Author: Brennan Borden

The multitude of stories contained within my experience with this semester can hardly be reduced to the scope of a singular blog post. From the conceptual seed shapes planted at the beginning of the semester to their seemingly endless strings of iterations and reiterations, the full sprawl of insight I have gained throughout my time in this course can be overwhelming to mentally parse. Taking stock of all I have learned, it makes me wonder how much a survey course such as this one can truly give an accurate and complete picture of the literary tradition which it covers. I had never even heard of the majority of the authors and works we discussed and was largely unfamiliar with many of the core concepts, which seems to me now to be a failure of my education up to this point, but I recognize that these can still only portray one slice of the entire body of African American literature.

Unsure of where to take this strand of thought, I turned to the initial groundwork upon which we built our studies in this course. We started the semester by examining Ron Eglash’s African Fractals, which gives a mathematical overview of the principles of fractal geometry that lay at the core of traditional African design. Eglash goes over a few central mathematical concepts evident in various areas of African design, and connects them to the cultural ties related to these concepts: most significantly, the fractal principles of recursion, numeric systems, scaling, complexity, and infinity. The one of these that I feel is most pertinent to my experience with this  course is scaling, for a variety of reasons that I hope to make clear. 

Eglash identifies scaling geometry quite broadly as “mathematical practices in thinking about similarity at different sizes” (71). It may also be described as “irregular geometric structures whose shape seems to be self-similar regardless of the level of magnification at which it is viewed” (Fractal-Scaling Properties as Aesthetic Primitives in Vision and Touch | Global Philosophy). In my understanding of the term, I take scaling to mean the process of applying identical ideas at varying magnitudes, sometimes to a dramatic extent. Scaling in the mathematical sense has many practical applications, as shown by Eglash in the “cost-benefit analysis” of African wind-screens using scaling techniques (73), but the more abstract concept of scaling can be seen represented in storytelling models, and will serve as a framework for my own analysis of my time in this course. 

For example, scaling is used as a primary thematic mode in Percival Everett’s The Water Cure. Graywolf Press, the novel’s publisher, describes the story as confronting “the dark legacy of the Bush years and the state of America today,” yet the narration almost never engages directly with the former president or his administration. Rather than undertake a face-value indictment of the Bush administration’s response to the September 11 terrorist attacks, Everett scales down the atrocities to a conflict between a few individuals, rather than between entire nations of people. In place of the terrorist attacks, Everett substitutes the brutal assault and murder of the narrator’s daughter, and the subsequent kidnapping and torturing of a man, who may or may not be the assailant, by the narrator. The narrator, identifying himself as Ishmael Kidder, enacts a sort of vigilante justice as retribution for his daughter’s unthinkable fate with little concern for whether or not his captive was the actual perpetrator of the violence. This clearly maps onto the much larger-scale vigilante attitude adopted by the United States government, which saw the deployment of troops and terrorization of masses of people overseas who were uninvolved in the attacks. The parallel is seen perhaps most clearly in the title of the book, referencing a torture tactic used by Kidder against his captive and by members of the United States military in places such as the infamous Abu Graib. 

Just as fractal scaling has cost-benefit advantages in African design, Everett’s use of thematic scaling delivers an especially strong impact. The central purpose of scaling is to adjust a design to the conditions of what is required of it, as in how the repeating spiral structure of some animals’ horns is scaled outward to fit the animal’s growing head. The aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks is a period in the nation’s history that feels almost impossible to grapple with, due to the unfathomable scale of the destruction surrounding it. No matter how information on the subject is conveyed, it seems that plain discussion of it can never get us close to coming to terms with it in meaningful ways. Scaling the situation down to interpersonal violence is much more suited for gaining a deeper understanding of the moral and ethical questions surrounding it, doing two main things: first, by revealing how ridiculous the country’s response to the attacks looks in hindsight, taking the grief over one atrocity out on those possibly not even involved in it with a more prolonged campaign of violence; and second, by making room for more understanding of what the those in power to that decision, highlighting the broad range of human emotions that can be heightened in the wake of horrendously inhuman acts. Everett’s microcosm of what would end up being decades of conflict between nations serves to bring the real-world events closer to the hearts of readers than regular descriptions tend to. The scaled-down portrayal takes its scaled-down form to adjust to how most readers experience the world surrounded by such massively scaled violence. 

