Rewriting

Polytropic Identities

in the Postmodern African American Novel

Notes

Chapter I

1.     The necessity of revising theory is also stressed by Robert Young: “[Theories] must always be reshaped, resituated, and redirected according to the specific, contingent location of the moment. The politics of theory conceived as a form of activism will always be that it intervenes in a particular, social or cultural framework against the presuppositions or politics of its adversary” (2001, 11).

2.     In this direction, Madhu Dubey remarks: “Although we would expect African-American literature to form a vital resource for debates about postmodernism, it is conspicuously missing, even when these debates are launched in the name of racial difference” (2003, 2).

3.     In “Locating a Text: Implications of Afrocentric Theory,” Molefi Kete Asante criticizes those writers whose work does not contain specific references to blackness. Using two powerful metaphors, he identifies two types of texts—the decapitated text and the lynched text: “A text that is decapitated exists without cultural presence in the historic experiences of the creator; a lynched text is one that has been strung up with the tropes and figures of the dominating culture” (1992, 13). In the decapitated text, the author moves away from his or her personal inheritance; in the lynched text, the author has little cultural or historical knowledge about his or her past.

4.     In 1987, the Centre for the Study of Black Literature and Culture at the University of Pennsylvania sponsored a conference entitled “The Study of Afro-American Literature: An Agenda for the 1990s.” A community of important black theoreticians gathered to discuss critical methods that should be used in constructing the African American literary canon. The two important points on the agenda were summarized by Barbara Johnson in two questions: 1. “What the black intellectual’s stance has been and should be toward white Western culture?” 2. “How the Afro-American literary and critical tradition has been and should be defined?” (in Baker and Redmond 1989, 39). Using the call-and-response pattern, critical polemics were initiated between Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Barbara Johnson, Deborah McDowell and Michael Awkward, Houston A. Baker and Mae Henderson, Kimberly Benston and Cheryl Wall, Arnold Rampersad and Michel Fabre, and others. These critics underlined the need to reshape the language of black criticism by stressing its vernacular roots, and by rethinking Western models. As Gates points out, black critics must avoid “the mistake of accepting the empowering language of white critical theory as ‘universal’ or as our own language” (1989, 5).

5.     For a general perspective upon the postmodern literature after the 1970s, see Larry McCaffery’s “The Fictions of the Present,” in Columbia Literary History of the United States. McCaffery compares postmodern texts written in the 1960s with those after the 1970s. He remarks that major writers of the 1960s (such as Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, John Barth, William Gass, Donald Barthelme, Ronald Sukenick, Susan Sontag, Raymond Federman, Kurt Vonnegut, and others) did not have “a unified aesthetic sensibility; but they did share a common sense that a crisis was at hand, for our society and for our literature, and that all forms of dogma, convention, and covert ideology… needed to be reexamined, exposed as artifices, and replaced if necessary by fresher systems more suitable to the times.” In their turn, American writers during the 1970s and 1980s (such as Tobias Wolff, Bobbie Ann Mason, Raymond Carver, Ann Beatrice, Richard Ford, Mary Robison, Alice Adams, Jay McInervey, Alice Walker, and others) are less interested in “experimentalism per se,” and more focused on “the daily world outside the page” (1988, 1162-63).

6.     In his suggestively entitled essay “Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture,” James Snead identifies a repetitive pattern in African American culture and literature. For Snead, repetition is the figure that underscores the main distinction between the Euro-American and the African American culture. In its Hegelian legacy, the Western culture has laid stress on progress, linearity, and teleology, so that repetition is equivalent with accumulation and growth. In a different sense, the black culture has stressed circularity, flow, and non-teleology, so that repetition entails deferral and return. However, Snead’s view on a non-progressive repetition as a specific form of black culture is questionable. How many of the postmodern novels follow the pattern of Snead’s repetitive model? Can we say that Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo—a novel used by Snead to exemplify his theory—implies no progression? Designed to subvert the binarism between the Euro-American and African cultures, Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, (like Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage or Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon) makes use of repetition in order “to produce difference” (Gates 1984, 10, in Moraru 2001, 84). Thus, Snead`s perspective on a non-progressive type of repetition cannot be generally applied to the whole black culture.

7.     Carolyn Holmes notes that in 1966 “the social and cultural fabric of the United States of America was shaken to the core of its European foundations by what has been termed a Black Revolution or Black Power Movement” (1992, 37).

