I FIRST HEARD the name J. California Cooper last November. Cooper, who died in 2014 at 82, was the author of five novels, seven short-story collections and 17 plays. Her books are folksy, funny and wise. They center on Black characters, most of them women. As Alice Walker, 79, who published Cooper’s debut collection of fiction, “A Piece of Mine” (1984), wrote, Cooper “reminds us of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston.”
Why had I never heard her name? I’ve been an English professor for nearly two decades, teaching surveys of Black American literature, even seminars focused on Black women writers. Before that, I was a graduate student at Harvard during the era of the Black studies “Dream Team,” learning from scholars like Cornel West and Henry Louis Gates Jr., and writing a dissertation that includes chapters on Walker, Toni Morrison and Gayl Jones. Before that, while growing up in Salt Lake City in the 1980s and ’90s, I looked to Black literature as a lifeline; I read every book I could find, including works by Ishmael Reed and Paule Marshall, Ernest J. Gaines and Maya Angelou — all Cooper’s contemporaries. Since childhood, I’ve been amassing a collection of Black fiction, drama and poetry that exceeds a thousand volumes. So how is it that Cooper escaped my willing attention?
Of course, we all have these lacunas in our reading histories. It can be a small blessing to encounter such gaps, particularly when you’ve read enough to fool yourself into thinking you’ve mapped all territories. Some will no doubt find it inexplicable — or inexcusable — that I remained ignorant of Cooper’s work for so long. It’s not the sort of thing one usually admits to in my field.
I count this late discovery as both a correction of personal oversight and evidence of something far more significant: the emergence of new arbiters of literary culture reshaping the canon of Black American literature. The word “canon” comes to English by way of the ancient Greek kanōn, meaning “rule.” When applied to literature, it refers to a list, actual or conjectural, of great works that define the terms of a literary education. Historically, canon construction is the work of the few, foremost among them academics who edit anthologies and design syllabuses. But this is changing: I didn’t come across Cooper in the pages of a scholarly journal; I saw her name on Instagram.
On social media in particular, Cooper has a growing following among Black women writers and other creative people who see in her work a model for making powerful, accessible art. “Everyone should read more J. California Cooper,” says the screenwriter and novelist Attica Locke, 49, whose credits include writing and producing for the TV melodrama “Empire” (2015-20). (“I was foolish because I believed in you. You are a fool because you believe in yourself,” Cooper’s character Sally snaps at her big sister, Carlene, in her 1994 multigenerational novel of small-town life, “In Search of Satisfaction,” in an exchange that would fit right into an “Empire” episode.) Among Cooper’s fans are the singer and actor Jill Scott, 50, who once flew Cooper out to New York for a performance at Carnegie Hall, and the actor Halle Berry, 56, who first read Cooper’s fiction in grade school.
This re-engagement with Black authors of the past like Cooper is being led by a fresh cohort of literary tastemakers: younger authors in search of ancestors; publishers eager to excavate Black literature — for passion and for profit — film and television executives in search of intellectual property; social media influencers on Bookstagram, blogs and podcasts bringing older works to the fore. Operating outside of academia, these groups are making the canon less prescriptive and more descriptive, a dynamic record of what people are actually reading and enjoying now. If the Harlem Renaissance is commonly understood as a period during which Black creatives were in vogue, then we’re in the midst of a new renaissance today, nearly a century later — not just of recent art but of the archive.
In 2021, Alice Childress’s “Trouble in Mind” (1955) made its belated Broadway debut. Beyond Broadway, Lorraine Hansberry’s lesser-known “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” (1964) began its run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this past February. On television, a series adaptation of Octavia E. Butler’s once overlooked novel “Kindred” (1979) debuted in late 2022, with several other Butler projects in production or development. In publishing, works are resurfacing from both widely established authors (the 2022 reissue of Morrison’s 1983 short story “Recitatif” in a stand-alone edition) and from neglected literary giants (new editions of five books by the novelist and short-story writer William Melvin Kelley, who died in 2017 at 79; and a forthcoming edition of the incendiary 1967 novel “The Man Who Cried I Am,” by John A. Williams, who died in 2015 at 89). Together, these efforts are unsettling the story of Black American literature.
