"It’s Both an Instructive and Welcoming Feast of Black Experience That We Seek." A Chat With Nathan Grant of African American Review

African American Review existed as the Negro American Literature Forum from 1967 until 1976 and the Black American Literature Forum from 1976 until 1991 before becoming African American Review.  Can you talk a little bit about the rationale behind this evolution in branding?  How has the publication changed over time?

The titles have changed with changing times.  As you might recall, the old demonym “Negro” was considered respectful in the Sixties, and then, with the title of the journal following, went on from there through its evolution. 

The great Caribbean feminist and cultural critic Carole Boyce Davies argues for a comprehensive “map of misnaming” broadly regarding Third World peoples.  One example that can be derived from her remarks is that it’s frequently argued that the term “African-American” has multiple difficulties as a means of the accurate naming of a people, as the imagined Venn diagram that the term’s components appear to create is, at best, unstable.  Few reasonable people would argue that in St. Louis, where AAR is housed, New York, Chicago, Baltimore, or Charleston, among other venues, that blacks are treated as Americans would expect other Americans to be treated.  In our title, however, we’ve omitted the hyphen because as W. E. B. Du Bois has remarked, as a testament of birth and of law in the United States, the African and the American are indissoluble, yet ceaselessly negotiating a balance of the terms.  That would be something worth striving for, I believe—an endlessly teachable fact for every living moment.  And, for a title of a scholarly journal of African American cultural expression, that may just be as good as it gets.

How does African American Review differ from other literary journals focusing on blackness and the black experience in America?  What does African American Review contribute to the conversation?

Again, we’re trapped in an ordinary function of language, I think, but there really isn’t, to my mind, a or the black experience.  There’s black experience, and we focus on as many aspects of its artistic, literary, and other cultural expressions as our contributors help make possible.  We’ve published scholarly essays on many different kinds of topics—mostly imaginative literature, yes—but also popular culture, art, sports, and performance.  It’s a journal that focuses on many aspects of black experience but with a sharply intelligent and scholarly edge.  I’d very much like to think that we indeed raise the level of conversation on pan-African culture, which also affects black experience in America, as the American—or United States—phase is but a part of the whole.

Do you view African American Review as an academic or a literary publication?  Why?

Well, we’re both.  Academic essays do tend to dominate the publication, but we have published several noted black North American poets, such as Cyrus Cassells, George Elliott Clarke, Nathaniel Mackey, Harryette Mullen, and Marilyn Nelson, among many others, as well as poets and short story writers from throughout the African diaspora.  We have also published many writers of conscience of other ethnicities, whether essayists or creative writers, because black experience, as is all experience, is at least semipermeable; it’s both an instructive and welcoming feast of black experience that we seek. 

It’s a journal that focuses on many aspects of black experience but with a sharply intelligent and scholarly edge. 

It seems as though African American Review is currently focused on publishing critical / academic essays.  Can you explain a bit about why that is?  Has AAR’s focus always been on critical / academic essays?

When it was Negro American Literature Forum, it was just a small journal “for school and university teachers,” as the line under the main title read in those days. The very first issue was only eight pages in length, and it announced the first memorial tribute to Langston Hughes, who had died only the previous week.  It also included short essays—notes, really—on the future of Negro poetry; two on Richard Wright’s Native Son, and a single book review, among other few notes and addresses. The School of Education at Indiana State University was the publication’s first sponsor, so its origins were anchored in scholarly traditions.  Only later were there poems and short fiction, but these only enhanced the journal’s profile as it attracted more varied kinds of readers. 

Changing gears, many have said that, with the attention garnered by the #BlackLivesMatter movement, Campaign Zero, etc., we are currently living in a second civil rights era.  Do you agree with this assertion?  Do you see similarities between this political moment and the black political moment of the sixties?

This is without doubt the civil rights era of the twenty-first century, though it seems odd that one can think of civil rights struggles in America as having been anything but continuous and seamless.  Mass incarceration was something that Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells both inveighed against in the nineteenth century, for example, and Du Bois wrote many times throughout the twentieth against the lynching of black men and other examples of two-tiered justice. In our own time, when we hear—and now see—evidence of cover-ups of shootings by police, we can easily recall the “Southern justice” of figures like Orval Faubus and Bull Connor. The only tangible difference today seems to be the arrival of a technology that makes these revelations possible. The Supreme Court has recently rolled back voting rights for African Americans in the South, and throughout much of the country, the GOP has done much the same for blacks, students, immigrants, the disabled, and the elderly.  Along with two-tiered justice, there’s also two-tiered American education, wherein more energy, opportunity, and far more tax dollars are poured into white school districts than those in which African Americans live.  So-called “Right-to-Work” laws, as they make their way through several states, will further impoverish blacks and other historically disenfranchised groups, which only helps to further undermine the creation of wealth for people of color—and this represents only a short list of grievances.  So yes, in our time, “We Shall Overcome” has become, unfortunately, the not-too-distant echo of #BlackLivesMatter.

In that vein, we are seeing some truly excellent writing from both African American writers (e.g. Ta-Nahesi Coates, Margo Jefferson, Roxanne Gay, Claudia Rankine) and African diasporic writers (e.g. Marlon James, Chigozie John Obioma, Helen Oyeyemi). 

Which writers would you say are the essential voices right now? Do you believe we are living in a black literary renaissance?

