[In contemporary African American literature] most importantly, black women themselves are projected as thinkers, feelers, human beings, not only used by others, but as conscious beings… They have culture, race, sex, sometimes situations in common, but they are not just push button automatons who scream when given this cue, cuddle up when given that smile. They are not just stereotypes, for stereotype is the very opposite of humanness; stereotype, whether positive or negative, is a byproduct of racism, is one of the vehicles through which racism tries to reduce the human being to a nonhuman level (Christian 1985, 16).1
African American literature and literary criticism have continued to respond to Western concepts of race. So much so, in fact, that we readers and scholars—black and nonblack—generally expect literary works and critical studies by African Americans to contest racist perspectives and the resulting oppression (Tate 1998, 3).
Chapter II
From Stereotypical to Polytropic Black Identities:
Excavating Literature and History
Toward Redefinitions: “The Problem of the Color Line”
W. E. B. Du Bois’s visionary phrase—“the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line”—encompasses a whole history. The problem of the color line preserves its relevance today, initiating basic questions: In what way does theory assume the daring risk of dislocating those rigid identities that are strictly defined by the color line?2 From what perspective can we question the stereotypical constructions of the African American self that are part of our historical and literary inheritance?
As shown in the previous chapter, outstanding intellectuals have united their efforts toward resisting Western hegemony,3 as well as toward promoting black cultural inheritance.4 The present chapter follows the same revisionist line in focusing on the cultural process of reshaping racial identity from former stereotypical views to present complex positions. In this light, rewriting identity does not simply presuppose repetition, but mostly a critical operation of reexamination through which an accepted cultural authority “is questioned and rendered vulnerable” (Butler 1995, 205).5
This chapter starts by sketching the Euro-American intellectual tradition, in which the black image used to be either reified or demonized by the white people. A shudder of apprehension crosses the mind of the contemporary reader while comprehending the moral and psychological damage done by the degrading, monolithic views on racial identity. As further demonstrated, the eighteenth and nineteenth century negative definitions have produced what Du Bois calls double consciousness, the ability of the black people to project dichotomized self-definitions.
Importantly, the main section of the chapter argues for a basic redefinition of the African American identity as polytropic—a perspective that denies both monolithic and dichotomized representations, and affirms multi-faceted, fully realized characters. This redefinition of the African American identity is part of the postmodern rewriting of the literary black and white inheritance. African American postmodern novels do not simply have the role of magnifying mirrors turned toward the past, haunted by images of the unfreed, untutored black self. On the contrary, my point is to reveal that the rewriting techniques of postmodern novels disrupt supremacist cultural patterns in order to find imaginative ways for redefining black identity.
This redefinition brings forward “the excavation of black history and literature from the perspective of African Americans” (McKay and Gates 1997, 2012). The postmodern phenomenon of rewriting thus urges us to look back at those texts whose message is so intimately embedded, so adamantly chastised, in contemporary works. As readers, we get caught in this authorial love-hatred embrace—where rewriting means rereading—and we need to go back and critically reevaluate master texts of the past.
Chapter II
From Stereotypical to Polytropic Black Identities:
Excavating Literature and History
Stereotypes: “The Black Image in the White Mind”
A critical detour into notable works by Euro-American thinkers has the aim to expose how stereotypes of racial identity are perpetuated in an erroneous process of mythmaking. In presenting a raw and selective summary of both European and American complex debates, my intention is to yoke them together and stress how thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic produced racist views. These thinkers create racial constructions that are not only arbitrary, but also thought to be universal. Their theories are not only racist, but also prescriptive in shaping some general opinion on black identity. As Henry Louis Gates remarks, Western writers “have tried to mystify these rhetorical figures of race, to make them neutral, absolute, essential” (1986, 6). Race becomes in this respect a concept infused with negative meaning by David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Georg Friedrich Hegel. Forking in two directions, their views stress either the unintelligent, beast-like, and subhuman aspect of the black race, or its naïve, simple, and childlike condition.
By differentiating between types of races, David Hume places the black race upon an inferior evolutionist scale. In his essay, “Of National Characters” (1748), Hume’s main argument for the blacks’ inferiority is related to their lack of cultural achievements:
I am apt to suspect that negroes, and in general all the other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufacturers amongst them, no arts, no sciences… Such a uniform and constant difference could not happen, in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an original distinction between these breeds of men (Hume 1964, 3: 252 n, in Gates 1986, 10).
