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As the three parts of Gwendolyn Brooks's Annie Allen (1949) follow their eponymous protagonist from her precocious girlhood through a psychically damaging loss of love and into a sobering womanhood, they dance with "snake hips" (Annie Allen, "rites" 10) between multiple expressive modalities and literary forms. Subliminally evoking a wide range of intertexts from African American arts and letters, the book-length poem signifies upon the limitations of the Western literary tradition and creative idiom to fully encompass or accurately depict the complexities of black life, prefiguring Brooks's eventual departure from it toward the Black Arts Movement's milieu in 1967. Indeed, R. Baxter Miller writes that in her early work, Brooks "re-search[ed] the tradition of Anglo-American poetry" to find "an ontological justification for freeing the tradition from itself" (100). Yet criticism surrounding Annie Allen myopically forecloses on the ways the African American cultural tradition informs it and its nascent yearning for a "new" expressive mode, attributing the text's experimental virtuosity to Brooks's thorough education in and use of Euro-American literary conventions while placing the collection in a retrospectively defined "integrationist" period in her oeuvre (Report 45). Literary criticism's prevailing model of periodization necessitates the adherence of African American literary scholarship, pedagogy, and criticism to discrete, neatly defined categories. Moreover, the Euro-American academy assumes the Western canon as the default standard for comparison and critique with a teleological concept of "progress" undergirding how literature is segmented or "periodized." The prevailing model thus casts Brooks's oeuvre as a sequential "growth" into an overtly "black" aesthetic, often conflating the aesthetic project(s) of the Black Arts Movement with essentialist notions of "recognizably black" art predicated on assumptions of its overt performativity, colloquialism, and engagement with Southern folk culture. Such a rationale is antithetical to the long-form cultural memory and intertextual relationality of the African American literary tradition, and Annie Allen stands as an exemplum of the need for a model more attuned to its nuances.
The academy's shift toward critical theory concretized how scholars of African American literature currently segment it by necessitating a canonbuilding project that anchored the tradition within a Euro-American timeline and required a streamlining of difference to fit the same progression narrative. In her seminal essay "The Race for Theory," Barbara Christian suggests that critical theory...