User talk:Jason Sanford
Please note that I'm traveling to a funeral for a few days and will not be able to respond until Monday, Nov. 6 to any comments.--Jason Sanford 15:08, 1 November 2006 (CST)
Hi Jason,
I am preoccupied with non-CZ with stuff right now so I'll respond in brief.
(1) The sentence regarding African American lit's drawing on oral tradition preexisted my edits. My only contribution was to move it to another spot and add "sermons." It will take us more than a few days to document everything that every previous editor has ever put into this article. I welcome your assistance in this endeavor!
(2) Re: situating African American lit in broader transnational context; cf. Gilroy Black Atlantic (1993). It is suprising to me that there should be any controversy about this--any more than it would be controversial to situate a regional literature like Southern US lit in a larger national literary & cultural context. To treat Af Am lit as a self-contained national tradition (as the original WP article does) without gesturing to its participation in a larger African diasporic culture is very 1980s.
(3) I deleted some "characteristics" stuff and relocated others elsewhere. The claims I deleted seemed to me uncritically to essentialize African American literary production and in any case were unsourced. (I retained a sentence about oral tradition which you rightly complain is unsourced.) My intention was to restore a much revised "Characteristics" section but in a form that emphasizes debates over the meaning of African American lit rather than conveys the illusion of consensus.
(4) Re: Length of lead--I don't think length is valuable intrinsically. The original lead was longer but was also needlessly repetitive and redundant; e.g., basically narrating the history of African American lit from C18 to present two times over, as you can see here [1]. Moreover the original lead described Af Am lit as "is literature written by, about, and sometimes specifically for African Americans." This is a highly controversial definition (I am thinking specifically of the second & third parts of the definition) and so I am going to move it from objective first paragraph to a later paragraph on debates over the boundaries of the tradition. (I'll be drawing in part on Claudia Tate's discussion of this in Psychoanalysis and Black Novels [1998].)
These are my thoughts but you should feel free to restore information I deleted you think is of importance.Brian Sweeney 21:51, 1 November 2006 (CST)