Make no mistake: Past generations have labored and sacrificed for us to enjoy such curatorial privilege. A brief history of chronicling the Black literary tradition might be told in three phases: During the Harlem Renaissance, anthologies like James Weldon Johnson’s “The Book of American Negro Poetry” (1922) sought to showcase Black artistic achievement for the purposes of racial uplift. “No people that has produced great literature and art has ever been looked upon by the world as distinctly inferior,” Johnson writes. By the ’60s, Black editors took cues from Black Power politics and the Black Is Beautiful movement. In an expansive though not exhaustive list posted in January to his blog, the literary scholar Howard Rambsy II identified 127 anthologies published between 1967 and 1976, from the iconic (1968’s movement-defining “Black Fire,” edited by LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal) to the obscure (1970’s “Right On!: An Anthology of Black Literature,” edited by Bradford Chambers and Rebecca Moon). Together, these publications recast the story of Black American literature as insurgent, independent and driven to define a distinctly Black aesthetic.
But the most important phase of canon building came in the 1980s and ’90s, a period that institutionalized Black American literature, securing it as a field of academic study. The key book of that time was “The Norton Anthology of African American Literature” (1996), edited by Gates and the literary critic Nellie Y. McKay, alongside an editorial board of other leading scholars. “The Norton” asserted that Black writers, in defiance of the racist mismeasure of Black intelligence and artistry, forged a tradition in conversation with all Western literature and in relation to “the repetitions, tropes and signifying” that would come to define a distinct canon of Black American literature. “While anthologies of African American literature had been published at least since 1845,” the editors write in the introduction to the 2014 third edition, “ours would be the first Norton Anthology, and Norton — along with just a few other publishers — had become synonymous to our generation with canon formation.”
Ironically, scholars were constructing this Black canon just as literary studies was deconstructing the canon of Western literature as a whole: globalizing it, feminizing it, queering it, racially diversifying it. Yet thanks to the efforts of successive generations, the Black canon is now durable enough not only to withstand but to demand attempts to deconstruct and reconstruct what Black American literature means. “African American studies remains an archaeological project,” says Soyica Diggs Colbert, 44, a Georgetown University professor and the author of a recent biography of Lorraine Hansberry, “Radical Vision” (2021). She credits a tweet from her fellow Hansberry biographer Imani Perry with the insight that being a student of Black American literature and culture demands constant acts of recovery. As writers and scholars, publishers and readers think about Black American literature now, they increasingly do so with a backward glance for writers and works that have been overlooked or underappreciated, forgotten or misunderstood.
Although canons may enshrine the past, they are instruments of the present. So what do readers require of Black American literature today? Works that confront the resurgence of white supremacy. Works that challenge orthodoxies of racial representation. Works that unsettle assumptions about gender and sexual identity. Works that expand the frames of formal experimentation. Works that imagine Black futures. “What does it mean for our generation to understand that the work [of shaping the canon] is incomplete?” Colbert asks. This essay is one response, proposing five categories of my own in which the Black American canon is already — or could soon be — growing to embrace underrecognized works of the past and the writers who made them.
1. ‘Bad’ Books
“WHAT DO YOU show?” Almost a century ago, W.E.B. Du Bois asked this of artists in a column simply titled “A Questionnaire,” published in a 1926 issue of The Crisis, the N.A.A.C.P.’s magazine, for which he served as founding editor. With seven leading questions, Du Bois cautions against portraying the race in a manner that might confirm racist stereotypes. “Is not the continual portrayal of the sordid, foolish and criminal among Negroes convincing the world that this and this alone is really and essentially Negroid, and preventing white artists from knowing any other types and preventing Black artists from daring to paint them?” Implicit in this question is Du Bois’s conviction that the only responsible Black literature is propaganda, marshaling a benevolent Blackness as an antidote to white supremacy’s pernicious specters.
And what do you teach? Canons are often forged in the classroom — contentious spaces these days, whether in K-12 schools, where a renewed wave of book bans disproportionately targets Black authors, or on college campuses, where academic freedom and cultural sensitivities sometimes collide. “We’re always in the business of expanding and constricting the canon in our decisions as teachers of African American literature,” the Vassar English professor Eve Dunbar says. For years Dunbar taught the rapper turned author Sister Souljah’s best-selling novel “The Coldest Winter Ever” (1999), a crime drama narrated in the voice of a teenage mother who is the daughter of a Brooklyn drug kingpin. “They loved it,” Dunbar recalls. “Now I think, ‘Would I [teach that] now?’” Because she is Black and many of her students are not, she considers what her choices might invite her students to take away — not just about Black literature but about Black people.
In 2006, when I was beginning my career as a professor at a small, predominantly white liberal arts college in Southern California, I taught “Pimp: The Story of My Life,” the 1967 memoir by Robert Beck, who published under the name Iceberg Slim. “Pimp” is a brutal book, unrelenting in its portrayals of sex, violence and addiction. It helped to codify the conventions of the now thriving genre of street lit, to which Souljah’s fiction also belongs. As a young Black professor assigning “Pimp” to students of multiple racial, gender and sexual identities, I was taking a chance. Fortunately, the class had generated enough trust that we could express ourselves freely: cringing at some passages and laughing at others, agreeing on the book’s importance while allowing for divergent assessments of its literary merit.
