These—are—the "breaks": a roundtable discussion on teaching the post-soul aesthetic

African American Review, Winter, 2007

We met at Duke University--mid-summer, Atlantic, at mid-campus--to talk about teaching courses that focused on the post-soul aesthetic. We met outside the John Hope Franklin Center, and soon enough we five youngish black professors were walking a hallway towards a conference room near the African and African American Studies program. Not at all surprisingly, the walls of the hallway were lined with framed photographs of the esteemed John Hope Franklin at various stages throughout his long and storied career. For me, given the topic I was about to raise among these professional colleagues, walking that hallway was something like running a gauntlet: Franklin's career is one of continued, sustained Negro uplift, as the photomontage of him documents. The post-soul aesthetic, on the other hand, critiques and questions certain black assumptions and traditions, and most professors who teach the art and literature of this post-civil rights movement aesthetic must, to apprehend the course material, assume a peculiar, if not precarious, pedagogical stance in the classroom, one that respects careers like Dr. Franklin's, but also constructively interrogates--and sometimes explodes--the very presumptions and precepts on which such a career stands.

And so, a mere hallway removed from the intense, startlingly direct gaze of Professor Franklin, I gathered together four professors who have had various experiences teaching the post-soul aesthetic in a variety of locales: among the five of us, we have taught at large public schools and small liberal arts colleges; at mid-list colleges and elite universities; at Midwestern, northern, and southern universities. Additionally, the experience of teaching post-soul material ranges from several years to one course to the planning stages for a first course.

Sitting around the table were Crystal Anderson, then of the University of Kansas but now of Elon University; Mark Anthony Neal, of Duke University; Evie Shockley, of Rutgers University; and Alexander Weheliye, of Northwestern University. We began when Alex confirmed that he had titled his course "Post-Integration Blues."

BERT: And you, Evie, said you're going to call yours "21st-Century African American Literature." Crystal, what do you call yours?

CRYSTAL: "post-soul aesthetic."

MARK: "Post-Black Culture."

BERT: And I used "post-soul," as well, even though I started out with "The New Black Aesthetic." Why the variety of names? And how do you define what helps you choose the names that you've chosen?

MARK: I think we all feel a sense of "break," and we're trying to articulate that break in some way. For me, at some point, "post-soul" really didn't encompass all the things that I wanted that break to represent. So when Thelma Golden began talking out loud about this notion of post-black, that became helpful for me, but that was actually the middle move. For me the thinking is to go from a post-soul to a post-black to what I term a NewBlack--one word. (1) That s what we try to do in the post-black course--to identify post-soul texts, and what becomes post-black texts, and what becomes NewBlack texts. The idea was to work that chronologically, but that doesn't actually work. [laughter] What do you do with someone like an Audre Lorde who as early as the 1960s is articulating this notion of "break" in much more complicated ways than Trey Ellis was thinking about it, particularly around gender and sexuality? So, yeah--[chuckling] I'm grappling with this notion as we speak.

ALEX: It's interesting. I just want to follow up really quickly on the whole idea of post-black because that was one of the terms that a lot of students brought to my class and that they really wanted to talk about. But they were also resistant to it--for obvious reasons--just as the whole idea of post-black was attacked in relation to what Thelma Golden was trying to do in the art world. So I would just like to hear you say more about why.... I mean, you talked about the kind of temporalization of how you're looking at it, but I would just like to hear you say why you thought that [post-black] was a more apt term to encompass the "break" than post-soul, or New Black Aesthetic, or all the different terms that are out there?

MARK: Well, I think post-soul, at least as Ellis articulated it (and I think [Greg] Tate does a much better job of articulating it--both of them, actually, as opposed to Nelson George) was really about a kind of post-civil rights freedom, if you will, in the art world that on some level wasn't critical of anything, but very celebratory. Whereas, for me, post-black, on the one hand, was a more conscious attempt to de-essentialize blackness. Not to reject it. Not to jettison it. But to be much more critical of essentializing blackness in some kind of way that I don't think the post-soul does. And even though my initial thinking of someone like, say, [Paul] Beatty, is of his work being post-soul, when you actually get down to it he's probably closer to what's happening around Thelma Golden's concept in that regard. The NewBlack move was really about how to integrate gender and sexuality in this context. For me, [the interest is] to look at Me'Shell NdegeOcello as a text of the NewBlack--where there is something much more complicated going on than post-soul and post-black really encompasses.