Even if it is not conscious, people engage in scaling practices all the time to simplify their understanding of the world, and this can have more negative consequences than the mathematical and literary implications of scaling. As I have reexamined my time in this course, I have identified some scaling of my own that I have unconsciously exercised. Given that this course has essentially been a survey course in a literary tradition that I had previously had relatively little exposure to, I am acutely aware of a pitfall of scaling out a few pieces of literature as being wholly representative of an entire body of literature. Black art has a history of being systematically pushed to the margins of academia and of dominant American culture, and I want to play an active role in dismantling my own ingrained notions of black literature by seeking out more of it. However, amidst the noise of everything that the human brain must take in day by day, I believe there is a tendency to try to make it easier to understand the work by substituting large groups of subjects with mentally constructed overarching scalings of individual subjects. It would then be possible to take the experiences I have had in this course and the analysis of the works we have read and treat it as having fully immersed myself in the world of African American literature, and that the work of deconstructing my personal biases is already done. This is a substitution that I need to be wary of, as I know that my journey in educating myself is still towards its beginning, and that the ways of thinking that we practiced in this course must be habitually continued as an ongoing process.

Beyond my basic awareness of this concept, several of the pieces of writing we read and their surrounding context clearly displayed the consequences of this kind of substitutive scaling. For most of the history of the United States, the hegemonic cultural focus has been inundated with works created by and for white people. This partially arises from and feeds back into the systems of white supremacy that the country operates under, which only functions with the construction of dually whiteness and non-whiteness, where whiteness is viewed as the normal condition and non-whiteness is a deviation from the normal. Therefore, members of the “in-group” may often use things that they see from the “out-group” to make generalizations about them. Black American artists have thus been forced to create their work under the watchful eye of American whiteness, feeling the pressure of their individual works having the potential to be scaled out as representative of all black art for some audiences. 

This is seen in the “Fugitive Slave Narrative” genre, where writers were pressured by white abolitionists to abandon the artistry of their storytelling and just focus on the plain facts of their enslavement, as their experiences would be taken by white readers as a picture of the whole of slavery, since reading these narratives was simpler than directly engaging with the reality of slavery.

Another example of this could be seen in our discussions surrounding Angles of Ascent, an anthology of modern African American poetry. Like all anthologies, it includes only what the publishers and editors feel should be included, giving the publisher a difficult task of deciding which poems and poets should act as the representatives of black poetry. This can cause conflict when there are differing views on what this material should be, as evidenced by the public disagreement between Amiri Baraka and anthology editor Charles Henry Rowell (A Post-Racial Anthology? by Amiri Baraka | Poetry Magazine). Such issues become more prominent because black creators are placed under more scrutiny and have their lives, works, and public interactions scaled to a magnitude different from their white counterparts.

Recognizing similar unconscious scalings and substitutions in my mind has been and will continue to be a central part of my work with this course. I have begun to notice times when I scale certain things down to a more digestible frame of reference to make myself feel more comfortable with things that are difficult to grapple with. Especially when confronting historic and current injustices against people of color worldwide, it can be tempting to avoid direct engagement as it is, but this only perpetuates and upholds such injustices. Scaling can be helpful in gaining a clearer understanding of moral ambiguities at a human level, but it also runs the risk of downplaying the gravity of a given situation. If I were to imagine the gruesome killing of a loved one, and imagine a scenario in which I respond by killing dozens of people uninvolved with the initial violence, this would not give an accurate picture of the all-too-real implications of when such conflicts play out on a scale of thousands. It is a long process to learn to see uncomfortable truths as they are, but I at least feel that this course has provided a strong groundwork for the process.