I have not taught “Pimp” since, but I have carried forward from the experience a guiding conviction that, despite Du Bois’s admonitions to the contrary, the Black canon must embrace “bad” books — not works of inferior craft but books that show Black characters courting racist stereotype as the cost of being free. This is increasingly relevant today, as contemporary Black writers reject the politics of respectability. Raven Leilani’s “Luster” (2020) and Zakiya Dalila Harris’s “The Other Black Girl” (2021) are just two recent books that reveal the human frailties, venalities and duplicities of Black protagonists. Du Bois might have thought of them what he thought of “Home to Harlem” (1928), Claude McKay’s novel that showcases all manner of vices in the Black urban underworld. “For the most part it nauseates me,” he wrote, “and after the dirtiest parts of its filth I feel distinctly like taking a bath.”
Eva Medina Canada did not take a bath after she killed and castrated her abusive lover. Instead, she “washed [her] hands, finished [her] brandy, wiped his mouth and left.” Gayl Jones described her 1976 novel, “Eva’s Man,” as a “horror story.” It’s a first-person narrative both lyrical and claustrophobic, told in fragments of “crumbled sheets and blood and whiskey and spit.” Together with Jones’s debut novel, “Corregidora” (1975), it excavates an imaginative territory for Black characters that only such outrageous transgressions can make visible. “I’m not interested in normal characters,” Jones told the Black feminist scholar Claudia Tate in 1979. “What does a Black writer do who is not interested in the normal?” Though Jones’s work has garnered acclaim (her most recent novel, “Palmares,” was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize), her first two novels merit renewed attention in a cultural moment that finds liberation in embracing Black characters behaving badly.
2. Experimentalists
WANDA COLEMAN, THE Los Angeles-based poet who died in 2013 at 67, just wanted to be read. Instead, she found her writing labeled experimental. Coleman’s work, which also includes fiction and essays, testifies to her fluency with conventional forms like the sonnet, as well as to her restless urge to innovate. “I had little interest in piggybacking or social climbing, but a great interest in the politics of literary greatness in America,” she writes. “Were I to ever achieve greatness, I wanted it on my own very stringent terms.”
In the decade since her death, Coleman’s greatness is gaining widespread recognition, thanks in part to recent reissues featuring illuminating introductions by other poets: 2022’s “Heart First Into the Run,” introduced by the 46-year-old Mahogany L. Browne, and 2021’s “Wicked Enchantment,” edited and introduced by the 51-year-old Terrance Hayes. In Coleman’s poem “My Bleak Visitation,” published in her 2001 collection, “Mercurochrome,” her genius expresses itself in plain-spoken language and measured lines:
And so
the strength I pray for and the freedom I seek
bear convolutions heretofore unaddressed, make
me the radical’s radical, inspire a sacrifice so deep
it rattles the old bones and the old stones.
Her radicalness here is not one of formal experimentation but of accountability for her damaged yet resilient psyche as a child born in 1946, during Jim Crow segregation. She gives voice to that which might otherwise remain unspoken.
“Experimental” might be the most reliable keyword for uncovering unheralded voices in the Black tradition. For all the radical political energies expressed in Black American literature, the literary mainstream has often been marked by formal conservatism. The novelist William Demby, who died on Long Island in 2013 at 90, after years spent living abroad outside of Florence, Italy, and in Rome, was long banished to the peripheries of the canon, largely because of his formal experimentation. His most beguiling book, “The Catacombs” (1965), adopts a semi-autobiographical perspective, in the character of Bill Demby. The writer seeds the narrative with newspaper clippings, stream-of-consciousness forays and philosophical speculations. A 2022 special issue of the journal African American Review makes the case for his surging importance. “Demby’s body of work has struggled to gain a lasting foothold in the African American literary canon and in classrooms, perhaps for the very fact of his living off the radar for decades in Italy,” the editors write. Now his experimentalism and transnationalism aren’t discouragements but invitations to a larger global audience.
3. Pioneers
IN SEPTEMBER 2020, Butler, the groundbreaking writer of Black speculative fiction, finally achieved her goal of making it onto the New York Times best-seller list. It came 14 years after her death. Butler’s eventual inclusion among the first rank of Black American authors is testament to a confluence of factors, especially the emergence of a community of Black women science fiction writers with literary capital — Tananarive Due, Nalo Hopkinson, Sheree Renée Thomas and Nnedi Okorafor among them — who’ve prompted a backward glance in search of ancestors.
