This Is Not an Apologia for African American Literature

Ross comments on Kenneth Warren's African American Literature? It seems to him that Kenneth W. Warren's What Was African American Literature? intends to provoke exactly the kind of defensive response from scholars in the field. After all, any book declaring the end of African American literature, much more so one written by a noted scholar of African American literature, is asking for a fight. Many Americans are experiencing a funny (as in ironic) desire to be done with this black thing once and for all, yet such a desire only evinces how foundational this black thing is to the American imaginary and the US.