In attempting to discern a central “seed shape” for our ENGL-337 course thus far, I found it difficult to focus on just one. There have certainly been several thematic throughlines that we have followed between pieces of writing over the course of these first few weeks, but as I have begun to delve into each of them, I have found that every possible seed shape has its roots in another possible seed shape, all of them intertwining and spiraling into the infinitely complex whole of African American literature. Any given individual concept that can be identified in the study of African American literary history cannot be separated from the whole that it is a part of, and that whole is also a part of each of its own fragments. Many of the concepts we have discussed in this course can be traced back to a uniting core of the many perniciously sprawling limbs of American white supremacy, but this is less a seed shape than it is the structural groundwork from which the study of African American literature has grown. However, even as the whole of American white supremacy is self-reproducing, some of its manifestations may be seen as having their own unique ways of recurring on their own, exemplified by common threads prominent in this course.

Before I go on to identify what I believe is the most significant of these threads given the information I have now, I would like to make it clear what my understanding of a “seed shape” is, as this is what I will be basing my argument off of. The terminology of seed shapes has its origin in the mathematical study of fractals, which Eglash at one point describes as “simulations for natural objects…with a seed shape that undergoes recursive replacement” (African Fractals, 12). Essentially, fractals are patterns resulting from one basic shape replacing each section of its own form with itself, and then doing the same substitutions with the resulting form, and so on; the output for one iteration becomes the input for the next. The possible result is an infinitely complex shape made entirely of a simple, self-reproducing shape– the fractal’s “seed shape.” This phenomenon is often seen in objects of nature, hence why manufactured fractals are often seen as “simulations” of nature’s patterns. More abstractly, then, a seed shape could be considered to be any core concept that recursively reproduces itself until it has created a deeply complicated mechanism of phenomena wherein the original, basic concept is always underpinning each resultant example of it.

Applying this to our course, and to the study of African American literature more broadly, I view a seed shape as being a societally ingrained thought system of which certain of the issues prevalent in the history of African American artforms are symptoms. Most of what we have talked about in this course are symptoms of several, interconnected conceptual seed shapes, but I have found myself continually returning to one idea, which is threaded through all of the readings we have at this time done as a class. African American literature was first cultivated in a society that did not want it to exist; and in a sense, the same is still true of more modern African American literature. As much as the myth of a post-racial America is pushed onto us, the fact remains that we live under a state where black voices may only be systematically uplifted on the terms of white hegemony. Therefore, a prominent seed shape germinating through the history of black literature has been the black literature as a study and as an artform has consistently been viewed as socially valuable in the context of “Western” notions of value.

Interestingly enough, the first iteration of this seed shape that made me think of this idea was with Ron Eglash himself, in his discussion of fractals. In our first class session, we watched a video of a presentation by Eglash about his studies of the usages of fractals in a variety of African societies. While it is clear that he is trying to be respectful and reverent of the often monolithicized “African culture,” but there was one comment that particularly stuck out to me, which I think reveals a problematic mentality that often accompanies white people trying in good faith to bring awareness to achievements by people of color worldwide. When explaining the successes his foundation has had with the application of his research in education, he claims that introducing young children in America of African descent to the history of African fractals has been “very successful teaching [them] that they have a heritage that’s about mathematics, that it’s not just about singing and dancing” (“African designs,” 14:40). 

