Writing the blackness of blackness: African American narrative and the problem of cultural authenticity

This project probes the different ways in which the blackness of blackness evinces itself in literary texts and the various standards critics use to determine a text's degree of authenticity. What, in short, makes the black text indisputably black?;In the introduction, I briefly survey how critics of African American literature have attempted to solve this problem. Chapter one theorizes two opposite models of cultural authenticity: the structuralist model and the auratic model. The structuralist model derives from the work of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and the auratic model is based on the writings of Walter Benjamin. I also put forth my own model of cultural authenticity, namely the ontological model.;The chapters that follow this theoretical framework explore various manifestations of the blackness of blackness. In chapter two, I examine Frederick Douglass's 1892 Life and Times of Frederick Douglass and show why the structuralist model of cultural authenticity is inherently flawed. This, then, would seemingly validate the auratic model. However, my analysis of Jean Toomer's Cane in chapter three shows that the auratic model does not present a viable alternative to the problem of cultural authenticity either. Therefore, a new model of cultural authenticity is needed, namely the ontological model. Chapter four analyzes how Jessie Fauset's Plum Bun negotiates the problem of the blackness of blackness. Out of this analysis, then, grows a new model of cultural authenticity: the ontological model.;In chapter five, however, James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room poses a challenge to the concept of the culturally authentic and hence questions the usefulness of any and all models of cultural authenticity for literary criticism. Chapter six juxtaposes Toni Morrison's Beloved and Richard Weaver's theory of white literary southernness, a juxtaposition which shows what is at stake if the concept of cultural authenticity is discarded entirely. The comparison also shows why literary criticism must not ignore the problem of the culturally authentic and why the ontological model of the blackness of blackness provides the only viable solution to this problem. Finally, the conclusion outlines how questions of cultural authenticity generally inform notions of identity and nationhood; therefore literary criticism must continue to engage the problem of the culturally authentic.