literary tradition as the progressive emergence of a
fully articulate presence, and seems to find warrant in black writing's
persistent thematization of literacy, public performance, and
self-definition. On the other hand, such a narrative of fully realized
agency and consciousness risks replicating the dominant ideology's own
reductive vision of identity as a predetermined totality, thus imagining
some singular and final form for African-American being. The study
asserts instead that African-American literature is fueled by the
simultaneous workings of a desire for a totally realized subject and the
constant displacement of that desire by a willingness--in contrast to
the oppressive system that would deny its agency--to put its own mode of
being into question.