Other, less famous literary forebears are similarly surfacing in response to the cultural currents and social conditions of our time. The novelist William Gardner Smith, who died in 1974, was antiracist before “antiracist” was a ubiquitous term. His 1963 novel, “The Stone Face,” about a Black expat in Paris forced to confront the snarl of injustice beyond a Black-white American context, “resonates with contemporary concerns about privilege and identity,” the writer Adam Shatz argues in his introduction to the 2021 reissued edition. Or consider the recent proliferation of Black queer fiction, from Brandon Taylor’s “Real Life” (2020) to Daniel Black’s “Don’t Cry for Me” (2022). Though certain canonical books, central among them James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room” (1956), are vital to that lineage, the roots stretch much further back, in works often hidden or suppressed.
Angelina Weld Grimké, already canonized as a writer of propagandist plays of racial uplift and pastoral lyrical poetry, might more provocatively be recast as a queer and feminist pioneer. Her best-known work, the anti-lynching play “Rachel” (1916), is of more interest to modern readers as artifact than art. However, her erotic poetry, much of it unpublished in her lifetime and still not widely read, is a revelation, articulating same-sex desire in scrupulously formal verse. “Caprichosa” (1901) is an erotic poem of unrequited love written in a truncated trochaic tetrameter: a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one, repeated four times but left with only the stressed syllable at each line’s end, as in Shakespeare’s famous lines delivered by the witches in “Macbeth” (“When shall we three meet again / In thunder, lightening or in rain?”). In Grimké’s hands, the meter generates an unsettled urgency:
Little lady coyly shy
With deep shadows in each eye
Cast by lashes soft and long,
Tender lips just bowed for song,
And I oft have dreamed the bliss
Of the nectar in one kiss. …
Longing quickens the pulse of these lines: their singsong regularity followed by sudden disruption, a conscious stumbling as Grimké’s first-person speaker makes her passion plain, before returning to the rigid music of the form.
As a teacher at Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., Grimké nurtured many young writers before dying in 1958 at 78. Among her brightest pupils was Richard Bruce Nugent, who worked across the literary and visual arts. Where his teacher had to seek subterfuge, Nugent, who died in 1987 at 81, could give fuller and freer expression to his identity — in the words of Thomas H. Wirth, his friend and literary executor, Nugent was “the first African American to write from a self-declared homosexual perspective.” His most enduring work, “Smoke, Lilies and Jade,” published when he was 20, is an erotic prose composition published in the first (and only) issue of the Harlem Renaissance-era literary magazine Fire!! (1926). Nugent uses ellipses after nearly every phrase, which function both as indication of omission and a break in linear time. In one scene, his protagonist encounters a man on the street at 4 in the morning and returns to his room, where “they undressed by the blue dawn … Alex knew he had never seen a more perfect being … his body was all symmetry and music … and Alex called him Beauty. …”
4. Fan Favorites
BUILDING CANONS REQUIRES architects: writers and scholars, teachers and publishers. Reshaping them is everybody’s work. “When it comes to Black authors, at least for me as a Black woman, so much has been culled for us,” says Traci Thomas, 36, the Los Angeles-based host of the literary podcast “The Stacks,” which features interviews with contemporary authors alongside book club episodes in which Thomas and guests discuss the literary past. “Going back to the archive is about trying to figure out why those people were given the magical treatment, and maybe figure out who else is there, too.”
In the 1980s and ’90s, Black women writers finally began receiving that magical treatment. Though literary prizes are a notoriously unreliable way to measure artistic merit, they nonetheless helped bring critical attention to Black literature after decades of exclusion. In 1983, Walker’s “The Color Purple” won both the Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. A decade later, Morrison, who died in 2019 at 88, won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The National Book Award for poetry, established in 1950, did not name its first Black recipient until 1999, when Ai — whom the poet Major Jackson once described as “a poet with an inner complexity and perceptiveness that felt truly American because she was Black” — won for her collection “Vice,” a decade before her death. The years since, however, have seen seven Black winners and nearly two dozen Black finalists.
