Against Marginalization: Convergences in Black and Latinx Literatures by Jose O. Fernandez

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

In Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison (1992: 7) draws a genre-defining connection between the exclusions instrumental to the founding of the United States and the exclusions at the heart of defining its literary tradition. She writes, "Just as the formation of the nation necessitated coded language and purposeful restriction to deal with the racial disingenuousness and moral frailty at its heart, so too did the literature, whose founding characteristics extend into the twentieth century, reproduce the necessity for codes and restriction." In Against Marginalization: Convergences in Black and Latinx Literatures Jose O. Fernandez describes the specific ways in which those "founding characteristics" impact Black and Latinx writers from the nineteenth century through the present. In this comparative work Fernandez pairs texts by Black and Latinx authors that share a common theme or set of concerns. He tells "the story of how countless Black and Latinx authors fought against centuries of literary, artistic, and cultural marginalization through their sustained efforts to write, publish, and reach a sustaining readership while aesthetically depicting the struggles of their respective groups" (6). By bringing together publication history, reception studies, and close readings of representative texts, Against Marginalization focuses on the point where the phenomenon of literary prestige and the institutions of publishing and higher education meet.In his first chapter, Fernandez offers an ambitious parallel history of the development of the Black and Latinx literary traditions from the colonial period through the 1960s. Even as he attends to the significant differences between the two, he argues that together these histories illuminate some of the same struggles authors of distinct racial and ethnic backgrounds face in publishing. In a long section about print culture from the colonial period through the nineteenth century, Fernandez uses the example of Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá to show "the complex ways in which Spanish-language texts remained outside the margins of American literary history when they did not conform to an English-speaking tradition despite Villagrá's inexorable link to the history of the Southwest" (33). American literary studies, by contrast, has a more longstanding—albeit relatively recent—practice of incorporating the work of Black authors. Fernandez cites the slave narrative, the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, and the energized field of Black newspaper and magazine studies in the nineteenth century as examples of this uneven canonical adoption. It is not, he suggests, until the late nineteenth century when the serialization of novels by Eusebio Chacón and the newspaper writings of José Martí provide the Latinx literature movement with comparative circulation. Fernandez compellingly shows how late nineteenth-century figures Charles Chesnutt and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton face similar challenges in addressing a white audience in order to publish in mainstream outlets and with mainstream presses. However, because of the relative visibility of African American writers over Latinx writers at the time, the former is more readily considered as part of the American literary canon than the latter.Moving into the twentieth century, Fernandez focuses on New York City as a publishing center for both Black and Latinx texts. As in the earlier period, the imbalance between the burgeoning Black literary movement of the Harlem Renaissance and the more obscure Latinx literary tradition persists. Fernandez offers the parallel examples of James Weldon Johnson and Jesús Colón, emphasizing again the visibility of the former over the latter in mainstream publishing. Johnson edited The Book of American Negro Poetry, which was published by Harcourt Brace in 1922, and Alfred A. Knopf reissued his novel Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man in 1927, associating his work with other modernist texts (46). Meanwhile Colón started writing in the 1920s in Spanish-language newspapers, but it was not until 1961 that his book A Puerto Rican in New York and Other Sketches was published by a Leftist press called Masses and Mainstream (47). The chapter ends with what Fernandez suggests is a shift away from New York City as the primary epicenter of Black and Latinx work. With the emergence of ethnic studies programs in universities nationwide, the calculus of literary prestige changes, and the assigning of texts in these programs "created an incentive for mainstream publishers to sign and reissue works by writers of color as a direct response to a demand for texts among college students" (56). This shift sets the stage for the comparative case studies that make up the remainder of Fernandez's book and, as he implies, make possible the focus on convergence rather than difference.The remaining chapters pair one Latinx author with one Black author writing in the same genre or on the same theme from the 1960s forward. The chapters are ordered roughly chronologically and all center Fernandez's claim that these authors engaged with the Western literary tradition to expand the audience for their work. This claim comes across most clearly in chapter two, in which Fernandez pairs Amiri Baraka's The Slave and Luis Valdez's Bandido! to think about the ways in which grassroots theater traditions presented formal challenges to the mainstream theater scene. He argues that "the plays transform marginalized subjects, from a slave and an outlaw, respectively, into revolutionary figures to create a historical continuity between previous instances of armed resistance and revolt from the past to their 1960s context" (78). The connection becomes even more salient when we consider the respective failures of the attempts at revolution staged in The Slave and in Bandido!. Fernandez astutely connects the depiction of revolutionary disappointment to a larger ambivalence about the best course of revolt in Baraka and Valdez's present. By turning to earlier moments of revolution, they could work out ideological tensions between nonviolent protest and armed resistance. Through their shared focus on failed revolution, Fernandez shows that both authors remained undecided on the ideal course of revolutionary action and also wavered on the extent to which their protagonists could make a break from the Western, colonial order. In doing so, they reveal the imbrication of the white literary establishment and the emerging fields of African American and Latinx literatures.Some of Fernandez's subsequent case studies stand on more tenuous connections between the paired authors and result in less satisfying conclusions. For example, chapter three pairs James Baldwin's Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone and Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima to position soldiers of color that served during World War II as an important antecedent