African American Literature and Realist Theory: Seeking the “true-true”

Abstract

The epigraph to this chapter represents the central question for African American literary theory. How can we understand the depth and complexity of living and being black in the United States if its aesthetic modes are subjugated to that which is not in dialogue with the complexity of African American social and cultural reality? Is the answer to measure African American aesthetics solely by Eurocentric standards, or to view African American literature as a response to predetermined “American” literary standards? This essay offers an extended realist theoretical reply to Kent’s question, in part through consideration of Barbara Johnson’s reading of identity as unified and double consciousness as a fragmented state of self-division in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. ¹

And what, praise goodness, happens to the complexity, the variety, and density of the black experience while the knee is so bent?

George Kent