Pitch Black, Black Pitch Theorizing African American Literature Marquis Bey Cornell University, Ithaca, New York These elements of social modality come to bear on the historical situation of the text, the writer, and various constituent reader-groups that “choose” the text, but I mean historical situatedness primarily as the enunciative conditions that surround a particular act of speaking/writing and the textual densities (“writ- ings” that precede) lowing back against it. In that regard, African American ictional texts declare, by deinition, a subversive move; not empowered to speak in the historical instance by any act of morality, legislation, or rule of cultural precedence; by tradition, the subject of speaking in others, but not a speaking subject itself, the “largest poet” (who has far less to do with particular writers’ identities than I personally like) of writings by black writers inscribes a fugitive condition. She or he is history’s “runaway” person, the missing commodity of the gross national product, whose whereabouts were once top secret (from about A.D. 1619, Jamestown, the colonial South, to the present). CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 18, No. 1, 2018, pp. 105–168. ISSN 1532-687X. © 2018 Michigan State University. All rights reserved.  105 This work originally appeared in CR: The New Centennial Review 18.1, winter 2018, published by Michigan State University Press.