Elijah: Hello everyone, Elijah here with another episode of Long River Rewind, where we will be focusing on African American literature in today’s episode. I have the pleasure of speaking with Professor Salvant. Professor Salvant, could you introduce yourself for us please?
Shawn Salvant: Good afternoon everyone. I am Shawn Salvant. I am an associate professor of English and Africana Studies here at UConn. Great.
Elijah: Would you care to share maybe a little bit of the other things that you work on here at UConn, maybe for research or things you might be writing?
Shawn Salvant: Well, I’m interested in pretty much everything related to African American literature, mostly in the 19th century, but I do some work also in the 20th century. I have a particular fondness and interest in the author James Baldwin who I also teach a single author course about.
Elijah: And what sparked your interest in African American literature?
Shawn Salvant: I’ve always loved to read ever since I was young growing up and always wanted to learn more about the history of my own literature, works by African American writers. [I] grew up in Southern state in Mississippi and that state is known for its writers in general and particularly some of its African American writers such as Richard Wright who’s always been someone I was interested in as well. So early on I took an interest in literature and when I went to high school took some wonderful AP classes about literature and got very interested in all of American literature really and was able to go to Duke University where I was an English major and took some wonderful classes also in African American lit. So it’s just been a passion of mine for many years.
Elijah: Sounds great. So I guess just to get a little more focused look on African American literature, I’m going to start with a bit of a working definition or at least a definition we can fall back on maybe talk about a little bit. So the Encyclopedia Britannica describes African American literature as “A body of literature written by Americans of African descent.” I’d say that’s a little bit broad for better for worse.
In your African American literature class, we’ve spent a lot of time talking about what makes African American literature actual African American literature. Often dealing with more fluid descriptions or indicators of what this work is. So what do you think about this description from Britannica and do you think it might be a little bit reductive or exclusive in some areas?
Shawn Salvant: Yeah, it’s a little bit simplistic. The answer to that question is actually quite complicated and quite complex. And it’s a question that many readers and critics and theorists have been wrestling with for many, many years. How do you define the genre? What makes the tradition what it is? So there are many answers to the question.
There’s no single answer to the question. But I know I think it does go beyond the skin color or the descent of the authors. I mean, there’s also matters of form and histories of expression taken into account, particularly as we discussed in the class. I think that any answer to that question must consider the importance of the African American vernacular tradition and the Black vernacular. And by that we mean not only the types of dialects that are spoken by African Americans around the country historically, but also the cultural material, the forms that are, we might say, endemic or inherent to the Black tradition that have been developed over decades, over centuries. So that material that so many of our major writers draw from, I think, is key to thinking about what makes this literature what it is.
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Elijah: Yeah, I completely agree. It’s definitely something that’s been stressed in both of the classes I’m taking with you of how complicated this question is. And not just for African American literature, but for classifying any kind of literature, because it’s a nuanced question with a lot of loaded, you know, cultural context and history behind it. I think one of the biggest takeaways I’ve had from both of the classes I’m currently taking with you that many people might not recognize or maybe know about American history and literary history is how vital of a role African American literature plays in American literature. As we learned, slave narratives are a literary genre that recounts an enslaved African American often reaching freedom eventually by the end of the novel. I mean, this is one of, if not the only literary genre that emerged exclusively in America and is mainly known in the Americas, which people might not recognize. They might attribute that kind of quality to a short story or to early revolutionary political texts or to some other form of work.
So that kind of runs counter to that predominant narrative. And why do you think it’s important to maybe break the stereotype and recognize how important slave narratives are to American literary history?
Shawn Salvant: Well, when we think about the slave narrative, and there’s a lot that we can say about it, you know, there’s many reasons to read a slave narrative, and there are many themes that a slave narrative incorporates into a work. Many people are familiar with, for example, Douglass’s 1845 narrative, which is the most popular, sort of the most read. These are certainly valuable historical works for giving a sense of what the experiences of these enslaved persons were like during that time. But from my perspective, from our perspective as literary scholars as students of literature, we also want to pay attention to the literary qualities of these works.
All autobiographies are complex works that not only relate an experience in a kind of denotative manner, but also make arguments about a person’s experience, why that experience was meaningful, why it’s significant and meaningful to other readers hundreds of years later. And Douglass is an example of it. So when you read a work like Douglass, his work is incredibly beautiful, eloquent, incredibly striking, incredibly powerful, along with giving us some sense of what it was like to live this enslaved experience. It doesn’t tell the whole story of American slavery, this is one man’s perspective, one man’s experience, but it gives you a little bit of a slice of that experience.
