SOURCE: “Literary Sources of the Early Afro-American Novel,” in CLA Journal: Official Publication of the College Language Association, Vol. 18, No. 1, 1974, pp. 29-43.

In the following essay, Bell traces the roots of the African-American aesthetic to the oral tradition, slave narratives, and the Bible.

With the resurgence of Black cultural nationalism in the 1960's, the question of a Black aesthetic became a vital issue for many students of American literature. On one side of this issue were distinguished critics like J. Saunders Redding, who insisted that “aesthetics has no racial, national or geographical boundaries” and who saw no future for a school of writers that sought to establish a Black aesthetic.¹ On the other side were Black cultural nationalists such as Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Laurence Neal, who indicted Afro-American writers for their imitation of white middle-class models yet maintained that “there is no need to establish...