Contemporary Black novelists practice mediated form against the immediacy dominant

Evidence

The ferocity of antifictionality and fervor of personalism in the contemporary literary field bring into relief the genuinely conspicuous commitment to objective narration in the work of a few contemporary Black writers who have enjoyed acclaim that underscores Black themes, but that often underattends to their marginal form. Colson Whitehead, Brandon Taylor, and Diana Evans produce free indirect discourse to evoke ideas beyond the personal, capable of historical and institutional and ideological expanse, and all three do so in conjunction with finely figurative social realism rather dissimilar to the empiricist realisms we canvassed in “Writing” and “Antitheory.” — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 339

Categorization

• SEED: An essay angle: why criticism of Whitehead/Taylor/Evans foregrounds Black themes while underattending to their formal mediation — form as the marginalized feature of marginalized writers.
• XREF: connects to: American literature’s defining traits are responses to an unacknowledged black presence. — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 73