But from a literary perspective, you also want to think about the types of images, rhetoric, the language that Douglass uses, because he’s drawing from that black vernacular tradition that I mentioned earlier, and he’s also contributing to it. And later writers in the 20th century, they may be more familiar with, the Tony Morrisons, the Richard Wrights, the Ralph Ellisons of the world, Alice Walkers, et cetera, or even up to a current figures like Jesmyn Ward and others. These folks are drawing from that tradition that Douglass also participated in. And so we want to track not only the experience, the so-called, quote unquote, black experience, which of course is very dynamic and very varied across time and across geography, but we also want to track the kind of common modes of expression, the common imagery, the common forms that these writers drew from, and used to develop this tradition, and think about how that tradition has changed over time, and ways it’s remained the same, because that’s what we’re really doing, the literary analysis, as opposed to dipping into things like history and sociology. Those things are important for context for sure. But from my perspective as a literary scholar, I’m always interested in the language.
Elijah: I think it’s fascinating to kind of like mentioning how slave narratives emerged in the Americas. You can track the development of this language through American writers, whereas if you look at a different literary form, you may have to go back to maybe European writers or to somewhere else in the world. But it is uniquely American in that sense. I don’t think people necessarily recognize or give African American literature, slave narratives, whatever, enough credit for that quality.
Shawn Salvant: Yeah, you really can’t tell the broad story of American literature without some understanding and some discussion of the slave narratives that contributed so much to works that we think of in the broader American literature. And things like, for example, think about a work like Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. You think about works by other nineteenth-century writers in the antislavery era like Harriet Beecher Stowe and her Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or later, autobiographies written by black and white writers. Those slave narratives, people should also understand and realize that they were more popular in terms of readership in the middle of the 19th century than some of the classic works of the American Renaissance that we may be more familiar with. Folks like Hawthorne, Melville, Walt Whitman. These are important writers, don’t get me wrong, but more people were reading slave narratives than are reading some of those classic works in the 1850s, things like Moby Dick in the 1850s, Scarlet Letter, etc. The population was reading a lot of these slave narratives and getting a sense of what that experience was like. But also those narratives were changing the development and the trajectory of American literature going forward. We see their influence not only throughout African American literature, but really throughout all of American literature.
Elijah: As a professor, do you think it’s maybe easier or do you find it maybe challenging to, let’s say, teach the fact that slave narratives and like transcendentalist literature were kind of running concurrently to each other and also influencing each other? Because I think people, they might exist at the same time, but they divide them into two very separate things from different people. But is that something you try and communicate? And is it easy to get people to realize?
Shawn Salvant: Absolutely. It’s so important. And it’s not easy to get people to realize it’s because they’re often taught separately. And so those connections are not often made, but you make such a great point, Elijah, because easy example for the Scarlet Letter. There is a relationship between characters and Scarlet Letter, between Chillingworth and Dimmesdale.
And in his notes, as you know, Hawthorne refers to that relationship between Chillingworth and Dimmesdale as a kind of reciprocal relationship that echoes a slave and a master relationship. And so we have to keep in mind when we read these famous novels from the middle of the 19th century, that slavery is part of the historical background and backdrop. And Melville, Hawthorne, these other figures, Dickinson, Whitman, these figures, Thoreau, the list goes on. These figures are writing amid American slavery and it stands to reason that their ideas and their art would be influenced by that important historical context. So we can, as Toni Morrison did in her famous literary theoretical text, Playing in the Dark, we can sort of read for the presence, not only the black presence in some of these non-African texts, you might say, but also the presence of some of the influences of slavery as a backdrop. It’s so important.
Elijah: I’m glad you brought up Toni Morrison and also turning our eyes a little bit on the black vernacular that you mentioned before. In our African American literature class, where we just finished reading Toni Morrison’s Sula over the past few weeks. And in that class, Toni Morrison presented a more, I would say, nuanced and interesting description of maybe not African American literature, but what makes a piece of literature black. And Morrison, believed that language was the defining characteristic that, you know, marks his quality. And she used a few select words to describe this effect. I’ve listed a few here: “Unpoliced, seditious, confrontational, manipulative, inventive, disruptive, masked and unmasking”, as some of those descriptors. And that’s something you can really see in her writing and how she builds characters in her novel Sula. But it’s also present in other works of African American literature that we have read in this class. You can very clearly see it in Nella Larson’s Passing and in the “Simple Stories” written by Langston Hughes. And they’re also present in other works that I haven’t read in this class, be it “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin or Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. It really echoes through all of these works, kind of speaking to how these African American writers are often almost riffing off of one another, building on similar, you know, ideas. So when would you say this Black language or Black vernacular appear in the African American literary canon? And how is it developed over time?