In his turn, Immanuel Kant—the philosopher who tolerantly advocates that human beings should be regarded as aims and not means in themselves—locates blacks outside the very order of humanity. If humanity is the class of intelligible things, blacks are unintelligent, dull-witted, and ignorant. In his much commented Observations on the Feelings of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764), Kant specifies that “the Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling (1960, 40). He proceeds to making the distinction between races on cultural criteria. Like Hume, Kant insists on blacks’ inferiority, being even more radical. Equating humanity with civilization, and proving that blacks have no artistic or scientific achievement, Kant situates blacks outside humankind.
The eighteenth century line of negative definitions of the black character was also approached by Friedrich Hegel. The German philosopher contrasts the superiority of the prototypical, ever-developing European culture with the inferiority of the a-typical, non-progressive African culture: “Such people of weak culture lose themselves more and more in contact with peoples of higher culture and more intense cultural training” (1955, 216, in Gates 1986, 11). Hegel’s Eurocentric perspective manifests in his antithesis between the Western culture that is progressive and linear and the African culture that is non-progressive and cyclical. The African is therefore for Hegel “a strange form of self-consciousness,” that is “unfixed in orientation and transcendent goals and terrifyingly close to cycles and rhythms of nature” (1955, 216-18, in Gates 1986, 11).
These essentialist views molded by Enlightenment philosophers run like a constant current under nineteenth century theories developed in America—harsh means of justifying the enforcement of slavery.6 In his well-documented book, The Black Image in the White Mind, George Fredrickson covers a century of pseudo-scientific debates on the question of race, suggesting that at the core of racism is the color line. The general prejudice is expressed by Robert Harper who sees blacks as “condemned to a hopeless state of inferiority and degradation by their color, which is an indelible mark of their origin and former condition, and establishes an impassible barrier between them and the whites” (Harper 1818, 6, in Fredrickson 1987, 18).7
This rhetoric of black inferiority proliferated by white Americans had its basis either in a biological insurmountable factor (that sees Africans as a totally different, inferior race), or in an environmentalist surmountable factor (that blames the Africans’ degradation on the miserable condition of slavery). On the one hand, the promoters of the biological factor label blacks as the alien, extraneous component of the population. In this respect, Thomas Jefferson—the spokesman of American democracy—is of the opinion that blacks are inferior to whites:
The opinion that they [the blacks] are inferior in the faculties of reason and imagination, must be hazarded with great difference… I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to whites both in mind and body (1944, 256-62).
On the other hand, the supporters of the environmentalist factor advocate the possibility for black people to change. Such abolitionists as William Lloyd Garrison, Elizabeth Chandler, Lydia Maria Child, and James Freeman Clarke launch their antislavery attack by sustaining that the black fraction of the population does not have a chance for moral and religious improvement. They argue that the blacks’ degradation is the consequence of their inferior condition as slaves, and it is not the effect of their physical constitution and mental abilities.
Stereotypes of African Americans are forged accordingly in order to propagate racist views and prove that “slavery was ‘a positive good,’ not only as a system of controlling an inferior race, but, more basically, as a way of providing security to the laboring class of any society” (Fredrickson 1987, 59). The idea of black people’s inferiority is fueled by two fully developed views springing from the eighteenth century: the slave-child and the slave-savage. These views are conflicting, since one stresses the slave’s inoffensive, innocent nature, while the other insists on the slave’s bestial, evil nature. In both cases, the role of the patriarchal, slaveholding system is to maintain social order either by “protecting” or “domesticating” the black slave. In the first case, the master is supposed to enact the role of a guardian for the child-slave; in the second case, his role is similar to that of a tamer trained to civilize the brutish, insensitive black character.
In literature, these prejudiced definitions produce stereotypical racial images in both black and white works. Up to the 1940s, stereotypical roles had been attributed not just to black women, as Barbara Christian remarks, but also to black men (1985, 16).8 The conventional representations of the African American male and female characters thus gravitate toward several figures:
· the black violent man
· the black pacifist
· the bellicose mulatto
· the trickster
· the conjure woman
· the mammy
· the wet nurse
· the tragic mulatta
· the black Jezebel
Some of them—such as the tragic mulatta—have disappeared from the postmodern literary mindscape. Others—such as the black violent man—have been reconsidered in a variety of ways among contemporary writers who stress the complexity of black psychological types.
