After Kenneth W. Warren''s What Was African American Literature?, Margo N. Crawford delivers What is African American Literature?
The idea of African American literature may be much more than literature written by authors who identify as "Black". What is African American Literature? focuses on feeling as form in order to show that African American literature is an archive of feelings, a tradition of the tension between uncontainable black affect and rigid historical structure. Margo N. Crawford argues that textual production of affect (such as blush, vibration, shiver, twitch, and wink) reveals that African American literature keeps reimagining a black collective nervous system.
Crawford foregrounds the "idea" of African American literature and uncovers the "black feeling world" co-created by writers and readers. Rejecting the notion that there are no formal lines separating African American literature and a broader American literary tradition