Shawn Salvant: Well, first, let me say I love I love the comparison, the example you use, the image you use of riffing off of each other, because that’s a reminder to us that when we talk about African American literature, it’s very intimately connected to the development of Black music as well. And you talk about riffing off as if, you know, like musicians riffing off each other. And that is a that’s a good image and a good way to think about black writers in the tradition who were falling from each other and taking elements of each other’s works and riffing off of it, improvising, making it their own over time. And that’s how the tradition sort of sort of moves forward.
It’s harder to find exactly when this began. We can trace this all the way back as Henry Louis Gates does and his kind of pioneering work, The Signifying Monkey, which is a massive sort of theoretical examination of all of the tradition of African American literature. I recommend that book to your listeners that they want to get a sense of this topic. But he traces the tradition back to the West Coast of Africa. And he looks at some of these West African folk tales and folk material and folk literature and how those folk tales began as oral expressions of West African life and West African and values in these different tribes and areas of West African during the Transatlantic Slave Trade goes all the way back.
So we can trace that. And it’s, you know, obviously, it would be on the scope of this this podcast here, but it goes way back to that to that origin, we might say, and develops in many different ways. And that’s and that’s the interesting piece of this, to see how that tradition develops over time and to be able to witness that tradition in its most current manifestation of folks like Morrison or, you know, Jesmyn Ward or whoever it may be and recognize that it’s still part of that ongoing tradition that goes way, way back. That’s exciting to see, you know, that it’s still this continuous flow of ideas and images and information and that that tradition is still very much alive and has kept itself alive in a literary sense, but also has sustained a people over time. This is put at passing on a cultural capital that used to be done through an oral tradition, but then becomes a textual tradition and resisted all of the efforts to tamp it down and to eliminate it through enslavement and even laws forbidding African Americans to read and to write, etc. To see the survival tactics that are embedded in the tradition and then also to see the incredible beauty and artistic elements is really what constitutes a lot of what folks like me study.
Elijah: Yeah, that’s great to hear. As you brought up music before, seeing how this style has evolved, you also do have more musical expression of this vernacular, be it through genres like jazz and blues. Even today, you can see it a lot in hip-hop, so it’s really cool to see how it’s progressed over time.
Shawn Salvant: Yeah, if you’re a hip-hop fan, you are a black poetry fan, in my opinion. The two go hand in hand. Take Kendrick Lamar as the example of people familiar with today. This man is a poet. So to listen to Kendrick Lamar’s poetry, and when I listen to figures like Jay-Z or whoever it may be, I’m listening for the allusions, the references, the similes, the comparisons which always blow me away. Some of them are so complex and so clever in some of these hip-hop songs that it’s incredible to think about how they create these, what they call punchlines now or whatever it may be. But the lyrical dexterity of the best hip-hop artists to me is just pure poetry. So yeah, the music and the literature definitely go hand in hand. This is one reason why Kendrick Lamar has won some of the awards that he has, and even receiving literary awards, etc., because his work is definitely very poetic, very literary.
Elijah: Yeah, it’s definitely very layered. Anytime I listen to it, I feel just like I would if I read a poem. I almost need a dictionary and an encyclopedia to really understand the context and the breadth of what’s being discussed.
Shawn Salvant: Yeah, it’s probably out of my expertise, but we have a class here that’s been going on for many years that’s on hip-hop, but this music can also bear close analysis, close literary scrutiny as poetry. You kind of take it out of its element to sort of transcribe it and put the lyrics on paper because it takes away some of the tones and the musicality of it, but it’ll be interesting to sort of look at those lyrics just from kind of a textual, formal perspective and think about how they operate because they’re very complex. And I think that there are rhetorical devices and rhetorical strategies and improvisations that hip-hop artists are making that don’t even have terms in our kind of literary, theoretical, literary, critical lexicon. I think that they’re pioneering their own ways of putting language together. Sometimes I listen to some of these lyrics and I’m just amazed by the complexity of the structures and the ways in which the metaphors operate.
Elijah: Yeah, it’s definitely something that’s truly fascinating.
Something else that we have talked about in class that’s been of some scholarly debate is the authenticity of black literature, especially before there was an established African American literary canon. So you have works like the poems from Phillis Wheatley, who was an enslaved girl who was eventually freed, but she was put on trial for her work. But now she came under criticism for appearing too European with her references and how she wrote and not having that “signature Black voice” from scholars like today, or at least in recent memory. And they also have another phenomenon where a lot of these earlier African American writers, they would orate their stories and then a white author would end up writing them down. You can see that in Ukawsaw Gronniosaw’s autobiography in 1772, and even later with Solomon Northrop’s slave narrative, Twelve Years a Slave, published in 1853. So how do these works fit in with Morrison’s idea of Black literature when you might not have this very clear Black vernacular in print because they were told and then written through maybe a white person, or just that Black vernacular didn’t exist in a literary form yet?
