What Is Jim Crow?

Author(s): GENE ANDREW JARRETT

Source: PMLA, Vol. 128, No. 2 (March 2013), pp. 388-390
Published by: Modern Language Association
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23489782
Accessed: 19-04-2019 00:50 UTC

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 388 What Was African American Literature? PMLA

Warren, Kenneth W. "The End(s) of African Ameri

I/I
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Hurston, Zora Neale. "How It Feels to Be Colored Me." Zora
M Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings. can Studies." History in the Making. Spec, issue of
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Ed. Cheryl A. Wall. New York: Lib. of Amer., 1995. Print. American Literary History 12.3 (2000): 637-55. Web.
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■o Sundquist, Eric. Rev. of What Was African American 30 Sept. 2012.
o Literature?, by Kenneth Warren. Journal of American . What Was African American Literature? Cam
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History 98.2 (2011): 550-51. Print. bridge: Harvard UP, 2011. Print.

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V What Is Jim Crow?
GENE ANDREW JARRETT

The titles of Kenneth W. Warren's essay cial order, created by local and stat
"Does African-American Literature Exist?" laws, statutes, and policies, received con
and book What Was African American Lit- tional sanction in 1896 with the U.S. Su
erature? instantly provoked me.1 Admittedly Court's decision in Plessy v. Ferguso
skeptical of these questions, I could not help "it was finally dismantled, at least ju
turning to my mental Rolodex of published and legally, in the 1950s and 1960s," s
authors and texts attesting to African Ameri- cally with the 1954 ruling by this c
can literature's historicity or currency. As I Brown v. Board of Education, overtur
read the essay and the book, I gradually re- Plessy (1-2). (A quick glance at the
alized that they raised more questions than ternational Bibliography shows th
answers—which, I suppose, could have been ren's characterization of Jim Crow
the point all along. Warren's work pulled resembles what one finds in the latest li
the rug out from under long-standing fields scholarship.) Based on this standard d
of academic inquiry and devoted readers tion in literary studies, I maintained that
outside the academy. In doing so, it elicited genuine intellectualism of African Am
an initial public reaction in the Chronicle of writers, even the notorious elitism of
Higher Education that was marvelous for its of them, did not rob their literature o
diversity and intensity. Subsequently, in the tiveness in the formal (or state-sanct
spate of responses online and in print, at electoral, and legal) realms of politica
conferences and in classrooms, his work has ("African American Literature"). A fle
breathed fresh air into scholarship on African cultural notion of political action sho
American literary history. only that African American literature has
In the year that has passed since I first long existed but also that it is a legitimate
read Warren's writings, my disagreement thing of the present and the foreseeable fu
with his main argument remains, yet the ture, as long as its writers see themselves and
thrust of my critique has changed. Previously act as agents of social change.
I accepted, as many did, the historiographical Now, I believe that the historiography of
premise of Jim Crow in What Was African Jim Crow that Warren uses to launch What
American Literature? For Warren, Jim Crow Was African American Literature? should
means the "system of Jim Crow segregation" have been as controversial as his resultant
that once defined a "social world": "This so- periodization of African American literary

> 2013 GENE ANDREW JARRETT

PMLA 128.2 (2013), published by the Modern Language Association of America

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 What Was African American Literature? 389

