African American literatures encompass a wide geographic territory which includes the United States, the Caribbean and Central and South America. The time frame also extends from the emigration and dispersal of peoples of African descent throughout the diaspora. In his comparative studies of international as well as trans-Atlantic slavery sociologist and historian Orlando Patterson, in Slavery and Social Death (1982), dates the contact of Africans with the Atlantic world, beginning in the late Middle Ages with the slave trade in the Atlantic islands of Madeira and the Canary Islands. Traditionally African American literature was associated with the imaginative cultural products of US bondsmen and bondswomen, including those manumitted by law or by eseape, and the freeborn. The almost exclusive focus of those literary studies was the written word. The genre preferences, moreover, were poetry fiction and drama with the understanding that songs, folktales, sermons, essays and life stories were outside the realm of belles lettres.

The preoccupation with the written word also excluded the voices and cultural legacies of at least 4 million Southern slaves in the early 1800s who had no access to literacy as a result of violent repression, proscriptive legislation or the lack of opportunity Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka) offered a significant caution to scholars whose foundation for constructing an African American literary tradition depended almost entirely on written texts. In Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963) Jones/ Baraka insisted that tracing the line linking the spirituals to blues and jazz would help provide a more comprehensive understanding of African American historical and literary traditions, in part, because it would necessarily include practitioners and commentators from several economic classes, social communities and mentalities.

Since the critical and theoretical reconceptualizations of the 1960s regarding what constitutes the “literary” or what qualifies as “text,” African American literatures are now recognized as embracing a continuum stretching from ancient African oral tradition to contemporary avatars of hip hop. The elements of that oral culture (praisesongs, epics, proverbs, riddles, folktales, etc.) serve as underpinnings for traditions transported, transmitted and reinvented for the specific locales of seventeenth through nineteenth century Cuba, Brazil, Surinam, Barbados, Richmond or Boston. The arbitrary distinctions between “literature” and the bio-mythographies known as autobiography have also faded. Slave narratives, the earliest of which appear in the 1750s, are no longer case histories as much as carefully crafted verbal portraits which share, with so-called fictive texts, as historian Hayden White affirmed, a concern with plotting, voice, narration, point of view and more. In Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow (1983) Avey Johnson, an upper-middle-class Westchester matron who has undergone a kind of cultural amnesia is reminded by her deceased Great Aunt Cuney, in the middle of a Caribbean cruise aboard the Bianca Pride, of the importance of telling and transmitting the stories of the ancestors to successive generations. In undergoing an allegorical Vodoun initiation, Avey returns to her given name, Avatara, and accepts responsibility for singing the ancient praisesongs of the would-be slaves who chose to walk home to Africa after their middle-passage transport to a place now known as Ibo Landing. She also rejects the experiential divides, dramatically alluded to in the Versailles Room which serves as the cruise ship’s formal dining room, that reinforce apartheid notions of disciplinary generic and cultural boundaries. That border crossing, a thematic and methodological pivot of African American literatures, surfaces powerfully in representative works that defy genre categorization: Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), Toni Morrison’s oeuvre and Toni Cade Bambara’s Mama Day (1993).

Contemporary scholars such as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., building on the Harlem Renaissance-era work of earlier folklorist-narrators, such as Zora Neale Hurston, trace lineage lines which connect, for example, West African insult poetry to tales such as “The Signifying Monkey” or the verbal duels of Caribbean calypso. There is an even shorter distance, moreover, between that cultural amalgam and the African American insult contests known as “playing the dozens.” In African American literatures, the word is a powerful tool of creation, destruction and transformation. Fiction-writer Toni Cade Bambara, among others, attests to a preoccupation with the potency of logos (word/language) as a key characteristic of an oral and written literature created by the muted and the unlettered. When that word is written, the cultural legacy of African American literatures usually begins with Lucy Terry’s 1746 poem, “Bars Fight,” or with the 1773 publication of Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects. In that volume, a young teenage and sickly Boston slave creates verbal portraits, which are praisesongs in their own right, celebrating English and American aristocrats. Writing in the poetic meter with much of the classic allusions of Dryden and Pope, Wheatley suffered for more than two centuries from the calumny that she had not used her privileged status or education as a slave-poet to combat slavery directly In the last quarter century however, there has been a revival of interest in the, perhaps, too subtle code by which Wheatley offers a stinging condemnation of slavery by assuring General Washington that the eyes of the world are fixed on its newest democratic experiment. Her self-deprecation in the midst of a poetic address to the students of what we now know as Harvard University is part of a pattern of a deliberate use of code to render opaque to masters and mistresses the subversion that hides behind the grin and the smile. Wheatley helps to establish a tradition of writing with invisible ink as a way of offering a scathing critique and parody of institutions that are and were incongruous in a new democratic Republic which uses “freedom” as a way of describing and defining its charisma. The immediate legatees of her consciously crafted dissimulation include writers such as William Wells Brown (Clotel, 1853), Charles Chesnutt (Marrow of Tradition, 1901), Pauline Hopkins (Contending Forces, 1900), Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man, 1947) and Charles R. Johnson (Middle Passage, 1990).

This use of double voicing functions simultaneously as a defensive and offensive weapon and as a re-appropriation of the dual consciousness W.E.B. Du Bois named in Souls of Black Folk (1903) as the albatross of African American experience. Nobel prizewinning novelist, Toni Morrison, a beneficiary of both oral and written traditions, also refers to such duality in her collection of 1990 Massey Lectures in the history of American civilization compiled in a volume entitled Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992). Morrison asserts that the canon of American literature has its roots in the construction of blackness as a foil against which to define whiteness.

She insists that American literature is inconceivable without the omnipresence of this largely invisible other who helps provide a sense of national identity and cohesion.