Shawn Salvant: Yeah, well, they complicate it to be sure, and that’s always the difficulty for this type of scholarship and work. And as one critic put it, how do you read for the black voice that sometimes enveloped in a white envelope when you think about the layers of editorship, the layers of amanuensis work, etc., that go into some of these and as you know, even going back to many of the slave narratives in the 19th century, many of those had to be authenticated by a white figure. In Douglass’s case, it’s his friend in fellow abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison who authenticated his narrative. Many of these narratives have some sort of prefacing remark by a white figure, a white editor or friend who validates and explains to the reader, yes, this text was actually written by this Black author, it’s not fabricated, it’s not made up. So there’s that authenticating gesture, but it definitely complicates this development. It’s not a linear development. You know, it’s very organic and very complicated going through different histories and different circumstances. So it by no means is it is it simple to sort of chart this, but those texts because of the circumstances of enslavement and all the pressures that are put on these writers to first of all, not to produce anything to keep their voices silent and having them being forced to find ways to get their voice out there. And one of the ways is to use these white authenticating voices as an avenue to get their voices out there. This is particularly before we get the rise of many of the black newspapers in like 1820s, 1830s, and by the time we get into the 19th century, there are many church organizations and other organizations that are giving venues to Black voices that are mostly under control, we might say of Black editors, et cetera. So that sort of progresses over time. But early on, as you said, there was this challenge to get these texts out there and they often did rely on some of these editorial principles. So yeah, it complicates that whole narrative, but I don’t think it derails it in any way. It’s just something that you have to keep in mind and speaks to the special circumstances of the emergence of a Black voice in America. And those things are interesting as well. Even those challenges to the emergence and the definition of this Black voice are interesting to me as well.
Elijah: And then kind of tying this back to Toni Morrison. There was an interview shown in our African American course where she brings up the idea of the white gaze and literature, which is kind of the predominant white voice that almost tends to shine through in your writing, where you might be thinking that you’re writing for, just because that is the audience you’re often surrounded by and pressured to appeal to. And this idea kind of works in conjunction with earlier examples of African American literature and a lot of those early slave narratives where they were not necessarily always written for white audiences, but that is who they were consumed by most often, because capitalism, power to buy these books and have that unique interest. But how can we possibly read some of these older works in a way that subverts the white gaze and maybe not necessarily just us as readers? How can we interpret the author’s decisions in writing these novels and how they might have been rejecting the white gaze?
Shawn Salvant: Well, we have to read carefully and we have to recognize that, first of all, that Black voice is not completely suppressible. It’s always going to find a way to make itself heard. And so even if there are these layers of editorship, the Black voice is resolute and it’s insistent on being heard. You read Toni Morrison’s language describing what she believes are some of the quintessential aspects of Black writing in a work like Sula. How it’s defiant, it’s resilient, it talks back, it’s subversive. And even in these texts in which we have some pretty thick layers of editorship, I’m always looking for ways in which that Black voice can be heard through that envelope. And it’s usually always there in some way, if we read carefully enough. Some of it can be found in comparing the work to other works by the same author or by different authors in the same time period, looking at some of the expressions, and reading out some of the language that we can kind of see is actually not consistent with that Black writers experience or their language and their style. It’s a matter of some pretty close literary analysis, but it’s worth doing because as Morrison says, even Morrison in 20th and now the early 21st century, she’s passed away a few years ago but was writing in the early part of this century, you think about a writer as skilled, as accomplished as Toni Morrison is, winner of the Nobel Prize, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and even she as an author talked about the difficulty, the importance and the necessity of trying to write beyond the control of that “white gaze” as she calls it. And thankfully, she’s such a perceptive, not only writer but also a kind of theorist of her own writing and theorist of African American literature that she kind of highlights that phrase that we have now, the white gaze to kind of give it an image and to give it something we can kind of analyze and talk about. But even she wrestled with that, especially early in her career, she writes about this, when she writes about the openings of Sula, I won’t get too much into the weeds on this, but she talks about how in Sula she began writing it in a way that was capitulating to that gaze and then had to kind of take a step back and recognize that she did not want to do that. In that interview mentioned, she says she spends all of her entire writing career trying to write in a way that does not cater to what she calls the white gaze. So yeah, that’s an important topic and important dynamic in studying these works.