But there’s another kind of acclaim worth reconsidering — in the deep strain of populist Black American literature, celebrated by readers who prioritize literature’s communal function as entertainment. Being Black in America is work enough; it’s all right for reading to be funny and fun, controversial and straight up scandalous. Such is the case with Terry McMillan, whose novels, including “Waiting to Exhale” (1992) and “How Stella Got Her Groove Back” (1996), also became popular films. McMillan, 71, not only writes impressive, escapist fiction but she “was the first visible, industry-recognized African American writer to be unapologetic in promoting her work,” says Malaika Adero, 66, a writer, editor and literary agent. McMillan had to hustle, compiling mailing lists to connect directly with booksellers. She amassed power, Adero says, “not by the industry but by her own energy.”
5. Victims of the Jane Austen Effect
IN A WASHINGTON Post essay published last November, the pre-eminent Jane Austen scholar Devoney Looser, 55, author of “The Making of Jane Austen” (2017), described how the towering reputation of the early 19th-century English novelist — both in her own time and today — prompts writers to follow her formula and readers to look for imitators. Similarly, through no fault of their own, certain singular talents in the Black American canon have at times so thoroughly dictated literary fashion as to render other ways of writing unrecognizable. What artists have we lost in the long shadows cast by our most canonical figures?
In April 1967, an aspiring poet and scholar named William J. Harris, then a 25-year-old undergraduate at the historically Black Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio, attended a lecture by LeRoi Jones, who later that year would take the name Amiri Baraka. The 32-year-old Baraka was already a literary celebrity, author of the groundbreaking play “Dutchman” (1964) and other important essays, novels and poems. By 1967, Baraka was entering a new phase of art and identity, one more militant and strident, that would come to define the Black Arts Movement. “He was really very startling,” Harris recalls of Baraka, who arrived at the gathering, which he insisted should be Black only, flanked by bodyguards.
The following year, Harris, by then a Stanford graduate student, decided to write his dissertation on Baraka, leading to a lifelong friendship. Now, more than 55 years later, and nearly a decade after Baraka’s death (and his own retirement) in 2014, Harris is recognized as the leading Baraka scholar. While working on the “LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader” (1991), Harris recalls challenging Baraka over the inclusion of a poem that Harris thought was more agitprop than art. “Well, we just have different aesthetics,” Baraka told him.
Indeed they do. Constitutionally, Harris, now 80, is easygoing and playful, hopeful and kind — not words that even Baraka’s closest friends would have often applied to him. And Harris’s own voice as a poet is much the same. Where Baraka often employs long, Whitmanesque lines, Harris’s are short and staccato. Where Baraka is lyrical and confrontational, Harris is sometimes silly or surreal; he looks to humor as a “way to get over,” he says. In “For Bill Hawkins, a Black Militant,” a poem Harris wrote around the time he first saw Baraka, reprinted as part of a portfolio published last month in Poetry magazine, he declares his independence — as a Black American and as a writer — in language suited to so many Black writers belatedly making their way into the canon: “Night, let me be part of you / but in my own dark way.”
THE POET ADRIAN Matejka assumed leadership of Poetry as its first Black editor, just in time to oversee the journal’s 110th anniversary issue. In his inaugural editor’s note, published last October, Matejka, 51, makes plain both his reverence for the magazine’s rich tradition (it was first to publish T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”) and his commitment to “illuminating some of the brilliant poets who weren’t given access in the previous decades.” Matejka opened up access almost immediately by extending the magazine’s Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, an annual award given to “a living U.S. poet whose lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition,” to 10 additional poets for the 2022 cycle. The 11 recipients ranged from Sonia Sanchez, 88, to Nikki Giovanni, 79, Juan Felipe Herrera, 74, and Patti Smith, 76. Some of them had never, or rarely, published in Poetry. Many of them are Black.
“Unwelcome,” Matejka says, when asked about the message that American literary institutions have often communicated to Black writers. In the face of diminished opportunity, Black writers created their own welcome spaces: independent publishing houses and magazines, writers’ workshops and collectives. “The thing that made it welcome [to be a Black poet] were those movements of poets that institutionalized Black art,” Matejka says. He thinks back to the ’60s and the upstart Black-owned Broadside Press, or to the ’90s and the Dark Room Collective, which birthed two national poet laureates in Natasha Trethewey and Tracy K. Smith.
By definition, canons bind past to present. Eliot, writing in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), observes that “what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them.”
Black American literature at once affirms and expands Eliot’s sense of tradition. Conditions in the United States hostile to producing and protecting Black art have robbed us of many monuments, upsetting the idea of order. These works — lost or never written — comprise a canon of their own: forgotten stories of the oral tradition, the brilliance of those James Weldon Johnson called the “Black and unknown bards of long ago,” the personal archives and manuscript drafts that precarity did not allow their authors to preserve. It is a testament to the efforts of our ancestors that so much remains, and remains still to discover.