Cameron Leader-Picone

I am currently working on turning my dissertation, Rinehartism: Representations of Blackness in Contemporary African American Literature, into a book. The project examines how various African American authors have attempted to define blackness in their narratives as well as addressing the implications of such definitions, particularly in relation to issues of community formation and racial leadership. Authors have challenged both essentialist notions of race and refused to embrace facile post-race notions by crafting multiple formulations of racial constructs that embrace rather than resist flux.

My argument also engages with efforts to periodize the post-Civil Rights Era, both aesthetically and socially. While, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, thinkers such Trey Ellis drew on the black power era concept of a “Black Aesthetic,” calling new developments the rise of a “New Black Aesthetic,” Ellis’ discussion of “cultural mulattos” who were equally capable of discoursing about mainstream white culture as black culture is but one element among many in contemporary racial discourse. Similarly, authors such as Aaron McGruder and Paul Beatty extend discussions of a “post-soul” culture, discussed by Mark Anthony Neal and Nelson George, among others, pointing to the burden that comes with the successes of the Civil Rights and Black Power generation, forcing contemporary African Americans to attempt to advocate in the shadow of icons such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. The representations of race found within these works of art are not at all unequivocally positive evocations of a new narrativised and malleable racial identity, but also reflect the deep challenges facing a community that lacks a static definition of what constitutes it, particularly in relation to who will continue to lead and advocate for change, as such change remains to be made.

These discussions of race have attempted to address changing dynamics within the black community, serving to emphasize the myriad lines along which any previous conceptions of a unified blackness seem fallacious, from class to gender to sexuality to a growing mixed race identity. However, what an examination of a range of artistic productions by African Americans illustrates is that African American artists, in dealing with representations of race that attempt to avoid problems of reification, have maintained the importance of race as a functional discourse that is constantly shifting in order to take into account the porous boundaries of any racial community. Moving beyond Paul Gilroy’s articulation of an “anti-anti-essentialism” that maintained that race retains its relevance due to social structures that continue to consider it in structuring social hierarchies, these authors represent race as a dynamic structural, social and experiential element.

On its most basic level, my book attempts to address the dearth of scholarship about African American Literature published from the late Civil Rights era to the present. While there has been work addressing particular authors, particularly Charles Johnson and Toni Morrison, there have been only limited criticism addressing the depth and diversity of African American Literature published in the last forty years. Book length treatments of the topic, such as Madhu Dubey’s Signs and Cities and W. Lawrence Hogue’s Race, Modernity and Postmodernity, focus much of their attention on situating recent works of African American Literature in relation to broader trends in American literature, particularly postmodernism. While these authors do an admirable job of opening discussions of contemporary African American literature, their own critical methodologies preserve the sanctity of canonical formulations. By examining both canonical authors (such as Charles Johnson and Ishmael Reed) as well as works from popular culture and multiple mediums, I argue for a critical discussion of contemporary African American literature as dynamic and diverse as the works it examines.

While my project is rooted in literary criticism, I am currently working on expanding its discussion of African American popular culture including further analysis of popular fiction, particularly the street fiction of authors such as Zane and Sistah Souljah, as well as analyzing the relationship between the racial constructs I analyze in contemporary African American Literature and the hip hop music that is central to the popular conceptions of blackness in America. My analysis of hip hop supplements the portrayals of hip hop culture in my chapter on the work of Paul Beatty and Aaron McGruder, and draws on analysis by scholars such as Tricia Rose and Imani Perry.