The Black Atlantic at Thirty: Implications for the Canon and for Publication and Instruction

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• The Black Atlantic at ThirtyImplications for the Canon and for Publication and Instruction
• John Saillant (bio)

Two habits of scholars of early African American literature, as we move into the second quarter of the twenty-first century, have probably outlived their usefulness. One is reliance on the Norton Anthology of African American Literature (three editions: 1997, 2004, 2014) for defining the canon in both classrooms and scholarship.¹ The other is the prioritization of authorized versions of Black-authored texts in scholarship and in college and university courses, all of which have relied on publication of those versions in letterpress imprints.² One of the most-cited works in Black studies, Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), can help us navigate the transition in which we seem to find ourselves.

Stepping away from the Norton and approaching textuality in a different manner are two sides of one coin. The Norton has prevailed even as scholars and other readers have uncovered previously unknown, unpublished works, recovered little-studied variant texts produced by Black writers, and reattributed published works more accurately to Black writers.³ This process of uncovering, recovering, and reattributing followed the accomplishments of bibliophiles of Black literature such as Arturo Schomburg and Dorothy Porter, yet it has surpassed them in its use of new scholarly tools. These advances were never well represented in the Norton. If we summarize this newer work in a definition of "fluid text" as "any literary work that exists in more than one version"—a notion I draw from John Bryant and Eric D. Lamore—we can focus on its implications for the ideal of the authorized text (Bryant qtd. in Lamore, "Circulation" 65n1). The conviction that fluidity is important implies that each version of a text has its own legitimacy for study. Scholars consider the changes as well as the reasons for change that relate one version to others. A synoptic view of the fluid [End Page 431] texts of the African Atlantic suggests that many of the works once regarded as stable and authentic were part of a series of changeable texts, more like crests and underswells, as in water, than like bound books, as on a shelf. The fluid African Atlantic text will be, if we take it seriously, a remarkable advance in canonicity, scholarship, and instruction.

The canon could be construed as including sets of fluid texts instead of authentic ones presumably authorized by their creators and identified as authoritative by modern scholars. New veins of scholarship could be opened as we analyze the reasons texts change as they move in time and space as well as across different readers and printers. Instruction could mirror the conditions of our students' lives, in which texts, like other media, including the ones our students create, evolve rapidly even in precarious circumstances. The character of nineteenth-century citizenship that Derrick R. Spires has observed—that it was, at times, "fluid—ordered but not static or circumscribed" (199)—is a condition we can see in the lives of early African Atlantic authors and their texts as well as in our own students in the classroom. We may lament the decline in the importance of the sole authorized text, yet what I argue here is that its singularity and solidity misrepresent the experiences of the authors of the Black Atlantic. A question we can pose to ourselves is whether fluidity was so essential to early African Atlantic texts that it should be represented in classroom instruction. If we answer yes, then college and university faculty may do well to rethink our use of anthologies.

The Black Atlantic can guide us through the works of the African Atlantic as we map their fluidity—I cannot say their concreteness—onto the concerns Gilroy has impressed on the field. Gilroy argued that expressions of the Black Atlantic have been a countercultural response to anti-black modernity, in particular to the transatlantic slave trade, New World slavery, oppression by Euro-Americans of Native American and African-descended people, massive dislocations of cultures and populations, and the development of capitalism funded in part by slave labor (1–40). We cannot understand this response to modernity if...