Clarence Major's All-Night Visitors: Calabanic Discourse and Black Male Expression

Abstract

R2 eaders who have followed Clarence Major's career and know his work realize that as his career has developed his work has become more experimental and increasingly foregrounds the great limitations of fictive portrayal and expres. sion which are the concerns of such white radical metafictional writers of the Fiction Collective as Ronald Sukenick, Raymond Federman, and Harold Jaffe. Major also experiments in his first novel, All-Night Visitors (1969), but the experimentation presents itself in the form of a pursuit of the potentialities of black male expression. Postmodern, metafictional, and poststructuralist interpretive strategies are relevant for an analysis of All-Night Visitors, but what I want to do in this essay is to utilize various critical paradigms, especially Anglo-American anthropological and African-American poststructural constructs that highlight Major's experimental project in terms of black male writing. My purpose is to show that All-Night Visitors is a black male text that reflects the problems of black male freedom, empowerment, and voice in ways that are characteristic of other contemporary black male texts. Black poststructuralists like Karla F. C. Holloway develop their theoretical paradigms through a method of shift: