December 12–19, 1996

book quarterly|anthologies

Norton Anthology of African American Literature

Henry Louis Gates and Nellie Y. McKay, general editors, W. W. Norton, 2,665 p., $39.95

Ten years in the making, this massive volume is not merely a worthy companion to the long and distinguished shelf of Norton literary anthologies, but immediately becomes the standard text in its field. Although many individuals will doubtlessly buy it, it is intended primarily for academic use. No one-semester undergraduate course in African-American literature can hope to do more than skim its surface; it will obviously find a place in graduate courses and American studies programs as well. The volume is so comprehensive and so thoughtful that it is difficult to imagine that any publisher will feel that this effort of synthesis (and expenditure of time and money) needs to be revisited for at least a generation.

One's initial reaction is that if the anthology has any shortcoming as a textbook, it is its immense size. In their eagerness to create the definitive treatment of the subject, in which aim they have largely succeeded, the editors (Gates, McKay and no fewer than eight others) have produced so large a volume that readers with slight physiques may quail at the prospect of toting it around.

On the other hand, the very size of the book makes it possible for the editors to be generous in ways that far surpass anything in the power of earlier anthologists to provide — supplying entire works when possible, at least integral units (e.g., whole chapters) when not. This goes far toward reassuring readers that they are not at the mercy of editorial caprice. In addition to offering large extracts, the editors have cast their net exceedingly wide, and it is impossible to imagine that even specialists can turn the pages and not discover new writers and new works. Another virtue of the volume lies in the tone of the headnotes that preface each section. Admirably, the editors have avoided politicizing the text, not by omitting controversy — no survey of a literature that records the travail of a people like this one could do that — but by offering their explanatory context dispassionately. The reader doesn't feel that the editors are stacking the deck in order to score contemporary political points.

The volume is accompanied by a CD (costing another $16) that gives the printed text a new and augmented life. Furnished with elaborate liner notes, it contains recordings, some rare, of blues, gospel, spirituals, jazz, rap, folktales, sermons and speeches. Among those represented are musicians like Paul Robeson, Louis Amstrong and Bessie Smith; orators like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X; and various rappers and storytellers. The CD is not a gimmick produced merely because the technology makes it possible to do so; instead, it goes to the heart of the editors' conception of their subject. For them, African-American literature exists as a continuum that originated in, and continues to be nourished by, a rich oral tradition. (The most recent examples are raps by Queen Latifah and Public Enemy.) The extension into orality also calls into question the standards by which some of that oral material should be evaluated. Voila, a ready-made essay topic: should those criteria be literary or otherwise?

The quality and quantity of material marshaled together in one place make it possible to raise large literary-historical questions: What were the effects of the black literary encounter with modernism? How will the dominant realism of 20th-century black literary expression, based as it has been on an assumption of the shared trauma of racism on the lives of black folk, cope with the ubiquitous corrosiveness of postmodernism, purporting as it does to deconstruct all myths and denying all claims of origin?

These are only first impressions produced by turning the pages and reading here and there in this wonderful collection. The real effects of this volume will make themselves felt as a generation of students and general readers engage with the texts and see African-American literature in a fresh light as a result. Having made a preliminary foray, I can only echo John Dryden 300 years ago when he encountered Chaucer for the first time: "Here is God's plenty."

— Robert Ackerman