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The text engages Kenneth Warren’s claims about the field’s pastness and perceived erosion after Jim Crow, then reframes the debate by treating African American literature as a pedagogical area. It asks how framing and classification shape classroom practice, linking curriculum design to mass incarceration, voter ID politics, attacks on political content in colleges, and pressures on academic freedom and tenure while keeping the course grounded in literature.",{"@graph":69,"@context":122},[70,84,105],{"@type":71,"itemListElement":72},"BreadcrumbList",[73,77,79,82],{"item":74,"name":75,"@type":76,"position":8},"https://docshare.wps.com","Home","ListItem",{"item":78,"name":9,"@type":76,"position":14},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/",{"item":80,"name":15,"@type":76,"position":81},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/literature/",3,{"item":83,"name":65,"@type":76,"position":19},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/black-lives-matter-teaching-african-american-literature-and-the-struggle/598018/",{"url":83,"name":65,"@type":85,"image":86,"author":91,"headline":65,"publisher":94,"fileFormat":97,"inLanguage":63,"description":67,"dateModified":98,"datePublished":99,"encodingFormat":97,"isAccessibleForFree":100,"interactionStatistic":101},"DigitalDocument",{"url":87,"@type":88,"width":89,"height":90},"https://docshare.wps.com/thumbnails/black-lives-matter-teaching-african-american-literature-and-the-struggle/598018.png","ImageObject",300,407,{"name":92,"@type":93},"Indoniesian Boy","Person",{"url":74,"name":95,"@type":96},"DocShare","Organization","application/pdf","2026-10-20","2026-10-15",true,{"@type":102,"interactionType":103,"userInteractionCount":8},"InteractionCounter",{"@type":104},"ViewAction",{"@type":106,"mainEntity":107},"FAQPage",[108,114,118],{"name":109,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":111},"How does the text position Kenneth Warren’s 2011 work within the debate on African American literature?","Question",{"text":112,"@type":113},"It describes Warren’s book as a lightning rod that provoked many scholarly responses. It summarizes Warren’s argument that African American literature’s distinctiveness has eroded alongside the legal demise of Jim Crow and the shift toward other global or diasporic frames.","Answer",{"name":115,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":116},"What is the central reframing proposed in the text?",{"text":117,"@type":113},"The text reframes the conversation by exploring African American literature as a pedagogical area rather than treating it mainly as a question of field boundaries and literary criticism. It focuses on how we teach it and why those teaching choices matter.",{"name":119,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":120},"Which contemporary political and social pressures are highlighted as shaping how African American literature should be taught?",{"text":121,"@type":113},"The text links teaching challenges to mass incarceration, ongoing state and non-state violence, voter ID laws and rollback of the Voting Rights Act, privatization and neoliberal restructuring of universities, and attacks by conservative groups on what they label as “political” content in curricula.","https://schema.org",{"og:url":83,"og:type":124,"og:title":65,"og:site_name":95,"og:description":67},"article",{"robots":126,"canonical":83},"index,follow",{"doc_id":128,"site_id":62},598018,1792534861,{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":131},{"doc_id":128,"user_id":132,"nickname":92,"user_avatar":133,"doc_module":4,"category_id":14,"category_name":15,"doc_title":65,"doc_description":67,"doc_content":134,"file_id":135,"file_url":136,"file_type":137,"file_size":138,"view_count":8,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":8,"is_downloadable":8,"audit_status":8,"page_count":139,"language":140,"language_code":63,"site_id":62,"html_lang":63,"table_of_contents":141,"faqs":142,"seo_title":143,"seo_description":67,"update_tm":144,"read_time":145},962090760608,"https://ap-avatar.wpscdn.com/davatar_276721f389ce27ea32af1340a28f341c","Black Lives Matter: Teaching African American Literature and the Struggle  \nJeffrey Gross  \nChristian Brothers University  \nPerhaps struggle is all we have because the god of history is an atheist, and nothing about his world is meant to be. So you must wake up every morning knowing that no promise is unbreakable, least of all the promise of waking up at all. This is not despair. These are the preferences of the universe itself: verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope.  \nTa-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me, 71  \nHe winked. His eyes twinkled.“All right, forget what I’ve said. But for God’s sake, learn to look beneath the surface,” he said.“Come out of the fog, young man. And remember you don’t have to be a complete fool in order to succeed.  \nPlay the game, but don’t believe in it—that much you owe yourself.”  \nRalph Ellison, Invisible Man, 153  \nKenneth Warren’s 2011 What Was African American Literature? was a lightning rod for the field of African American literature. Warren’s book incited dozens of published responses, including the proceedings ofa roundtable at the 2012 MLA Convention in a room filled to standing-room only capacity. As his title suggests, Warren poses crucial questions about African American literature as a cohesive field of study. He asserts African American literature’s was—its pastness—by suggesting that African American literature as a cohesive category “has been correspondingly, if sometimes perceptibly, eroded” alongside the “legal demise of Jim Crow”  \n(2), Warren argues that we have, since the dismantling of legal segregation in the 1960s, moved to something that comes after African American literature: “African American literature as a distinct entity would seem to be at an end, and that the turn to diasporic, transatlantic, global, and  \nother frames indicates a dim awareness that the boundary creating this distinctiveness has eroded”(8) . For Warren, African American literature’s coherence came from its response to Jim Crow racism, as writers “sought to build support for a racial project by giving their readers a glimpse of the emptiness, or at least the insufficiency, of dominant white American ideals”(22) . In perhaps the most often cited passage of his book, Warren argues,“it is my contention here that to understand both past and present, we have to put the past behind us”(84) .  \nI do not wish to prolong my response to Warren’s book, at least in relation to the way he historicizes African American Literature as a distinct field of study and literary criticism. Responses from well-known scholars filled the Winter 2011 issue of African American Review and, in 2013, PMLA.1 These responses, of course, add to the range of reviews Warren’s book received—from praise for how he historicizes African American literature to complaints about the historical, categorical, and methodological limits he puts on literary productions by African American writers. Warren challenges us to think about what was or what is African American literature as a category for literary production and criticism. His book asks important questions about how we classify African American artistic production. Scholars who agree and disagree with Warren must be more precise in their definitions of African American literature, particularly about what is and what is not part of that literary tradition. Here, I aim to reframe the conversation toward an exploration of African American literature as a pedagogical area. How do the ways we frame African American literature shape the way we teach it?  \nIn considering African American literature as a teaching subject and a focus of critical pedagogy, I aim to examine what African American literature is or needs to be in the university classroom. In locating African American literature as a teaching subject, I am particularly  \ninterested in the undergraduate course as a site of exchange between students and professors and as a space for cultivating links between lite","cbCaiar8kW5j77gt","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaiar8kW5j77gt","pdf",592651,28,"English","# Introduction: Teaching African American Literature as Pedagogy\n## Warren’s Framework and the “End” of a Distinct Field\n## From Literary Criticism to Classroom Practice\n## Classroom Relevance: Racial Conflict, Violence, and Policy","[{\"question\":\"How does the text position Kenneth Warren’s 2011 work within the debate on African American literature?\",\"answer\":\"It describes Warren’s book as a lightning rod that provoked many scholarly responses. It summarizes Warren’s argument that African American literature’s distinctiveness has eroded alongside the legal demise of Jim Crow and the shift toward other global or diasporic frames.\"},{\"question\":\"What is the central reframing proposed in the text?\",\"answer\":\"The text reframes the conversation by exploring African American literature as a pedagogical area rather than treating it mainly as a question of field boundaries and literary criticism. It focuses on how we teach it and why those teaching choices matter.\"},{\"question\":\"Which contemporary political and social pressures are highlighted as shaping how African American literature should be taught?\",\"answer\":\"The text links teaching challenges to mass incarceration, ongoing state and non-state violence, voter ID laws and rollback of the Voting Rights Act, privatization and neoliberal restructuring of universities, and attacks by conservative groups on what they label as “political” content in curricula.\"}]","Black Lives Matter: Teaching African American Literature and the Struggle | PDF",1792086143,43]