Bernard W. Bell is an award-winning scholar, activist, and emeritus research professor in the Department of English at the Pennsylvania State University. Bearing Witness to African American Literature: Validating and Valorizing Its Authority, Authenticity, and Agency is Bell's ninth book in which he is the author, editor, or coeditor. Bearing Witness is a unique addition to Bell's published works because in it he assumes the role of both author and editor in the same text. Here Bell presents twenty-three unprinted, out-of-print, or otherwise isolated lectures and essays dating from 1968 to 2008.
Given that Bell takes on the role of author and editor in Bearing Witness, it is no ordinary “Selected Works of …” volume. More typically, scholars are charged with organizing and presenting the work of an author. Standard edited collections typically pass over the author's own critical perspective on her or his own oeuvre. It is mostly left up to the reader to determine the metanarrative of the included works and their “value” to a given field of study. While this practice might seem relatively uncontroversial, Bearing Witness shows that there is much to be gained from doing things differently.
Today, most American university students and scholars are profoundly underprepared to meaningfully acknowledge the authority, authenticity, and agency of African American authors and scholars. The causes of the marginalization of African American scholarship are legion, although Bell is absolutely right to say that “vestigial institutionalized racism” has a major explanatory role (301). Moreover, humanities departments in many American universities are currently under financial strain and administrative scrutiny. Given that the marginalization of African American scholarship occurs within a broader context of the devaluation of the humanities, there is a pressing need to valorize the intellectual labor of African American authors and scholars whose work occupies the periphery of an increasingly marginalized field of study.
Thus Bearing Witness stands as an important and timely contribution to African American literature and the field of humanities broadly construed. The collection of essays and lectures covers an impressive range of topics, including (but certainly not limited to) Du Boisian double consciousness, early African American poetry, African American vernacular English (AAVE), the intersection of race and gender, and curriculum reform in the context of higher education.
Although the book navigates a wide variety of topics, the collection lacks a stand-alone piece that critically examines the terms employed in the book's title, namely “authority,” “authenticity,” and “agency.” While the technical meanings of these terms are discussed in individual selections, the lack of a self-contained piece on authority, authenticity, and agency may strike some readers as a significant omission. However, the lack of a stand-alone piece on the terminology in the title can only count as an “omission” if one adopts a narrow perspective about what serves as a “critical discussion.” As a scholar who uses multiple interdisciplinary methodologies in his research, Bell takes a different tack to address the meanings of these terms. Rather than explain what it means for an African American author and critic to have authority, authenticity, and agency in a single text, Bell shows the reader the meaning of these terms by inviting her to bear witness to his personal journey.
Bell introduces each of his twenty-three essays and lectures with a short preface containing his reflections on the text and on the events surrounding its creation. Sometimes these reflections are nostalgic, as when Bell remembers a visit from James Baldwin over an “awesome continental meal of [Bell's] wife's coq au vin” (137–38). At other times, Bell offers some retrospective commentary about the impacts and uptake of his work, such as whether the tone of his essay “The Liberating Literary and African American Vernacular Voices of Gayl Jones” turned out to be “too rigorous and academic” (206).
When taken together with their accompanying texts, Bell's prefaces give Bearing Witness a sense of familiarity in addition to academic rigor and scope. While the reader does not walk away from Bearing Witness with an abstract conceptual understanding of what authority, authenticity, and agency are as strategic terms, one is instead left with a sure sense of how one scholar does scholarship with authority, authenticity, and agency. Thus Bell's self-identification as an “African American scholar activist” strongly influences the overall methodology and metanarrative of the text. Bearing Witness is not only a demonstration of excellent scholarship, it is also an excellent demonstration of praxis.