Chapter II
From Stereotypical to Polytropic Black Identities:
Excavating Literature and History
Double Consciousness: “I Write Therefore I Think”
As demonstrated above, both the Enlightenment European philosophers and nineteenth century American thinkers propagate racist views by equating blacks’ inferior status with lack of cultural achievements. Striking back, African Americans critically respond to the stereotypical black image in the white mind. For nineteenth century black writers, literacy is a means of proving their humanity. One can say that their version of the Cartesian formula—I write therefore I think, I think therefore I am—accommodates new ontological definitions. They write themselves into being, through narratives that reshape their enslaved identity into a free persona. The whole process of writing slave narratives, “the process of authorship,” provides them with “a measure of authority unknown to them in either real or fictional life” (Valerie Smith 1987, 2).9 Gates remarks in this sense:
The recording of an authentic black voice—a voice of deliverance from the deafening discursive silence which an enlightened Europe cited to prove the absence of the African’s humanity—was the millennial instrument of transformation through which the African would become the European, the slave become the ex-slave, brute animal become the human being (1986, 11-12).
From the very beginning, slave narratives appear as hybrid genres, where black authors incorporate other texts—documents, newspaper clips, adds, and letters—in order to authenticate their own writings. They have to claim the authority of authorship by proving the truth of their own saying. This is the reason why some of these autobiographies are prefaced by white authors, mainly by famous abolitionists ready to validate the veracity of the black text. Such is the case of Douglass’ narrative prefaced by William Lloyd Garrison, or of Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents prefaced by Lydia Maria Child.
In the multi-layered discourse of their eclectic genre, these black authors create a network of relations that forge their own aesthetic unity.10 Thus, they have to discover their voice by borrowing the writing tools of their masters. Moving from the prison-house of “enforced illiteracy,” they find themselves into the prison-house of white language (Stepto 1979 b, 23). They produce a double discourse written with two hands, in which a black appropriation of the white sign takes place in order to employ it for racial purposes. Slave narratives, autobiographies, and novels become genres in which black authors adapt the white forms by insisting on freedom as the sign of black literature. Hence, the black text “Signifies” upon the white discourse and re-articulates it through a mimicry/mockery gesture that does not simply copy the white original, but produces difference by carving out a space of its own (Gates 1988).
The pursuit of literacy as a means of shaping an independent self marks like a red thread black literature from nineteenth century slave narratives by Frederick Douglass (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by Himself, 1845, 1855, 1881) and Jacobs (Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Written by Herself, 1861), to twentieth century autobiographies by Booker T. Washington (Up from Slavery, 1901), James Weldon Johnson (The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, 1912), Richard Wright (Black Boy, 1945), Malcolm X (Autobiography of Malcolm X, written by Alex Haley, 1965), and Maya Angelou (I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, 1970).
Suggestively, these black narratives insist on the idea of double consciousness, on self-dichotomized projections that mark African American experience. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W. E. B. Du Bois speaks about the “tragedy” of the black soul—the twoness—their double belonging to Africa and America that has made them guests in their own country:
It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity… [This] history… of strife, [of] longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self (1997, 38).
Du Bois relates this dichotomized definition to white people’s propensity to see blacks as the alien element of the population, and also to black people’s tendency to see themselves as strangers. Having a double identity—African and American—the black person undergoes the tragedy of twoness, of looking at Oneself as Another. Du Bois’ understanding of the essence of the black soul “is a perpetual and difficult struggle to overcome this conflict and self-estrangement” (Blight and Gooding-Williams 1997, xii).
Du Bois’ dualism finds elaborate literary expressions in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and in Imamu Amiri Baraka’s poetry—powerful instances of stressing double consciousness. In Invisible Man, Ellison does not simply see double consciousness as a racial product, but as a human phenomenon: “Now I know men are different and that all life is divided and that only in division there is true health” (Ellison 1994 a, 499). In his turn, Baraka expresses his personal anguish regarding the duality of the black mind:
I am inside someone—
who hates me. I look
out from his eyes. Smell
what fouled tunes come in
to his breath. Love his
wretched women
(Baraka, “In Agony. As Now,” in McKay and Gates 1997, 2575).
