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Really enjoyed this piece, but it also left me wondering why critics always seem to mention the same five or six names when they're writing about writers who are working at the cutting edge of literature. https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/has-self-awareness-gone-too-far-in-fiction
Sometimes—most times—these writers are said to be writing autofiction (Waldman describes them as Bildungsroman writers). Whatever the case may be, writers of color rarely if ever make the cut.
But wait, you might say, what about all those black writers who are getting so much love? Oftentimes those writers are working in long established traditions—historical fiction, say—and though they may be praised for innovating within these traditions,
Critics can draw from a vast storehouse of knowledge and criticism about these traditions as they assess the new works.
So here's a thought experiment: are there any writers of color who are writing autofiction today?
Two names come to mind—Zinzi Clemmons and Akwaeke Emezi (and perhaps even yours truly, lol). Both writers have been celebrated for their work, but—to my knowledge anyway—even when they're praised for their innovation, they aren't described as progenitors of a new kind of fiction.
They are not included in the lineup of autofiction writers. They're aberrations. They've written orphaned texts.
I think part of the reason this happens is because autofiction is, well, so damn personal, and so much of the appeal of autofiction lies in the intense sense of familiarity that an autofictional text can generate between the writer and reader.
You see this in all the praise for Knausgård's work. His work appeals if you can see some part of yourself in his struggles to raise his children or in his intense, finely grained (and white and middle-class) memories of childhood.
As a critic, you might even say that Knausgård is writing about 'universal' themes. After all, a white critic would argue, don't we all have intense memories about our childhood friends? Don't we all hate to wash the dishes?
But does universality run in the other direction? If, say, you're a black writer who is writing an autofictional text about the intense grief that accompanies loss (Clemmons) have you written a universal book?
If you do manage to break through as a writer of color—a fiendishly difficult task on its own—and you aren't writing in an established tradition, in all likelihood your work will either be dismissed as an oddity, praised as a kind of sui genersis wonder work,
or will be assessed through the lens of a genre that doesn't really fit your work (I have no experience with this)
I've been reading a great deal about two literary movements of late—the Harlem Renaissance and the Dark Room Collective poetry movement that originated at Harvard in the late 1980s.
Both fostered a generation of incredible artists (of course), but also, just as important, both fostered a generation of critics (often the artists themselves) who were uniquely situated to comment on what the new art was hoping to achieve, and whether the artists were successful
Which is not to say that outsiders should not comment on the work—of course they should!
But I think the conversation about the new art—especially since we're dealing with marginalized communities—benefits immensely from a conversation between the practitioners themselves and the (usually white) critical establishment.
Let's, as an example, take African fiction (there's that hoary topic again). I’ve said this elsewhere, but in my view the biggest tragedy with respect to African fiction is that the terms of success and failure have been defined by outsiders
If a book by an African writer achieves success in New York or London, it is a successful work of African lit.
So you have a canon of African texts that is being selected and curated by outsiders. Is this an advisable (and sustainable) way to create a literary culture?
Another way of saying this is if a writer from Kenya wrote a six-volume text about childhood memories and how much it sucks to wash dishes, would this be considered a work of African fiction? Autofiction? Would it be considered cutting edge? Would it even be published? Lol
And here's the more important question: is it possible that the Kenyan writer might be doing something completely new? Something that no one in the known literary universe has done before? If so, who will say so?
