(Re)making a difference: Theorizing experience and racial individuality in twentieth century African American literature and literary theory

The dissertation challenges the critical tradition that characterizes African American literary criticism as primarily a debate over whether artists should create art or propaganda. An examination of the intellectual connections between the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement suggests instead that much of African American literary criticism centers on questions of reading rather than creation. Where the Harlem Renaissance ends with anxiety over writing from a place of racial individuality when readers only read stereotype, the Black Arts Movement attempts an explicit articulation of an aesthetic that will allow an objective reading of black difference. This critical dialogue around reading, racial individuality, experience, and objectivity in turn informs African American literary production in the twentieth century.; The principal contribution of this project to African American literary criticism is its refocusing critical attention on the intellectual context of African American literature. Employing a postpositivist realist framework, this study examines how black artists and intellectuals have attempted to redefine of black difference. Postpositivist realism's definition of identity as theoretical constructions derived from individual and group experiences is consonant with the ways African Americans writers theorize in identity and experience in their writing. By viewing twentieth century African American literature and criticism in this light, the dissertation shows that African American literary critics attempt to create an aesthetic with an objective understanding of racial individuality. It further shows that twentieth century African American novels engage these questions of difference and identity through their dramatization of the African American struggle for racial individuality in a culture that insists on homogeneity.; Chapter One outlines the intellectual tradition begun by the Harlem Renaissance and continued in the Black Arts Movement. These movements define the questions taken up by subsequent artists and intellectuals. The Third Life of Grange Copeland by Alice Walker, The Man Who Cried I Am by John A. Williams, Quicksand by Nella Larsen, Caucasia by Danzy Senna, Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin, and A Gathering of Old Men by Ernest Gaines give evidence, in subsequent chapters, of the intellectual tradition outlined in Chapter One.