Image of Blacks in Western Art
Studies in American Africanism is an investigation into two principal areas of discursive practice: one area involves the ways in which a non-white, Africanist presence and persona was constructed in the United States; the second area involves the ways in which that fabricated “presence” served the literary imagination in its exploration of American identity.
The course uses the terms “Africanism” and “Africanist” to suggest the mythic construct of a denotative and connotative blackness, and an entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and mis-readings of African peoples and their descendants in this country. Africanism is also the process of alienizing and exoticizing one’s own experience of Black people in order to know and therefore own that experience. [
caveat] The course is not limited to an investigation of what might be called racist or non-racist literature. Nor does the course take or encourage a position that confines itself to measuring the quality of a work based on the attitudes of the author, or the representations he or she makes of another racial or ethnic group. Such judgments can and are being made in recent literary criticisms. (For example, the critical scholarship of Ezra Pound, [Louis-Ferdinand] Céline, George Jean Nathan, Paul de Man, etc.; and we know books are constantly being banned from library shelves for these alleged attitudes or representations or sensibilities regardless of past evaluations of the quality of the text. In fact, the argument has been advanced that, in the case of Paul de Man, say, or Mark Twain, the work can have no unmitigated quality precisely because the work—or in some cases not the work but the author—has been found to reveal insensitivity to ethnic, religious, sexual, or racial groups.)
However, although those judgments are within the reach of this course, they are not within its purview. One of the reasons the course does not close with analyses leading toward conclusions about a work’s being racist or non-racist is that such an analysis can be an intellectual cul-de-sac—once the evidence is in, there is nothing more to be said about the work.
What we propose to do is a series of close readings of traditional American fiction in order to discover what impact notions of racial hierarchy, racial exclusion, and racial vulnerability and availability have had on the literature. We will describe and analyze how this literature has behaved in its encounter with racial ideology and discover in what ways the literature has been shaped by that encounter.
Now in order to do this we will have to identify the instances during which American literature has been complicit in the development of racialism, and when it has intervened in racial discourse to undermine or explode it; but we will want to move beyond stark identification to the further investigation of what Africanism has meant for the work/product of the writer’s imagination. How does literary utterance arrange itself when it tries to imagine an Africanistic “other”? What does the encounter with Africans and/or African-Americans do to and for the work? How does one describe the rhetorical struggle that follows? Our study averts the gaze from the racialized object to the racialized subject; from the described and imagined to the describers and imaginers.
If Africanism is a construct, if “blackness” has “meaning,” then so does “whiteness.” One goal, then, becomes to discover how the concept of “whiteness” was built/invented/produced and what it is for. The insights we come up with may help us to discover not only the nature—even the cause of “whiteness”—but also the part that its development played in the evolution of something known, loosely, as an American. Reading and critiquing American literature from this point of view may also release the literature from the incoherence that the studied indifference and historical evasion in criticism has imposed on it. In other words, we will regard the literary engagements with Africanism as self-reflexive—as ways to talk about, imagine, and set forth/assert the deep concerns white writers have about themselves and the world they inhabit. Further, we will regard the presence of Africanism in a work as an impinging force in the execution of that work’s structure and figurative language.
The suspicion of the course is that the intrusion or inclusion of Africanistic characters is significant. That the writer’s choice to include or the necessity of inclusion can be shown sometimes to throttle the text, destabilize it, and, far more frequently than one would think, it can be shown to liberate it, to provide and force astonishing kinds of artistic creativity, astonishing leaps into otherwise forbidden territory, and that in the wake of this imaginative encounter, some interesting patterns emerge—patterns that should be included in the history of American literature as part of its distinguishing features.
Two points require underscoring (one about knowledge and imagination, the other about language):
1) Although we will see that “knowing” the “other”—the conviction that one “knows” Africans and African-Americans—is central to the construction of “whiteness” (knowing is, after all, the demonstration of power), we should not ever assume that the Africans and African-Americans encountered in this fiction are in fact known—they are imagined. Sartre’s description of colonialist language captures the point: “These phrases (terminology for the suborned natives) were never the translation of a real, concrete thought; they were not even the object of thought . . . they have not by themselves any meaning, at least in so far as they claim to express knowledge about the colonialized.” So we will not be looking for “real” or realistic representations of blacks within a construct based on stereotypes. (“Representation is how we make our will known.”) In the absence of race-neutral knowledge, or open-minded inquiry about Africans and African-Americans, and in the presence of ideological and imperialistic rationales for oppression, an invented, fictive Africanist persona emerged, and flourished because of its serviceability. Political serviceability, of course, and economic serviceability, etc.; but it is the literary serviceability that we will focus on.