Elijah: I really like how you brought up how comparing different literary works from the same author to kind of interpret any inconsistencies that might reveal the internal Black voice that’s reaching out. I think that’s really important and just something that I saw in reading in class with Phillis Wheatley, where you might read her poems and it might seem a little more European, a little more like drawing a lot of those popular allusions. But some of the other material you gave us was specific letters that she wrote. And I think in those letters it really, it was so different, you know, and I think that really revealed more of that Black voice that can’t be suppressed, that’s always going to be there and the fact that she might say something in one poem that seems a little “okay” with slavery, like you can interpret it that way, but then you see these, you know, letters where she’s very fiercely advocating, you know, against slavery.
Shawn Salvant: Yeah, and she’s navigating, you know, not necessarily okay with slavery, but she’s navigating as best that she can given the circumstances she’s in. She’s making her plea for her own humanity and Black humanity in a larger sense as best she can under the circumstances. So yes, she’s adopting what we might consider to be kind of Western, European, or you might say white literary forms, but even within those forms, and she’s talking, when she writes a poem “On Imagination” and she talks about using metaphors of shackles and imprisonment and talking about her imagination, is what liberates her and frees her to get beyond the limitations of her experience as a figure and as a writer. We can’t help but think about her circumstance and how that poem is about her kind of plea for her own freedom and for Black female freedom in particular in this context. So that’s what I mean by reading carefully and understanding the context and as I say, reading between the lines you might say, kind of putting herself in a position, you know, how does she get her ideas and her voice out there?
And that’s actually, it’s quite clever and it’s quite, you know, kind of intriguing and quite to her credit that she’s able to do that. And yeah, we talked about how for many years there were, she had, she still has many detractors who dismiss her as someone who simply adopted and sort of reproduced these Western forms. But if we read carefully, like I said, read her other materials or letters, she has an exchange with a Native American minister, Indigenous minister, Samsom Occum in her time and it speaks to her desire for freedom and desire for all, for all enslaved persons to be free. She did write those things, but some of her most read poetry, you know, may sort of belie some of that, but it’s definitely there if we look closely.
Elijah: Yeah, I completely agree.
Shawn Salvant: And not to mention, I should say, just her entire life, you know, just her existence and the fact that she survived the Transatlantic Slave Trade and was able to produce these poetic works as a child really. A young girl, you know, 14, 15 years old when she began writing and publishing is kind of an amazing testament to her resilience and her ability to survive and to become this world’s historical figure that we’re still talking about here in 2025. You know, she wrote her poems in the 1770s and we’re still discussing her hundreds of years later, it’s a pretty amazing feat. I would love if someone’s still talking about me 200 years from now, I’d be shocked first of all, but I’ll also be very pleasant surprise.
Elijah: Yeah, she’s a truly remarkable figure, just both, you know, American history, African American literature, even as American literature, there’s so many things that you can give her credit for, not just for being like African American at the time, but also being like a woman. That’s truly insane.
Shawn Salvant: And as we’ll see, we will discuss this in a class next class, but a poet like Nikki Giovanni who just passed away a few months ago has a poem that’s for Phillis Wheatley and sort of not only giving her some credit for her role in you might say founding or initiating aspects of the tradition, but also reflecting on her life and what her life, what his life meant not only for Wheatley and folks in her time, but for later writers like Nikki Giovanni, who was such an important figure in the Black arts movement, such a revolutionary poet who died recently. So we again, that’s another example of how we see this connection between the Black authors going way way back to the era of the slave trade and connecting with authors that are still writing today.
Elijah: Yeah, I’m sure looking forward to look more into it. But I think that’s all I have for questions for today. Before we go, is there any, you know, African American pieces of literature, be it fiction nonfiction, even scholarly that you might recommend to listeners or anything you’re reading right now that you find particularly interesting?
Shawn Salvant: Well, a few of them that I mentioned, can’t go wrong with Toni Morrison, someone who’s sort of important for me I mentioned, Jesmyn Ward, who’s a writer who comes from my part of the country down in the Gulf Coast of Mississippi and is one of the leading writers of this era, I’d recommend her works. But yeah, those are two that come to mind. And you can never go wrong with James Baldwin as well, another author who is sort of near and dear to my heart. So, you know, The Fire Next Time, Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, Another Country, are some of his great works.
Elijah: Great, be sure to check those out. So again, thank you, Professor Salvant for sitting down with me and giving me such thoughtful answers to these questions. I’d also like to give a huge shout out to WHUS Storrs, UConn’s student run radio station, for letting us use their studio and equipment. And see you next time.