to the civil rights movement. Fernandez spends most of the chapter tracing the varied publication history of each novel and arrives at a parallel group of characters that present the difficulties veterans of color faced after returning from battle. At the center of the chapter, he offers a short section that connects Baldwin and Anaya as reluctant in their conscription as spokespersons for activist movements. Fernandez shows that, although both Baldwin and Anaya were involved in civil rights movements, they also strove for "artistic individuality" (82) that problematized their charge to write for a collective movement. A more persuasive version of the chapter might have focused on nonfiction writing and interview work as an antecedent to chapter four, which pairs Ralph Ellison and Richard Rodriguez to reveal how their essays grapple with inclusion in the Western literary tradition. In spite of Ellison's and Rodriguez's distinct contexts, Fernandez convincingly argues that they both strove to articulate the ways in which "broad racial identifications such as 'white' and 'black' hide a larger complexity due to the blending of different traditions and experiences from different groups" (105). This shared concern reverberates in our contemporary language of "color blindness" and in critiques of critical race theory being taught in classrooms. Fernandez's work on the essay as a form also extends the literary-historical work begun by Cheryl Wall's On Freedom and the Will to Adorn (2018), which stakes a claim for the essay's centrality to both aesthetic and political debates in the African American literary tradition.In his final two chapters, Fernandez considers fiction writers whose work is frequently taught in university courses. In these chapters, he most fully fleshes out the triangulated relationship between the publishing industry, institutions of higher learning, and the abstract idea of literary prestige. Chapter five pairs Alice Walker and Helena María Viramontes to show how these writers recenter marginalized, rural subjects; while chapter six pairs Edward P. Jones and Junot Díaz, who depict urban subjects. In these chapters we can see Fernandez's intellectual debt to Mark McGurl's magisterial book The Program Era, which argues that the curriculum of the Iowa Writers Workshop has shaped American fiction since the program's inception. McGurl (2009: 236) contends that, for writers of color, "the imperative to find your voice was an even more conspicuous corporeal one, circling back again and again to the housing of the storytelling imagination not only in a human body, but in a racialized and gendered body with 'bloodlines' or 'roots' in an organic community or culture with its own repository of storytelling tradition." Fernandez is less interested in the anxiety that this corporeality might produce, and focuses instead on the generative power of literary training and tradition. For Walker and Viramontes, the aesthetic of literary modernism opens up possibilities for experimentation; and for Jones and Díaz the short story form—the cornerstone of Iowa's pedagogical project in McGurl's study—creates new ways to express the economic inequities experienced by Black and brown people in urban spaces. Fernandez insists that not all literary inheritances are burdened by a requirement to appeal to an imagined white audience. In fact, with an increasingly diverse student body at colleges and universities, an integral audience for this work is made up of students that share these authors' backgrounds and experiences.Against Marginalization will likely be compelling to readers interested in comparative ethnic studies, or invested in the literary history of the twentieth century. Fernandez combines historical detail with straightforward analysis that make this book plausible for use in undergraduate classrooms. In a graduate course, I might pair his work with Richard Jean So's more data-driven analysis in Redlining Culture. So (2021: 5) elucidates "the economics of American literature—production, reception, and recognition—and how those economics have and continue to punish and exclude minority authors." While Fernandez arrives at a rosier outcome in his conclusion, both authors index a long history of systemic exclusion. Ultimately, Fernandez concludes, "as the previous struggles of the 1960s and 1970s at college campuses demonstrate, change often originates at key historical junctures and moments of social upheaval led by students and activists who are able to inspire others" (174). In teaching this history and their work, he implies a new generation might be invigorated to both create new, more representative forms of literature and art and to compel concrete political change.At multiple points in the text, Fernandez restates the need for unity, for convergence, and for comparison. Although he offers a rationalization for this choice, I found myself wanting him to contend more seriously with difference. In the introduction he argues, "The shared fight by Black and Latinx writers against historical, social, and literary marginalization—which is reflected in the development of their respective literary traditions—represents a key characteristic that unites not only Latinx writers from different racial, ethnic, and cultural groups but also other writers of color in the US context" (7). This argument pits a "shared fight" against "respective literary traditions," suggesting that we might construct a more capacious literary tradition by downplaying racial and ethnic difference. However, what might we lose in sacrificing the thematic, formal, or aesthetic features that define existing literary traditions? My worry is that, by treating the Black and Latinx literary traditions as one, we flatten the distinct historical, political, and ideological circumstances that give rise to each tradition. If we begin in the nineteenth century, as Fernandez does, we must account for the unique trajectory that African American literature takes from the slave narrative through figures like Baldwin and Ellison, who draw from the autobiographical tradition and struggle with the balance between aesthetic experimentation and propagandistic political statement. That trajectory seems very different from the history of Latinx literature being excluded from print circulation for much of the nineteenth century and finding its audience largely in classrooms during the latter half of the twentieth century. The metric of convergence is highly effective in illustrating how Black and Latinx authors have contended with the nebulous concept of "literary merit," as well as the ways in which "merit" has become concretized through book sales. Our students should certainly understand how we have (mostly) arrived at a curriculum that includes figures like Anaya, Viramontes, Walker, and Baldwin. However, they must also understand the distinct histories of racial and ethnic struggle that gave rise to the work of each author. By balancing the convergences that Fernandez adeptly tracks in this book with continued attention to historical particularity, we can better inspire young people to artistic and political action.