Du Bois revises the Hegelian perspective that portrays black people on the threshold of history and argues that the black person is a sort of a “seventh son,” a latecomer to the stage of the world’s history, being part of a race that “struggles relentlessly for a recognition and a self-realization that would heal the wound of America’s double-edged tragedy” (Blight and Gooding-Williams 1997, xii-xiii). Du Bois pleads for America’s recognition of African Americans, whose presence shaped the country’s destiny and that of its white inhabitants.
The idea of double consciousness is also present in Franz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. Fanon underscores that “the white masked black man” has a double role that allows him to keep his own place (as a slave) and also to project himself into the place of the other (as a master), without giving up his own position. He defines Blackness (Négritude) as a biological condition that is inscribed on the body, and as a cultural and social construct, so that the role of Blackness is conditioned by the social hierarchy dominated by the category of whiteness in Western culture. In this way, the paradox of Blackness manifests: “though a biological fact, it is, at the social level, a construct culturally determined by expectations coming from the opposite world, that of whiteness” (Draga 2000, 41). Fanon shows accordingly that the black person’s self-perception is initiated by “an inborn complex of inferiority,” since the black individual’s self-definition appears as a negative projection of the white man’s Other, of his shadow (1999, 324).11
Chapter II
From Stereotypical to Polytropic Black Identities:
Excavating Literature and History
Double Consciousness: “I Write Therefore I Think”
As demonstrated above, both the Enlightenment European philosophers and nineteenth century American thinkers propagate racist views by equating blacks’ inferior status with lack of cultural achievements. Striking back, African Americans critically respond to the stereotypical black image in the white mind. For nineteenth century black writers, literacy is a means of proving their humanity. One can say that their version of the Cartesian formula—I write therefore I think, I think therefore I am—accommodates new ontological definitions. They write themselves into being, through narratives that reshape their enslaved identity into a free persona. The whole process of writing slave narratives, “the process of authorship,” provides them with “a measure of authority unknown to them in either real or fictional life” (Valerie Smith 1987, 2).9 Gates remarks in this sense:
The recording of an authentic black voice—a voice of deliverance from the deafening discursive silence which an enlightened Europe cited to prove the absence of the African’s humanity—was the millennial instrument of transformation through which the African would become the European, the slave become the ex-slave, brute animal become the human being (1986, 11-12).
From the very beginning, slave narratives appear as hybrid genres, where black authors incorporate other texts—documents, newspaper clips, adds, and letters—in order to authenticate their own writings. They have to claim the authority of authorship by proving the truth of their own saying. This is the reason why some of these autobiographies are prefaced by white authors, mainly by famous abolitionists ready to validate the veracity of the black text. Such is the case of Douglass’ narrative prefaced by William Lloyd Garrison, or of Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents prefaced by Lydia Maria Child.
In the multi-layered discourse of their eclectic genre, these black authors create a network of relations that forge their own aesthetic unity.10 Thus, they have to discover their voice by borrowing the writing tools of their masters. Moving from the prison-house of “enforced illiteracy,” they find themselves into the prison-house of white language (Stepto 1979 b, 23). They produce a double discourse written with two hands, in which a black appropriation of the white sign takes place in order to employ it for racial purposes. Slave narratives, autobiographies, and novels become genres in which black authors adapt the white forms by insisting on freedom as the sign of black literature. Hence, the black text “Signifies” upon the white discourse and re-articulates it through a mimicry/mockery gesture that does not simply copy the white original, but produces difference by carving out a space of its own (Gates 1988).
The pursuit of literacy as a means of shaping an independent self marks like a red thread black literature from nineteenth century slave narratives by Frederick Douglass (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by Himself, 1845, 1855, 1881) and Jacobs (Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Written by Herself, 1861), to twentieth century autobiographies by Booker T. Washington (Up from Slavery, 1901), James Weldon Johnson (The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, 1912), Richard Wright (Black Boy, 1945), Malcolm X (Autobiography of Malcolm X, written by Alex Haley, 1965), and Maya Angelou (I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, 1970).
Suggestively, these black narratives insist on the idea of double consciousness, on self-dichotomized projections that mark African American experience. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W. E. B. Du Bois speaks about the “tragedy” of the black soul—the twoness—their double belonging to Africa and America that has made them guests in their own country:
It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity… [This] history… of strife, [of] longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self (1997, 38).
