The difference in how Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison conceived of Black subjectivity has profound consequences for how we understand the audience of African American literature in the contemporary period. While Ellison assumed that the Black subject is invisible because whites fail to recognize African American humanity and complexity, Morrison understood herself to be both legible and embraced by her Black community. Ellison and Morrison represent twin poles for the consideration of such issues as the implicit desire for white validation to the bold expectation that Black life not be explained to outsiders. Evidence of Ellison and Morrison’s respective approach to Black literature is reflected in two recent texts by prominent African American writers. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me (2015) and Imani Perry’s Breathe: A Letter to My Sons (2019) both highlight how key aspects of Black life remain invisible to white observers while also using readerly intimacy as a potent force for social change. These texts demonstrate the continued tension of presenting Black writing within a national landscape dominated by white hegemonic power.

This chapter argues against the view of Perry 1967 (to some extent endorsed by Reardon 1971) that the novels were popular literature, written for a juvenile readership and ‘for the edification of children and the poor-in-spirit’: rather, it suggests, the intertextuality with high literature of the classical period and the level of education it implied point to an elite readership, among whom some of the few women to receive such an education were doubtless numbered.