8.     The two distinctive directions of the Black Arts Movement’s ideology were focused on the publication of journals and the development of black theatre groups. At a time when most American magazines refused to publish black writers, the work of many important African American authors was hosted by black journals: Journal of Black Poetry, Black Scholar, Negro Digest/Black World, Black Theatre, and Black Dialogue. At the same time, black theatre came to be seen as the cultural hub for circulating racial ideas throughout America: the New Lafayette Theatre and Ann Teer's National Black Theatre (in New York), the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) and Val Grey Ward's Kuumba Theatre Company (in Chicago), Inner City Repertory Company and the Performing Arts Society of Los Angeles (in Los Angeles), Black Arts West (in San Francisco), Free Southern Theatre (in New Orleans), and countless others. Amiri Baraka (LeRoy Jones) also founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre School in Harlem (1964), an influential model that inspired black artists throughout the country.

9.     While modernism appears as a period when poetry and drama are main genres of the black literature, postmodernism becomes the time when countless significant novels are written.

10. Alfonso de Toro summarizes the actual debate on the relationship between modernity and postmodernity in three ways: a. postmodernity as “ruptura con la modernidad” (as something entirely new); b. postmodernity as a vulgar imitation of modernity (in a negative, anachronistic, and petrified view); c. postmodernity as a culmination of modernity (in positive terms) (1997, 11). For a detailed description of postmodernism as a new facet of modernity, see Matei Călinescu, Five Faces of Modernity.

11. Dubey salutes David Harvey’s view in The Condition of Postmodernity: “Harvey extensively details recent changes in production, labor markets, finance, and consumption, but he regards these changes as a new wave of modernization and global industrial reorganization rather than as fundamental breaks with industrial modernity or with the capitalist mode of production” (1990, 145, in Dubey 2003, 18).

12. This is Dubey’s main reason for not using the term “postmodernity,” which would presuppose a radical shift from modernity. Instead, he prefers such phrases as “the postmodern period” or “postmodern times” to name those changes that occurred in American society after the 1970s.

13. Valerie Smith points out that, before the advent of feminism, African American criticism approached issues of gender in three ways: “in a biological framework permeated by sexual stereotypes of women; in assertions of male authority within the Black Arts Movement; and in an ostensibly gender-blind literary history that did not give equal weight to women’s texts” (1994, 484).

14. Summarizing the main points of differentiation, Jaime M. Grant notes the discrepancy between black and white women’s backgrounds: “As white women proposed to change the system to allow women the opportunity to reap the same benefits as men, they often failed to recognize the complex realities embedded in this simple statement. Over the course of more than a century of organizing for equality, white women consistently have failed to acknowledge the widely different historical, material, and cultural realities between themselves and women of color; they have thus represented white women’s experiences and agendas as representative of all women” (2005, 4).

15. In Specifying: Black Women Writing the American Experience, Susan Willis affirms that “history gives topic and substance to black women’s writing,” because it is presented as “concrete experience.” Basically, “the black women’s relation to history is first of all a relationship to mother and grandmother” (1987, 3, 5).

16. One significant aspect that black feminists strove to undertake is changing the structure of the interpretive community. While in the past this interpretive community was considered to be primarily male, after the 1970s female readers have started to emphasize their own perception of both male and female texts.

17. In Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s Writing, Elaine Showalter expresses the necessity to revise the idea of women’s culture by outlining several premises: “In thinking about women’s culture and American women’s writing, we are looking at an invented as well as a ‘natural’ form, and at exchanges, translations, and intertextuality as well as indigeneity” (1991, 19, my emphasis).

18. However, there are critics who are against the use of the term “tradition.” Hazel Carby’s Reconstructing Womanhood starts from the premise that she “does not assume he existence of a tradition or traditions of Afro-American intellectual thought that have been constructed as paradigmatic of Afro-American history” (1987, 16).

19. Christian continues this idea: “But there is a deep philosophical reordering that is occurring in this literature that is already having its effect on so many of us whose lives and expressions are an increasing revelation of the intimate face of the universal struggle” (1985, 163).

20. Bloom’s study claims to follow the criterion of aesthetic value, and refuses to constitute a literary canon from a politically correct perspective, which takes into account race or gender. With the exception of Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf, all the authors brilliantly analyzed by Bloom are white men.

21. In her important article “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature” (1989), Morrison highlights the necessity to revise how the texts included in the literary canon have shaped the African American presence.