Du Bois relates this dichotomized definition to white people’s propensity to see blacks as the alien element of the population, and also to black people’s tendency to see themselves as strangers. Having a double identity—African and American—the black person undergoes the tragedy of twoness, of looking at Oneself as Another. Du Bois’ understanding of the essence of the black soul “is a perpetual and difficult struggle to overcome this conflict and self-estrangement” (Blight and Gooding-Williams 1997, xii).
Du Bois’ dualism finds elaborate literary expressions in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and in Imamu Amiri Baraka’s poetry—powerful instances of stressing double consciousness. In Invisible Man, Ellison does not simply see double consciousness as a racial product, but as a human phenomenon: “Now I know men are different and that all life is divided and that only in division there is true health” (Ellison 1994 a, 499). In his turn, Baraka expresses his personal anguish regarding the duality of the black mind:
I am inside someone—
who hates me. I look
out from his eyes. Smell
what fouled tunes come in
to his breath. Love his
wretched women
(Baraka, “In Agony. As Now,” in McKay and Gates 1997, 2575).
Du Bois revises the Hegelian perspective that portrays black people on the threshold of history and argues that the black person is a sort of a “seventh son,” a latecomer to the stage of the world’s history, being part of a race that “struggles relentlessly for a recognition and a self-realization that would heal the wound of America’s double-edged tragedy” (Blight and Gooding-Williams 1997, xii-xiii). Du Bois pleads for America’s recognition of African Americans, whose presence shaped the country’s destiny and that of its white inhabitants.
The idea of double consciousness is also present in Franz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. Fanon underscores that “the white masked black man” has a double role that allows him to keep his own place (as a slave) and also to project himself into the place of the other (as a master), without giving up his own position. He defines Blackness (Négritude) as a biological condition that is inscribed on the body, and as a cultural and social construct, so that the role of Blackness is conditioned by the social hierarchy dominated by the category of whiteness in Western culture. In this way, the paradox of Blackness manifests: “though a biological fact, it is, at the social level, a construct culturally determined by expectations coming from the opposite world, that of whiteness” (Draga 2000, 41). Fanon shows accordingly that the black person’s self-perception is initiated by “an inborn complex of inferiority,” since the black individual’s self-definition appears as a negative projection of the white man’s Other, of his shadow (1999, 324).11
Chapter II
From Stereotypical to Polytropic Black Identities:
Excavating Literature and History
Polytropic Identities: “Who Am I”
The previous sections have demonstrated that black identity is a cultural construct, whose avatars can be traced from stereotypical representations to dichotomized self-projections (that circumscribe race in binary terms—black vs. white, African vs. American, Self vs. Other). Against this historical hushing of African Americans, the last decades have produced innovative, liberating reformulations of racial identity. Recent theories plead more and more for the disruption of fixed or binary mind-sets—an operation destined not for reinstalling old patterns, but for stimulating new cultural practices of self-representation through new aesthetic forms. What is at stake, as bell hooks observes, is creating strategies “for decolonization that aim to change the minds and habits of everyone involved in cultural criticism” (1994, 5).
In its actual hypostases, African American identity becomes “an unstable entity open to subversion, appropriation, and conflicting interpretations at numerous political and literary moments” (Favor 1999, 137). As shown in Chapter I, the transformative power of black postmodernism consists mainly in redirecting attention toward those figures that have been forgotten, misunderstood, or turned invisible. Contemporary black literature does proclaim the black characters’ visibility by rethinking earlier representations and by making use of sources of self-assertion that exist within personal experience or communal values.
Postmodern black authors crucially focus on an ontological stress on self-discovery. They rethink the Kantian generic question that shaped modernity—What is the human being?—from the specific standpoint of the black subject. In this sense, Ihab Hassan endows Kant’s question with a racial message: “Victim, rebel, outsider, scapegoat, trickster, the Negro finally confronts us, in the darkness of which no man can bleach himself, with the question: Who am I?” (1966, 72). The abiding goal of postmodern black authors is therefore the problem of reconsidering racial identity, chiefly of freeing it from restrictive past definitions.12
By insisting on various ways of revising the literary tradition and its “racially infected language” (Morrison 1992, 12), the present book analyzes various ways in which postmodern black texts reshape the African American identity. It questions the black and white texts that have proliferated the subordinate status of African-Americans in relation to the superiority of white Americans, as well as those texts that have fixated blackness into heroic postures that copy white models. The work also discusses how postmodern black authors fill in the gaps of the literary tradition that keeps silent over racial or sexual aspects of the physical and moral enslavement—the tradition that “drops a veil over proceedings too terrible to relate” (Morrison 1987, 109).
