Introduction viihave embraced “assimilationism.” He writes, “It is
true that some of the writers in the twenties and
thirties, Walter White and Jessie Fauset among
them, sought in their novels to illustrate how little
difference there was between Negroes and whites,
even going to the extent of presenting heroes and
heroines white enough to pass. After all, it is natu-
ral for man to want to belong, really belong, to the
society which nurtured him” (326). On the other
hand, despite acknowledging Bone’s “commend-
able effort,” Turner, in “The Negro Novel in Amer-
ica: In Rebuttal,” caustically took Bone to task for
the “errors of fact and inference, inconsistencies
and contradictions, supercilious lectures, and flip-
pant remarks often in bad taste.... Unfortunately,
not content to confine himself to the role of critic
and historian of individual writers, [Bone] has
presumed himself to serve as psychiatrist, philoso-
pher, and teacher not only for all Negro writers
but for all Negroes” (122).
Most scholars agree that in the 1960s and
1970s, the Black Aesthetics and Black Arts move-
ments challenged the hierarchy with radical and
militant voices that spoke cacophonously black,
insisting that blacks were not victims but agents.
For example, Baraka identified blacks as magi-
cians who own the night. Despite this challenge,
however, black writers and critics in general con-
tinued to value assimilationism, led, according
to Professor Lawrence Hogue, by “elite/middle
class African Americans” who were interested in
racial uplift, in protesting racism, and in refuting
negative images of African Americans. This [atti-
tude] kept the black/white binary firmly, coun-
terproductively, destructively, and “supremely in
place.” Here, Hogue echoes Baldwin who, in his
critique of Wright’s Native Son, “Everybody’s
Protest Novel,” in which he derided the protest
novel, argues that Bigger’s tragedy is “that he has
accepted a theology that denies his life; that he
admits the possibility of his being sub-human
and feels constrained, therefore, to battle for
his humanity according to those brutal criteria
bequeathed him at his birth” (23). According
to Baldwin, Bigger seeks “acceptance within the
present community” (23).
Hogue argues that the acceptance of a black/
white binary “failed to engage and appreciate Afri-
can American differences, rich cultural diversity
and approaches to life that comprise American/
African American life” (2). Ironically, it also cre-
ated yet another paradigm, the elite or black mid-
dle-class norm/center, reducing African-American
differences to a “singular formation.”
Hogue demands that a wider net be cast—one
that would include, embrace, and value the multiva-
lent black voices and identities of African Americans,
including “jazz/blues African Americans, Voodoo
African Americans, working class African Ameri-
cans, subaltern African Americans, modern African
Americans and urban swinging African Americans”
(2)—which, in the end, is concerned less with white
racism and more with defining and constructing
themselves as subjects with agency. Hogue calls for
a more polycentric theoretical perspective to access
and assess the African-American literary tradition
and “to examine and discuss African Americans in
terms of their own distinctions and traditions, to
engage the polyvalent nature of African American
literatures, history, and criticism” (2).
Returning now to the question of what DuBois
might discover at the beginning of the 21st cen-
tury in a new exploration of the “striving in the
souls of black folks,” it would be impossible to
deny that he would discover a veritable vineyard
in which, as unfettered and emancipated former
chattel, African Americans flowered the American
literary landscape with their gift of story, reaping
a rich and bountiful harvest that runs the gamut
from autobiography and slave narrative to slam
poetry; hip-hop and rap narratives; black erotica
and experimental fiction; blues drama and novels;
baby mamma drama fiction; gay, lesbian, detec-
tive, and science-fiction popular best sellers; femi-
nist, womanist, and Africana Womanism voices;
African-American–Caribbean voices; modernist
and postmodernist voices; the humorous tales of
Jesse B. Semple; and the bitingly satirical voice of
The Boondocks comic strip. No doubt, he would,
indeed, say “amen” to Morrison’s claim with which
this introduction began: that African Americans
“have always imagined” themselves.