In the introduction to the Fourth Edition of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Valerie Smith emphasize the imitativeness of literature—Black literature, specifically. To them, literature begets newer literature. At the same time, readers have traced formal patterns of repetition and imitation in Black literature across centuries, dating back to the antebellum. For instance, Flight to Canada by Ishmael Reed and Kindred by Octavia Butler; Harriet Tubman’s Incident in the Life of a lave Girl and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, published almost two centuries after Incidents; Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Percival Everette’s 2024 James. These examples reinforce the notion that newer Black literature echoes, burrows, and imitates seminal literatures. This seminar thus seeks to investigate how Black literary and cultural productions have imitated other, earlier literary productions, even across genres and geographical boundaries—like what the editors of the anthology The Negro Caravan (1944) called “a sort of literary inbreeding which causes Negro writers to be influenced by other Negroes…” Even Kwame Anthony Appiah recently aver that “the history of art is the history of people borrowing and adapting techniques and tropes from earlier works.” We seek papers that—using fictional and non-fictional Black writings and art—connect the past to the present—papers that explore “imitation,” “influence,” and “intertextuality” as central to Black literature and Black arts. Guiding questions to consider include, but are not limited to: 

What literary traditions have endured across generations, and how have they survived? 

What forms of continuity exist across Black literary history—Plantation to post-bellum literary and cultural productions, Africa to the Diaspora, across centuries, etc.? 

How do Black writers create new meanings from older texts? 

What role does memory play in Black literary traditions? 

How do contemporary writers preserve or challenge earlier literary traditions? 

How does Black literature reinvent its own past? 

What histories continue to shape Black literary expression? 

How do questions of race, identity, and freedom evolve across Black literary history? 

What earlier genres continue to influence Black literature today? 

How does Black literature balance tradition and innovation? 

What can earlier Black literature teach us about contemporary Black writing? 

Questions? Email: [email protected]