Born out of the critical alertness of the contemporary revisionist context, this work redefines the postmodern black character’s identity as polytropic.13 A semantically loaded concept, the polytropic identity does not presuppose only a geographical and spiritual movement away from imprisoning conditions, but also a disruption of rigid social, moral, and gender norms. African American identity becomes a verb and not a noun, a process, and not a state, so that progress is made possible from browbeaten dependence to redemptive independence. Achieving autonomy is not only a physical act, but also a psychological one, in which the major objective is the awareness of one’s freedom. As Morrison beautifully puts it, after escaping physical bondage, comes the hardest part of “claiming ownership of that freed self” (Morrison 1997 a, 95).
The black self is no longer a unified entity, but a plurivocal one, whose multiple existential roles must be seen in connection with important historical moments. Treading along the figurative avenues of this always-shifting existential itinerary, such polytropic protagonists evolve from a powerless state of lack of acknowledgement to a liberating one of self-naming. Paul L. Dunbar’s famous line—“Speak up… an ‘spress yo’se‘f”—so compellingly reiterated in Ntozake Shange’s Betsey Brown, characterizes black protagonists (1985, 22).
The change in perceiving racial identity is reflected by the black authors’ ability to control language, so that the struggle for increasing self-confidence is subtly paralleled by the struggle for discursive power. At the existential level, the polytropic characters strive to rip the sociopolitical web in which they are caught; at the textual level, African American authors dare to go out of the prison-house of language—to depart from stultifying roles imposed on black identity by the white intellectual tradition. This is the main reason why postmodern black writers have turned discourse into a backlash, a possibility of going back in time to free language from fixed, essentialist, or universalizing definitions. True enough, the return of the writer to past texts is paralleled by the metaphorical movement of the polytropic (“round”)14 characters toward freedom—a complex movement that no longer follows the linearity of the traditional narrative pattern.
In aligning themselves with the postmodern techniques, contemporary black authors make use of new narrative forms, such as parody, pastiche, irony, paradox, and fragmentariness. However, by asserting their belief in the ethical notion of communal values, postmodern black writers distance themselves from those contemporary authors mostly preoccupied with reinventing form and style. While paying attention to language, African American writers “are not inclined to neglect moral and social issues in their narratives” (Bell 1987, 284).15 Through discourse, they change our perception of racial power, and proceed to dislocating the pattern embedded in the previous story.
Via the process of rewriting, the postmodern African American writers do not only propose new definitions ofblack identity, but also present past characters in a new light. One of the essential aims of this book is to reveal how these postmodern authors make us reread the earlier texts by taking into account their contemporary perspectives. In this way, Herman Melville’s ambiguous black characters are reread differently after Charles Johnson’s rewriting of “Benito Cereno.” Harriet Beecher Stowe’s black pacifist and bellicose mulatto can be fully reconsidered after Ishmael Reed’s scathingly parodic view. Harriet Jacobs’ image of the black Jezebel is powerfully reshaped by Toni Morrison’s insightful neoslave chronicle. The cliché of the nineteenth century “good girl” is displaced by Alice Walker’s subversive rewriting of gender roles. Also, Richard Wright’s concept of “bad nigger” or violent man is redeemed by Ernest Gaines’ heroic embodiment of black masculinity.16
Since the aesthetic is deeply connected with the social, rewriting identity turns into a creative “manipulation undertaken in the service of power, and in its positive aspect can help in the evolution of a literature and a society” (Lefevere 1992, vii). Lefevere’s claim crucially entails two perspectives. From a literary perspective, rewriting can introduce new concepts, new genres, and new devices. From a social perspective—through reevaluations of an inadequately defined past—rewriting signals a recuperative process that does not only rectify certain aspects of literature, but also installs in society new mental schemes of perceiving identity. Letting the subaltern speak, these authors find their own voice, and also offer “speakerly”17 models for the others.18
The potent themes that black authors circulate are shaped in this way by a range of literary and social forces, and contain leitmotifs of self-representation in relation to a micro/macro-level: home, family, memory, and history. 19 In this respect, critics have detected in the works of these writers a double process of identification: identification with the American culture (as a way of belonging to its mainstream), and “ethnic identification” with the African culture, (“as a marker of values, tastes, styles, and attitudes” (Singh, Skerrett, and Hogan 1994, 7)). Hence, the problem of presenting this double identification to a “double audience,” consisting in insiders/the black readers, and outsiders/the rest of the readers (James W. Johnson 1928, 477). By discussing their own racial issues, the black writers start functioning as “interpreters of their own ethnicity for the ignorant outsiders,” inasmuch as decoders of the larger social context to their own black readers (Sîrbulescu 1999, 11).
