Kenneth W. Warren offers a salutary historicizing of the field of African American literary studies that reaffirms the historical and, hence, provisional nature of group identity. His book What Was African American Literature? views black literary studies through a skeptical lens that reveals the discipline's continuing investments in cultural “blackness” as nostalgic, transhistorical, and exceptionalist. In much the same way, scholars of United States history and literature have deconstructed—with little controversy—the transhistorical notion of America and exposed the Cold War origins of “American studies.” Yet responses to What Was African American Literature? have been at best lukewarm and at worst harshly critical. Why do the implications of Warren's argument seem so worrisome? Do they suggest we must choose between the field's historical and theoretical integrity and its institutional existence? Can the critical tradition of African American literature retain its institutional authority and its progressive political integrity without resorting to anachronistic concepts of black particularity, concepts through which “the limitations of the black condition get rewritten as a paradoxically fortunate turn” (19)?