The African American Literature and Culture Now Symposium brings together a group of leading scholars in African American humanistic fields to identify and discuss the central questions that animate 21st-century Black Studies.

Panel #1: Constraint and Possibility in Contemporary African American Literature

Margo Natalie Crawford
“Scenes of Loosening the Thick Time of Black Body/Slave Body”

In “The Slavebody and the Blackbody,” in The Source of Self-Regard, Toni Morrison wonders how the “black body” can be separated from the “slave body.” I argue that the work of freeing the black body from this afterlife of slavery is the work of denaturalizing that which Bakhtin describes as the “thickening of time.” Bakhtin writes, “time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh.” I propose that the thickening of time and time’s “taking on of flesh,” in terms of the afterlife of slavery, gain new dimensions when we rethink Fanon’s theory of epidermalization—“the slow composition of my self as a body in the middle of a spatial and temporal world.” The slow decomposition of the black body as a slave body demands a loosening of the thickness of that melancholic historicism that keeps collapsing black past and black present. I argue that the practice of that loosening is a core tension in 21st century African American literature. I bring together scenes of loosening in Toni Morrison’s flow from Paradise to her last novel God Help the Child.

Kevin Quashie
“Poetic Inclination, Black Subjunctivity”

I want to make a case about ethics that requires first that I make a case for aliveness. But just to establish a marker for the ethical—the urgency of the ethical—I want to be clear that there is no question more vital than the question “how to be,” and no doing more vital than to imagine that this question belongs to ones who are black (and to black literature). That is, because the question of the ethical is a question of relation, it seems to elide blackness: in an antiblack imagination, there is no “how to be” since antiblackness presumes to answer or overwhelm or even render inept this query. I want to get to the question “how to be” without reifying it as one of respectability or worthiness that is sutured to behavior; I want to get to the question as if we, black people, are not exempt from its daily reckoning. This thinking through both aliveness and ethics will lean on black poetics.


Margo Natalie Crawford is professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a scholar of 20th and 21st century African American literature and visual culture and global black studies. Crossing boundaries between literature, visual art, and cultural movements, her scholarship opens up new ways of understanding black radical imaginations. Her other research interests include performance studies, queer theory, comparative ethnic studies, radical feminism, and transnational modernism. Her most recent book is Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and 21st Century Black Aesthetics (2017). Her earlier work includes Dilution Anxiety and the Black Phallus (2008) and New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement (co-edited with Lisa Gail Collins, 2006). She is now completing What is African American Literature? Through a focus on textual production, diasporic tensions, and the ongoing, repetitive production of the contemporary, What is African American Literature? shows how tensions between the material and ephemeral make the textual production of African American literature become the textual production of black affect.

Kevin Quashie is a professor in the English Department of Brown University, where he teaches black cultural and literary studies. He is the author of Black Women, Identity, and Cultural Theory: (Un)Becoming the Subject (Rutgers University Press, 2004) and The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture (Rutgers University Press, 2012). He is co-editor of the landmark anthology New Bones: Contemporary Black Writers in America. His essays have appeared in differences, CLA Journal, The Massachusetts Review, African American Review, and Meridians. His forthcoming new book is titled “Black Aliveness, or a Poetics of Being.”