A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance

While some earlier literature can be described as confessional, confessional writing as a distinct style and genre emerged in America following World War II. This style became especially prominent in poetry, most notably in the work of Adrienne Rich, Robert Lowell, and Sylvia Plath.

The form became connected with Postmodernism in the 1960s, sharing such features as self-performativity, self-reflexivity, a rejection of strict meter and form, and fusions of personal conflict and historical trauma. Both literary genres emerged as a response to collective traumas such as World War II, the Holocaust, and the Cold War, as writers sought to externalize internal anxieties. By the end of the 20th century, the style had also taken on elements of Postcolonial theory, with writers from marginalized communities using the confessional form to describe the experience of the colonized, and issues surrounding oppression, history, race, and gender.

Confessional writing typically uses first-person narration in non-fictional forms, such as memoirs and diaries, to describe personal revelations. The genre’s language is often colloquial and direct, allowing authors to radically reduce the distance between their writerly personas and their real selves. This collapsed space invites the expression of typically concealed emotions, such as shame and social discomfort. At the same time, contemporary confessional work often explicitly connects the personal to the socio-political, featuring idealistic feelings such as empowerment and freedom. Confessional writers frequently aim to achieve closure and catharsis, often by representing marginalized peoples.

Abdurraqib uses his life as a microcosm of the wider Black experience in modern America. Confessional writing allows Abdurraqib to search for healing while considering how much America has and has not changed. Abdurraqib exemplifies the genre’s fusion of autobiography with postmodern and postcolonial techniques, relying on the use of Black humor, wordplay, and intertextuality as he uses pop culture to develop arguments about his personal experiences and those of other Black people. Abdurraqib explores texts and performances typically considered too low-brow for study. Moreover, Abdurraqib draws upon metafictional techniques to structure his essays, which build connections between topics in fragmentary and collage-like ways that reflect the temporal distortion of the postmodern mode.