22. Repetition in the form of call-and-response was also explored by John F. Callahan whose reader response criticism lays stress on the relation between the text and the reader. Suggestively entitled In the African-American Grain: Call-and-Response in the Twentieth-Century Black Fiction, Callahan’s project links the black fiction with African roots. In tribal African folklore, the process of storytelling has two characteristics: 1. The seizure of the role of the narrator; 2. The dialogue between the narrator and the audience (1989, 15). Here Callahan draws on the ethnographic work of Roger Abrahams, who writes: “In their specific African setting these tales are called upon not just to deliver a specific message, but to initiate talk about that message” (1983, 9). Callahan shows that African oral tradition influences African American forms of culture—i.e. spirituals, blues, performance, and literature—which entail repetition, a call-and-response dialogue between the individual and the community. Literature in itself becomes a “repeated act of fictionalizing,” in which the author calls on the reader (1989, 19).

23. In The Implied Reader, Wolfgang Iser specifies: “The reader has to figure out the unsaid” (1974, 140).

24. Morrison`s critical reading of the canon has similarities with Jane Tompkins` main point in Sensational Designs (1985). As Rodica Mihăilă comments, Tompkins’ New Historicist project aims at rewriting history: “Exposing the classical canon of the American Renaissance, including the works of Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Hawthorne, Poe, and Whitman, as a fraudulous practice by élite scholars like F. O. Matthiessen whose aesthetic judgement concealed a strong ideological component, she employs the poststructuralist critique of representation as implying misrepresentations, incomplete signification, political and ideological constructions to deconstruct the canon and give representation to what she calls ‘The Other American Renaissance,’ chiefly represented by best-selling Victorian sentimental fiction” (1994, 178).

25. Morrison stresses the necessity to investigate critically four directions. First, she discusses “the Africanist character as surrogate and enabler,” since “Africanism is the vehicle by which the American self knows itself as not enslaved, but free; not repulsive, but desirable; not helpless, but licensed and powerful.” Second, she draws attention to “the way an Africanist idiom is used to establish difference or, in a later period, to signal modernity.” She explains here how the “dialogue of black characters is constructed as an alien, estranging dialect made deliberately unintelligible by spellings contrived to disfamiliarize it.” Morrison’s third point comes close to the first one: “We need studies of the technical ways in which an Africanist character is used to limn out and enforce the invention and implications of whiteness.” Finally, her fourth point expresses the need “to analyze the manipulation of the Africanist narrative… as a means of meditation—both safe and risky—on one’s own humanity” (1992, 52-53).

26. Gates comes with several definitions or connotations of the word “Signifyin(g),” as given by Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Clarence Major, Hermese E. Roberts, Mezz Mezzrow, Malachi Andrews and Paul T. Owens, J. L. Dillard, William Labov, and William A. Stewart, etc. Gates quotes Roger D. Abrahams’ brilliant definition of Signifyin(g): “The name ‘Signifying Monkey’ shows [the hero] to be a trickster, ‘signifying’ being the language of trickery, that set of words and gestures which arrives at “direction through indirection” (Abrahams 1962, 125, in Gates 1988, 74).

27. Using his theory of Signifying, Gates analyzes a variety of works (from Frederick Douglass to Zora Neale Hurston, from Ishmael Reed to Alice Walker) in which the common denominator is the device of parodic variation. As Madhu Dubey observes, Gates’ approach “is squarely formalist insofar as it posits signifying as a principle of intertextual repetition that operates transhistorically, without any significant variations” (2002, 17). Still, it is through parody, which is considered an important postmodern device, that Gates manages to place his theory under the umbrella of postmodern literary theory.

28. In The Signifying Monkey, Ishmael Reed is the only novelist whom Reed considers to be “postmodern.” Analyzing Reed’s corpus of works, Gates specifies: “he seems to be concerned to critique and revise the models of representation fundamental to the canonical texts that comprise the tradition of the Afro-American novel” (1988, 217).

29. At a time when few critical texts discussed the ideas of a black female tradition, Awkward’s book analyzed the relationship between female authors by focusing on works by Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Gloria Naylor.

30. Henderson takes her inspiration for the trope of “speaking in tongues” from the Biblical episode of the Tower of Babel: “Speaking in many and different tongues, the dwellers of Babel, unable to understand each other, fell into confusion, discord, and strife, and had to abandon the project” (1991 b, 23). Henderson applies the trope of “speaking in tongues” to Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Sherley Anne William’s Dessa Rose, and Toni Morrison’s Sula.