The Debate Revisited: (Dis)Placing the Ground of African American Literary Theory

Abstract

This article revisits the debate that took place in the pages of New Literary History in 1987 among Joyce A. Joyce, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Houston Baker Jr. by examining the continuing role of the notion of black authenticity deployed for articulation of differences and specificities. What becomes decisive in revisiting the debate is how to take into account all the various intersecting lines within and between the two positions by the double task of (dis)placing the ground of African American literary theory. Within mind the idea that theory is precisely what different theories themselves contest, I put forth the argument that one should read the one position against the grain of the other and consider them to be mutually constitutive rather than opt out of any of the terms and conditions of the debate. From such a shift of theoretical locus, one is enabled to understand that the question of what African American literary theory ought to be not so much asking for a definition as arguing for an ongoing discussion on why we always concern ourselves with such theory at all and what this engagement with the debate entails for us in a field of perpetual renegotiation.