history. Warren declares that African Ameri- executive order of 1 January 1863 may yhave
can literature "gained its coherence as an un- formally emancipated slaves, a longer an
dertaking" during the fifty-eight years when more nuanced view of history would see tha
blacks and whites could occupy only so-called "emancipation appears less the grand event of
separate-but-equal public spaces and facilities liberation than a point of transition betwee
(1). And "with the legal demise of Jim Crow," modes of servitude and racial subjection" (6).
he goes on to say, "the coherence of African Writing literature qua literature, furthe
American literature has been correspond- more, did not necessarily depreciate or mi
ingly, if sometimes imperceptibly, eroded as guide African Americans' political
0
ability to
well" (2). Yet we should resist the constriction focus on and redress the vestiges of servitude ?
of Jim Crow to the first half of the twentieth and subjection—and, not unrelated, segrega
century. Such a narrow periodization over- tion—regardless of official emancipation. "If
states the role that constitutional or juridical formal politics signal certain institutional
events have played in race relations, while re- practices such as electoral processes and pol
stricting the political awareness and activities icy making," Wilson claims, regarding the
of African American writers to discourses of aesthetics of politics in antebellum America,
de jure racial segregation. "then a turn to culture as a particular arena
Encapsulating a spectrum of racial con- where African Americans had varying lev
flict and domination that stretches from els of agency is all the more necessary in the
well before 1896 to after 1954, Jim Crow de- years before they were ostensibly granted
mands paradigms of literary study attuned access to these structures with the passage
to an expansive historiography. Scholarly ap- of the Fifteenth Amendment" (7). Such in
proaches to segregation's history, according formed historiographies of slavery and free
to John David Smith, should focus on "dif- dom help put in perspective Warren's claim,
ferentiating between segregation by custom, ironically both an assertion and a potential
habit, or practice (de facto segregation) and concession "in the face of textual evidence,"
segregation by specific law (de jure segrega- that African American literature of the ante
tion). Historians have frequently erred by bellum period "was changed significantly by
focusing too narrowly—on de jure segrega- the necessity of confronting the constraints of
tion only—thereby missing long-standing the segregation era" (7). Smith, Hartman, and
patterns of informal racial separation that Wilson have suggested that the period be
have stained the fabric of interracial contact tween 1896 and 1954 likely was not so unique
throughout American history" (7). Though in this regard.
Jim Crow was a term first used in 1841 to By the same token, Jim Crow or racial
classify racially segregated railroad facilities segregation emerges after this period by other
in Massachusetts, it also "existed informally names to signify circumstances of social con
throughout much of the country's antebel- straint. "Since the nation's founding," as Mi
lum history" (10). chelle Alexander puts it in her study of the
Literary studies of Jim Crow should social control of mass incarceration, "African
strive for the flexible definition and peri- Americans have repeatedly been controlled
odization found in the scholarly work of through institutions such as slavery and Jim
Saidiya Hartman and Ivy G. Wilson on slav- Crow, which appear to die, but are then re
ery and antebellum American literary and born in new form, tailored to the needs and
cultural production. Reconfiguring the ante- constraints of the time" (21). Here again we
bellum political sphere, Hartman has shown have the information to critique Warren's
that, while President Abraham Lincoln's secondary claim that "African American

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390 What Was African American Literature? PMLA

2 literature itself constitutes Note a representation

m and rhetorical strategy within
1. Warren the domain
drew "Does African-American Literature of
q a literary practice responsive to conditions
Exist?" from What Was African American Literature?, so
5 that, by and large, noI quote longer obtain" (9). Since
only from the book.
5 Alexander has shown that such conditions
g still obtain, one has to wonder whether dur
Works Cited
-o ing the first half of the twentieth century Af
ra rican Americans' enlistments of literature in Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration

J the service of social change—or what Warrenin the Age of Colorblindness. New York: New, 2010. Print.
partly means by the literature's "coherence"—Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery,
and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America.
J» were so exceptional as to justify Warren's New York: Oxford UP, 1997. Print.
" argument about the literature's subsequent
Jarrett, Gene Andrew. "African American Literature
demise. My bet is that these enlistments were Lives On, Even as Black Politics Expire." Chronicle of
not. Rather, African American writers across Higher Education 1 Apr. 2011: B12-13. Print.
Smith, John David. Introduction. When Did Southern Seg
a longue durée persisted, through success and
regation Begin? New York: Palgrave, 2002. 1-42. Print.
failure, in making an artistic and politicalWarren, Kenneth W. "Does African-American Literature
impact on social attitudes and practices pre Exist?" Chronicle of Higher Education 4 Mar. 2011:
B10-11. Print.
cisely because they recognized that Jim Crow,
. What Was African American Literature? Cam
narrowly or broadly defined, was not the only
bridge: Harvard UP, 2011. Print.
kind of racism that afflicted the world.
Wilson, Ivy G. Specters of Democracy: Blackness and the
Aesthetics of Politics in the Antebellum U.S. New York:
Oxford UP, 2011. Print.

When African American

Literature Exists
R. BAXTER MILLER

demise
In making an important distinction inof1972
African American literature w

between Langston Hughes and Ralph

the Elli
next forty years? In serious reflect
shall define
son, both of whom he appreciated, George African
E. American literature as
folk,recognizes
Kent, of the University of Chicago, or even sometimes highbrow, responses
to a Then
the artistic superiority of Ellison. community's
Kent existence and as original
and innovative idioms, forms, and aesthet
warns that the imaginative transformation
ics of particular
of folk sources alone hardly suffices, for "the yet "universal" import from
1773
basic attitudes [spirit] and forms of(when Phillis Wheatley's Poems was
response
to existence are abandoned by published)
us [Africanto the present.
Yes, my
American critics] at our peril" (162; it may be true that, as Kenneth War
ital
ics; see also Miller, "Mirrored Reflection"
ren maintains in What Was African Ameri
163). Who would have thought can Literature?,
then that aAfrican American literary
later theorist at Chicago would tradition
envision the a theme of racial protest
expressed

) 2013 R. BAXTER MILLER

PMLA 128.2 (2013), published by the Modern Language Association of America

This content downloaded from 179.210.156.212 on Fri, 19 Apr 2019 00:50:35 UTC
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