Chapter II
From Stereotypical to Polytropic Black Identities:
Excavating Literature and History
Dismantling the Wrongs of the Past: “A Countershaming Agenda”
In her Nobel Prize Lecture, Toni Morrison affirms that writers should be aware that language has both restorative and destructive powers: “We do language. That may be the measure of our lives… Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation” (1993, 4). Like Morrison, African American writers know the power of language that can create novel ways of reconsidering what has been miswritten, erased, or thrown into oblivion.
This book has the task of excavating the literary and historical inheritance from the standpoint of the polytropic black character. In this double reconsideration, the writer’s purpose “is not to annihilate the real in order to take its place,” but to reveal the compensatory role of the imaginary (Boia 1999, 28). What must be discussed is the dissolution of historical facts into significant fictional renderings, so that looking back at past texts becomes an essential means of producing “narrative interpretations about [its] subject matter” (White 1999, 3). On the one hand, this ongoing process of postmodern recycling is a means of re-envisioning the present, 20 so that the unspeakable conditions of the black history become the topic for new understandings of the present. On the other hand, through the lens of contemporary texts, the past is seen differently in accordance with actual problems, so that “making history in the present often involves not only a retrieval of the past, but an attempt to make the past repeat the priorities of the present” (Young 1996, 146).
Emblematically, the priorities of the present consist in creating imaginative ways of redefining the African American identity via historical revisions of the nineteenth and twentieth century. Contemporary revisionist novels provide us with a more disquieting than paregoric message—as Michel de Certeau reflects:
History is ‘cannibalistic,’ and memory becomes the closed arena of conflict between two contradictory operations: forgetting, which is not something passive, a loss, but an action directed against the past; and the mnemic trace, the return of what was forgotten… More generally speaking, an autonomous order is founded upon what it eliminates; it produces a ‘residue’ condemned to be forgotten. But what was excluded… reinfiltrates the place of its origin—It resurfaces, it troubles, it turns the present’s feeling of being ‘at home’ into an illusion (1986, 3).
Key moments of the nineteenth century—the Middle Passage, the Antebellum period, the Civil War and its aftermath—become crucial events to be reconsidered now with a focus on black characters. The denigration of black characters by the official slave history is explored in rewritings that aim at freeing these characters from their historic yoke. This transpires in an important number of neoslave narratives that have been published after the 1970s: Ernest Gaines’ The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), Gayl Jones’ Corregiadora (1975), Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada (1976), Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident (1981), Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale (1982), Sherley Anne Williams’s Desa Rose (1986), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage (1990), and others.
To quote Ashraf Rushdy’s definition, these neoslave narratives are “contemporary novels that assume the form, the conventions, and take the first person voice of the ante-bellum slave narrative” (1999, 3). Making use of metafiction, these neoslave hybrid genres reconsider the past and reveal that there is no such thing as History, but several (hi)stories to be continually revised If Margaret Walker’s modernist novel, Jubilee (1966), for instance, insists on the linearity of the narrated events (by chronologically telling a story of the Antebellum South, the Civil War, and Reconstruction), most postmodern novels play with traditional narrative conventions and freely move on a temporal axis, thus disclosing the fictitious character of history.22
The neoslave narratives can be seen as “narratives of Buildung,” in which the temporal and spatial movement triggers the creation of polytropic characters forged out the transgression of enforced racial roles (Kester 1997, 5). From an ignorant fieldhand, the male slave is transformed into a self-conscious being, able to instill change on a moral and social level. In her turn, the female slave evolves from “the mule of the world,”23 into a person capable of unburdening herself from the oppressive tropes of the racist and patriarchal system.24
Hackneyed images of black characters circulated by nineteenth century black and white literature are rewritten now, alongside with the destabilization of long-established codes of manner. Polytropic heroes in multiple, hybrid hypostases challenge former reductive models: either such “good” stereotypes as Uncle Tom or the Mammy, or such “bad” stereotypes as the rebellious mulatto or the Jezebel. What must be reconsidered is the dissemination of black images through significant nineteenth century texts: Frederick Douglass’ Narrative (1845, 1855, 1881), Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig (1859), Harriet Becheer Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), William Wells Brown’s Clotel (1853), Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents (1861), Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892), and many others.