This comment may seem innocuous at first, but it carries troubling implications. It apparently subverts the stereotype of African culture being more centered on the body and nature, with European culture being more centered on the mind and intellect; however, it implicitly creates a hierarchy in which “mathematics” is to be more valuable than “singing and dancing.” Eglash is aiming to introduce African cultural traditions into the EuroAmerican world, but only the ones that have a use-value that adheres to EuroAmerican thoughts of value. He seems to dismiss soul-affirming practices of singing and dancing as trivial, emphasizing only aspects of African American heritage that are deemed practical. He creates a similar hierarchy between intention and intuition. He dispels the thought that African usages of fractals are based purely on intuition, but in doing so degrades the value of intuition and the just as valid use of intuitive thought over intentional thought in many cultural practices. This may be digging a bit too deep into a couple of well-intentioned but simply misguided statements, but it did prime me to be more aware of similar ideations made manifest further in the class.

It became clear to me that this framework of black achievements being promoted only on white has been a challenge faced by black authors since the inception of the African American literary tradition. This is perhaps most apparent in the prefaces of the autobiographies of formerly enslaved people chronicling their experiences with slavery, a genre of literature now known as the “fugitive slave narrative.” In order for these artistic works to be published for a wider, largely white audience, the narrative would have to be prefaced by accounts from white people establishing the credibility of the narrative’s black author. Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is preceded in most printings by a preface in which William Lloyd Garrison asserts that the following narrative “is, in [his] judgment, highly creditable to [Douglass’] head and heart” and he is “confident that [the narrative] is essentially true in all its statements (Garrison, May 1, 1845). Following this is often included a letter from Wendell Phillips to Douglass, in which Phillips states that he “can put the most entire confidence in [Douglass’] truth, candor, and sincerity” (Phillips, April 22, 1845). For another instance, Harriet Jacobs’ Life of a Slave Girl was not widely accepted until a white scholar offered support for the truth of the narrative. The fact that the initial perceived value of these foundational pieces of African American literature was dependent on notable white people attesting to their veracity suggests that what was valued about the literature was not the authors’ artistry, but the framing of the literature by white activists as solely calls for abolition. Compounding this is the unfortunate truth that these authors were pressured to give simply a clear description of their enslavement to be most convincing for the cause of abolition; dominant society was not interested in African American literature as “literature,” but rather as a political tool.

Distressingly, it appears that this idea is still underpinning the foundations of modern “black studies.” When African American artforms and histories stopped being fully excluded from the realm of academia through the 1970’s and 1980’s, they were introduced as separate areas of study from Eurocentric cultural studies. As Toni Morrison expressed in a quotation that is featured as a central epigraph for this course, “Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form” (Morrison, 1989). The way I have connected this to my argument is that hegemonic American academia seems to present African American literature as being valuable in the same way that white literature. Students are often taught to read works in the classic “canon” for their artistry and their expressions of profound thought and deep feeling. African American literature, on the other hand, tends to be taught more as a study of African American people and their history, focusing less on the authors’ very real artistic achievements in their works. This is so prevalent that readings by white readers of any works by black authors may come with the assumption that every piece of black literature must have some “political” purpose; something very obviously evidenced by the fact that white readers frequently believe that Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild” must be about slavery, even though there is little textual evidence to support this. The shadow of white supremacy remains uncomfortable with non-white voices being centered; thus, there is an underlying societal thought instilled in white Americans that the study of works by black authors is valuable because it will help the white readers feel better about themselves– as though reading about past and current injustices towards African Americans will help absolve the guilt of white Americans– and not because it is valuable in and of itself.

As I am currently taking a class in African American literature, especially one where the majority of my classmates and my professor are white, I think it is paramount for me to remain aware of this apparent trend, being someone brought up by blatantly white supremecist systems. I want to make myself as aware as possible of the ways in which this strain of thought may have seeped into my own subconscious perceptions of African American literature and African American art more broadly. As we continue through the semester I hope to continually challenge my own experience of the course, and recognize the biases I may have that could suggest that the centering of black voices in this class could be valuable to me for the self-serving reasons that are often implicitly given, distracting from the inherent value of the literature’s artistry. Awareness that we are living in an environment that has a foundation in refusing black voices speak for themselves without being superimposed by what dominant white society views as valuable about those voices is key in working to dismantle those trends, especially in education.