Elegant Inconsistencies: Race, Nation, and Writing in Wilson Jeremiah Moses's Afrotopia

Abstract

In 1998, the historian Wilson Jeremiah Moses published his fifth monograph, Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History, as part of Cambridge University Press's highly regarded “Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture.” This would seem to be an odd publishing venue for a historian, but in earlier books Moses had written eloquently on Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), and throughout his career, textual analysis has been central to his influential studies of black nationalism.1 In many respects, then, the Cambridge series was the ideal venue, and the book was widely noticed, with numerous appreciative reviews appearing in journals devoted to American history and African-American studies. Nevertheless, the leading journals in American literary studies, including American Literary History and American Literature, ignored Afrotopia, and the book has not had a significant impact on American and African-American literary studies. However ardent the talk among literary scholars about the importance of interdisciplinarity, ours remains a discipline-focused and -organized profession in which literary scholars generally speak to literary scholars and historians to historians.2 Moses aspires to speak across the disciplines, and in Afrotopia he makes a signal contribution to African-American literary and cultural studies by examining African diasporic affiliations in light of contradictions, rather than romanticized celebrations of resistance. Afrotopia may well be his best book, and for its complex readings of the dynamic place of Africa in the writings of a range of African-American intellectuals, it deserves our renewed attention.