Furthermore, this strategy of rethinking the past becomes the major task of those writers who revise the twentieth century history. Key moments—the Great Depression, the Black Arts Movement, and the feminist movement—signify basic sources for rewriting identity. The rich variety of black fiction makes a point in stressing racial value and coupling it with issues of class and gender, national and global power structures—as shown by William Melvin Kelley’s Dunfords Travels Everywheres (1970), Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972), Clarence Major’s Reflex and Bone Structure (1975), Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters (1980), Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982), Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place (1982), Ntozake Shange’s Betsey Brown (1985), John Edgar Wideman’s Philadelphia Fire (1990), Ernest Gaines’ A Lesson Before Dying (1993), and others.
Each of the above writers is a fetish-breaker, powerfully dismantling the wrongs of history:
So this is what we want: to sabotage history. They won’t know whether we’re serious or whether we are writing fiction. They made their own fiction, just like we make our own. But they can’t tell whether our fictions are the real thing or whether they’re merely fictional. Always keep them guessing. That’ll bug them, probably drive them up the walls. What it comes down to is that you let the social realists go after the flatfoots out there on the beat and we’ll go after the Pope and see which action causes a revolution. We are mystical detectives about to make an arrest (Reed, in O’Brien 1973, 179).
Black novels function accordingly as demythologizing instances where polytropic characters are forged through the subtle process of rewriting texts that span from Zora Neale Hurston and Jessie Fauset, to Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. In Gates’ view, the central trope of black fiction is that of “Signifying” as “repetition and revision, or repetition with a signal difference” (1988, 63). The activist role of literature, its power of changing racist mentality is thus illuminated by the recent black fiction.
The primary objective for contemporary black writers is to “carry out a countershaming agenda by graphically inscribing the savage and brutal—and shamefully perverse—message of the whites” (Bouson 2000, 159). This countershaming maneuver has the role of exposing whiteness as a coercive force that has systematically created social and mental patterns of subjecting the black mind/body. In this way, postmodern authors reveal the violence embedded in the multitude of past texts, whose racist views projected African Americans as the Other, placed outside the realm of humanity. Toni Morrison suggests that the aim of the black narrative is to create liberating discourses that counteract racist ideology. Morrison turns the tables on white oppressors and reveals their horrors as the source of the “jungle” planted in blacks:
Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift, unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood… The more coloredpeople spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside. But it wasn’t the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable) place. It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them (1997 a, 198).
To conclude, by yoking together black identity issues with acute social and political matters, the postmodern African American fiction rewrites the past racial hypostases: the “bad Nigger,” the violent man, the daring mulatto, the trickster, the highly objectified/highly sexualized black woman, etc. From past instances of “self-veiling,” characterized by “an unassertive, undemanding, adaptation to the environment,” contemporary polytropic heroes attain significant moments of “intimacy,” distinguished by “freedom from compulsion, and a lucid, prompt communication with [their] spirit and the world” (Cooke 1984, 8). The need to dismantle the racist snares of language makes black authors extremely conscious about the process of writing per se. The character’s achievement of authority over mind and body is constantly related with the writer’s authority over discourse, so that the thematic freedom coincides with the linguistic empowerment.
Postmodern black writers thus get involved in a significant act of reconsidering former images or filling in the gaps of earlier texts, so that what was misrepresented or left unsaid in the past becomes now a central theme.25 In certain cases, this revisionist strategy is paralleled by the need to provide an alternative to the white culture, by informing readers about the African heritage as a main component of the American culture.26 The importance of African Americans in the formation of the American national self is reinforced accordingly. They not only narrate a different story from their precursors, but they also make us see history differently. Through subtle reappropriations of the past, they unravel the polytropic character’s evolution along primary moments of an ethically and spiritually enriching journey.