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The
Blackademic Life Academic
Fiction, Higher Education, and the Black Intellectual
Lavelle
Porter
Evanston
(Illinois): Northwestern University Press, 2019 Paperback.
x+201 p. ISBN 978-0810140998. $34.95
Reviewed by Anne
Stefani Université Toulouse 2
The
Blackademic Life focuses on a literary genre barely explored by
critics and scholars, the black academic novel—a novel centering on the lives
of black students and academics. Part of its originality lies in its crossing
the fields of Literary Criticism, African American Studies, and History of
Ideas to frame a highly stimulating study of African American literature within
the current context of persisting racism and anti-racist activism in the United
States. Lavelle Porter examines the black academic novel as an important
contribution of black intellectuals to the historic resistance of African
Americans to white supremacist discourse in higher education. The study
starts after Reconstruction, when black academic fiction emerged as a genre, to
follow the latter’s evolution through the main stages of twentieth- and
twenty-first-century racial history. This historical perspective allows the
author to interpret the black academic novel as a distinctive subgenre within
the broader genre of academic fiction. If the five
chapters explore a carefully selected set of works chosen for their exemplarity
in the various periods under study, a major leading thread for the analysis is
the significance of W.E.B. Du Bois’s fiction in the history of the genre. This
is indeed another originality of Porter’s undertaking: to approach Du Bois not
through his social-scientific writings, but through his novels spanning three
of the four periods singled out for the analysis. If the author acknowledges
the aesthetic shortcomings of Du Bois’s fiction, he convincingly demonstrates
the value and function of such works, first in Du Bois’s personal experience as
a black scholar, second as seminal writings including all the distinctive
features of the genre developed by authors of later black academic fiction. The book’s main
thesis is that for Du Bois, as for all other black intellectuals, black
academic novels constituted counternarratives against the white supremacist
discourse that persistently and systematically questioned black people’s
intelligence and educability [112] from slavery through the present. After a first
chapter devoted to the presentation of the context, the critical literature,
and the chosen analytical framework, each following chapter hinges on selected
authors and their contributions to the genre. Chapter two deals with Sutton
Griggs and W.E.B. Du Bois as pioneering figures; chapter three examines the
works of Nella Larsen, Ralph Ellison, and J. Saunders Redding; chapter four focuses
on those of Paule Marshall, Gil Scott-Heron, and Alice Walker—with a return to
Du Bois through an analysis of his later fiction; finally, chapter five discusses
the works of Ishmael Reed, Samuel R. Delany, and Percival Everett. The
conclusion extends the reflection to the representations of blackademic life in
popular films and TV shows. Porter
proceeds methodically to demonstrate the value of black academic novels to
African American literature and cultural history while drawing the contours of
what he calls “the politics of the black intellectual” [24]. Building on classic
and recent critical thought—from Harold Cruse to Critical Race Theory through Foucauldian
discourse analysis, postcolonial studies, Afro-Orientalism, and queer theory,
to name only a few—he convincingly articulates his own theory of the subgenre
he has singled out for study. He identifies a set of key features allowing him
to construct an elaborate definition of the black academic novel and to examine
it critically. Themes such as the “overeducation of the Negro”, the politics of
respectability, and the politics of authenticity, are extensively discussed. At
the core of his study lies the paradoxical status of the black intellectual,
both an exception and a representative of his group (90). The book examines in
depth the tensions characterizing the lives of black intellectuals, between, on
the one hand, their responsibility to represent the black community—a notion
encapsulated in Du Bois’s “Talented Tenth”—and, on the other, their desire to
escape racial identification, to find their own individuality, to free
themselves from the “burden of responsibility and representation” [39, 74]. The
various strategies deployed in the novels are what Porter names “the politics
of the black intellectual”. A striking
quality of the book is its self-reflexive dimension, the author commenting on his
scientific dilemmas and on the necessary limitations of his study. Such
intellectual honesty testifies to the author’s concern for nuance, which
definitely serves the analysis by providing convincing justifications for his
choices. Another strength of Porter’s lies in his successfully combining a
well-buttressed, sophisticated, scientific approach with a highly personal,
subjective outlook on his subject. As a black academic himself, he not only weaves
elements of his own life and career into his scholarship, but also applies to
himself Du Bois’s notion of responsibility by explicitly presenting the writing
of his monograph as an ethical commitment to “finding [his] place in a
genealogy of black intellectuals whose sacrifices and efforts made [his] own
blackademic life possible” [160]. Porter finally reaches beyond the field of
academic literature by adding political commentary to critical analysis. The
result is an engaging text demonstrating that scholars can contribute in the
debates of their time without losing their scientific legitimacy and rigor, nor
their critical distance. By framing his literary study within the context of
the Trump presidency pitting antiracist movements such as Black Lives Matter
against white supremacist ideologues, and by shedding light on the continuity
between past and present, Porter not only helps us grasp the depth of white
supremacist discourse in American culture but also reminds us of the vital role
of literature and intellectuals in the building and preservation of a just
society. This is no small achievement at a time when politics and the academia
are being torn apart by culture wars. His highly readable piece of scholarship is
indeed a most welcome response to the assaults of conservative
anti-intellectual forces currently at work in the United States.
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