Post-Soul, Post-Racial, Post-Black Black Boxes: What Turn of the Millennium African American Literature Can Tell Us About Critical Turns

Modern African American literary critique is frequently framed by James Baldwin’s “Everybody’s Protest Novel” from 1949 through to various post-black discourses in the 21st century. The latter identify a new generation of scholars and authors whose work can be contrasted with the more unitary black identity mobilized during the Civil Rights- and Black Arts Movements in that they see themselves as being in a position to choose their own ways to be black. Many scholars have questioned such discourses and what they see as a neoliberal preoccupation with the individual, a precarious loss of solidarity, and an impossible break with the literary tradition. In this talk, I work through a number of examples to point to literary continuities and developments across this period to propose a different possible periodization.