Kenneth W. Warren

Kenneth Warren has presented an account of African American literature that emphasizes its complex relations to the whole range of American literature and politics. He traces intellectual trajectories, establishes historical contexts, and unearths the debates and conversations that literary works initiated in their own time to argue that African American literature is not a separate and separable strand of literary production. His work addresses the relationship between literature and the public sphere, and identifies the role that Jim Crow laws had in inspiring an African American literature energized by active witnessing.