The Matter of Africanism, by which I mean the fabrication of an Africanistic Presence that would support, promulgate, and enhance the institution of slavery and the hierarchy of race, seems to be a dominant figuration within American literature. And it is important to remember that under the constraints of this fabrication, we can be only secondarily concerned here with the way Africans really were—what their various cultures, laws, languages, and art forms were; nor with what African-Americans were or are really like—what kind of cultural, linguistic, artistic, and social forms they either preserved or created in the New World. “Real” Blacks “out of the loop.” In short, we are not concerned here, except indirectly, with all of what was available for these writers to see and interpret, but rather with what they believed they saw, or wished to see, and how in fact they did interpret a black “other” in their midst.
We will try to discover how the variables of racism—biologic, economic, ideological, metaphoric, metaphysical—can be understood in each of these formulations to be insistently self-referential for both the racist and the non-racist alike.
Because our route takes us repeatedly to and through economical, ideological, iconographical, and figurative racism, the order of the readings is not based on a work’s date of publication or progressive literary periods. I don’t want linear or chronological time to suggest a conventional “progress” in these matters. Or lead us to believe that because the language and iconography of Africanism has altered, that its force is weakened in the literature.
Roughly put, we will treat the content of sample literature like the results of a Rorschach test, the meditation on a black spot that appears in any of an unlimited variety of shapes, and hazard some speculations about what that meditation reveals about the viewer, and how he or she translates these meditations into art. Writers produce meaning in their work—and we want to note how. In some instances the act of imagining blacks produces language and images reinforced by received, unquestioned, culturally informed perceptions—perceptions, biases, and evaluations already established as “knowledge” and distributed as such. In other instances the presence of Africans and/or African-Americans alters the work—forces it away from its announced and/or hidden course and yields fresh insights that are at odds with racial cliché. In all instances, the act of imagining Africanist personae tells its own story, a story often at variance with the responses it intended to call forth.
2)The second point to be stressed is that although the language used to accommodate this Africanist persona may be overt or encoded, covert and self-reinforcing, it is also powerfully revealing. The close readings we do will decode this language. I will come back to this point about how language can sabotage or negotiate content. But first I want to put our study into historical context.
When we look at the beginnings of American literature we should remember that nineteenth-century writers were mindful of the presence of blacks; they had personal and political responses to the “problem” inherent in the contradiction of a free republic resting on and committed to a slave population. The alertness to this slave population did not confine itself to personal encounters with blacks or not. Nor to their familiarity with the publishing boom that slave narratives fed. The press, the political campaigns, the policy platforms of various parties and elected governments are rife with the slave/free discourse. It would have been an isolated individual indeed who was unaware of one of the single, if not the single, most explosive of issues in the nation. How could one speak of profit, of economy, of labor, of progress, of suffragism, of Christianity, of the frontier, of the formation of new states, the acquisition of new lands, of education, of transportation—freight and passengers—neighborhoods, quarters, the military—of practically anything a new nation concerns itself with—without having as a referent, at the heart of the discourse or defining its edges, the presence of Africans and/or their descendants? It was not possible. What did happen, frequently, was an effort to talk about these things with a vocabulary designed to disguise and displace the subject. It was not always successful, and in the work of many writers disguise was never intended. But the consequence was a master narrative (or a term I like better—white discourse) that spoke for the African and/or his descendants, and of him. Whatever popularity slave narratives had, a slave’s own narrative did not destroy the master narrative, for the master narrative could accommodate many shifts, several adjustments to keep itself intact. Enforced silence from the object was needed and a kind of tacit-manipulative silence of the subject as well.
Some of the silences were broken, of course, and some maintained by authors who lived with and within the narrative. What we are interested in here are the strategies for maintaining the silence and those for breaking it. The thesis of the course is that our founding writers engaged, imagined, employed, and created an Africanistic presence and persona in several ways, and that more recent literature has followed in their footsteps.
Copyright © 2026 by Estate of Toni Morrison. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