I wouldn’t make such distinctions regarding writers, just as I wouldn’t say that we are now living in a black literary renaissance.  I understand that it seems that black writing seems to have captured the larger American imagination yet again, but the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are filled with African American writing, and in the earlier decades of the last century much of that writing was either ignored or treated as a local (read: limited) curiosity.  Despite the broad liberalization of American publishing in the first third of the twentieth century, readerly attention to black and other minority writing nevertheless depended on the marketplace as governed by white publishers. The first African American to make his living entirely through his writing was Richard Wright, and that distinction began practically in midcentury, in 1940, with his altogether controversial and chilling novel Native Son, and continued with his 1945 autobiography Black Boy.  There were of course many important voices that preceded his, however, and these continued through his generation and after.  You mention Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose notable book Between the World and Me (which title, intriguingly, is also the title of a poem by Wright), as Toni Morrison has astutely observed, reads very much like James Baldwin’s 1963 book The Fire Next Time, which was for its era also a towering achievement.  There are many other examples of such sensible and historical convergences in black writing, but if the injustices that first provoked black literary expression continue practically unabated today, then it certainly seems likely that the black counterstatement has also little changed its form.

Again, I think that today’s technology in so many of its effects and their dominance of everyday life, including social confluence, has done among other things much to broaden the access of African and African diasporic writers to American readers.  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who divides her life and career between Nigeria and the United States, has become a very important voice over several novels from Nigeria; there is the Ethopian novelist Dinaw Mengestu, who now lives and teaches in the U.S.; again from Nigeria, there is the great Ben Okri, who has been compared to other great writers of color, including Salman Rushdie.  I could go on, but to answer your question, while voices like Coates, Roxane Gay, and other African American writers are crafting new American responses to American multicultural conflict, African and diasporic writers are examining conflicts and culture in their own countries, and in their writing and their lives are returning the gaze to America.  Our American perspectives on race, ethnicity, and culture are enhanced, re-energized, by being drawn closer to African and diasporic sensibilities through social and other media that makes possible new cultural readings both across and within continents.  For such a catholicity of perspectives and urgencies, there has perhaps never been a more fascinating, more portentous era.

Do you believe it is the duty of black writers to write about blackness and the black experience?  What do you think about black writers who often focus on themes other than race (e.g. Machado De Assis)?

I don’t believe that you can ever impose duty on art or artists, and the failure of even the puissant former Soviet Union to do this, from Shostakovich to Solzhenitsyn, is a testament to this position.  Many black writers, beginning perhaps from the days of the Harlem Renaissance—Countée Cullen and Jean Toomer among them—wanted to be known simply as writers, as conveyors of uniquely American experience—yet then, as now, they were firmly claimed by the black canon.  We doubtless do need black artists and writers to create whatever they wish, simply because no one ever needed the oppression that brought about literary protest in the first place.

Switching gears again, what do you look for in submissions to African American Review?  Are there aesthetics or unifying characteristics you seek across fiction, poetry and criticism?

Perhaps for reasons similar to the answer to the previous question, we don’t look to recreate canons of black experience.  Paradoxically, however, we do try to chart the progression of the field and perhaps shape conversation and writing about that progression, and that’s the real challenge, I think, of the scholarly journal in this age of ever-faster transmissions of information.  In an earlier time, you’d just wait for the journal to come out before making judgments about literatures and their impact on the academy and on readerships.  Now, new social forms, new forms of media transmission, and new styles of peer review, in addition to the ever-changing nature of the academy itself, have changed the role of journals as intellectual interlocutors.  For example, the more distant past saw articles on various authors, but the themes might have been limited to social protest through the filters, say, of other poetic and prosaic styles.  Today, the powerful social impact of LGBT culture, the unmasking of previously covert government surveillance and interference (generated in part by increased aid in this area to scholars and others through the Freedom of Information Act), the advent of poststructuralism as a means of literary study, a new and robust technology, the much broader proliferation of women’s voices in the academy and the increased attention to them, among many other elements, have truly caused academic discourse literary study and discourse to speed up.  The contemporary journal’s task, I think, has been to track this speed and give contours to what might otherwise be likened to a convention at a venue so small as to have the many constituencies invited make a sheer mockery of the fire codes.  As journal editors, I think we can open the windows and let some more air in.  Or out.

African American Review has published special issues on James Baldwin, Hip Hop, and black performance and special sections on Phillis Wheatley, Chester Himes, and Anna Julia Cooper.  Are there any forthcoming special issues or sections that you would like to make readers aware of?

As regards special issues, we’re working on a 2016 number on African Canadianité, or on the issues of being both African and Canadian.  We’re pretty excited about this, particularly as it’s an issue that continues to help us push beyond U.S. borders, and for 2017, which marks our fiftieth year of publication, we’re doing a special issue on the topic of blackness and disability.  We’re excited about that, too!

Do you have a favorite issue or piece that has been published during your tenure as editor?  If so, which piece or issue, and why?

I’m ordinarily loath to talk about my favorites, as they all involve both so much labor and love.  I may have to say, though, that my very first issue, volume 42, number 2 (2008), had a fine leading essay on the Pulitzer-Prize winning and former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey, and a quite controversial cover introducing it….  I’m also remembering the more recent volume 44, number 4 (2011), in which we featured the proceedings of a Roundtable that took place at the Modern Language Association conference in Seattle that year, on Kenneth Warren’s provocative book, What Was African American Literature?  And so there I go….

If you could give one piece of advice to a writer who is interested in publishing in African American Review, what would it be?

Well, for all that’s at stake in seeking to claim an audience—be you black, white, or anything else—I don’t imagine there can be just one piece of advice… how about three?  First, write with vigor, clarity, and intellectual conviction.  Research well and accurately.  And finally, if you’re a budding creative writer, speak from your heart, but say exactly what you want to say.  That’s what great writers do.