Abstract
The persistence of racism and the concomitant threat of African Americans' (literal and psychic) annihilation kept the commitment to black social advancement and positive racial representation foremost in African American expressive culture of the mid-twentieth century.4 While there is much that is empowering about the insistence that black literature do manifestly political work, this injunction has led to proscriptive modes of representation and the emergence of cultural standards that devalue black literary texts that do not highlight the material impacts of racism or promote explicitly black racial uplift.