Ghosts of the African Diaspora: Re-visioning History, Memory, and IdentityHow to Read African American Literature: Post-Civil Rights Fiction and the Task of InterpretationBlack Aesthetics and the Interior Life

Abstract

Whether in local book clubs and classrooms or in recent literary scholarship, fictional narratives of slavery and the civil rights era stoke our fascinations and frustrations with the past. Three recent studies analyze how this “historical turn” in black literary production and criticism has made texts such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) emerge as essential reading. Joanne Chassot, Aida Levy-Hussen, and Christopher Freeburg suggest that the historical turn reflects many writers’ and readers’ shared sense that black literature can reflect or even intervene in shaping black people’s political futures, often by recasting the past. Chassot offers nuanced accounts of how several black novelists negotiate history as a corrective to lingering sociopolitical issues. Meanwhile, Levy-Hussen and Freeburg question the analytical methods that have led us to expect that African American literature will offer a sociopolitical or psychological salve at all.In Ghosts of the African Diaspora, Chassot identifies nearly thirty black-authored books published between 1980 and 2005 that feature ghostly presences, though she elaborates on only about half a dozen across the book’s four body chapters. Focusing on works by Fred D’Aguiar, Gloria Naylor, Paule Marshall, and Michelle Cliff, Chassot argues that black writers use ghosts as potent vehicles for restoring voices that have been silenced, lost, or omitted from dominant narratives of Western historical progress (19). Ghosts serve to disrupt linearity; blur the boundaries between past, present, and future; and enable authors to “re-vision” or reframe historical accounts to redress the traumatic legacies of slavery and colonialism. If Chassot’s argument feels familiar, it may be partly because of the ubiquity of ghosts in black fiction, as well as in the “spectral turn” of scholarship toward increasingly attending to magical realism, speculative literature, gothic forms, and the fantastic (5). Still, with its thorough introduction and cogent close readings, Chassot’s book should help to usher in renewed attention to important novels, such as Naylor’s Mama Day (1988) and D’Aguiar’s Feeding the Ghosts (1997), that often remain in the shadow of the paradigmatic Beloved.While Chassot reminds us that black literature thematizes ghosts to represent a “central dilemma, the need to remember and to forget the past” (32), Levy-Hussen addresses how literary critics, as well as novelists themselves, navigate this dilemma. In How to Read African American Literature, Levy-Hussen critiques the stymieing effect of two common critical approaches: therapeutic and prohibitive reading. For advocates of therapeutic reading, the experience of being immersed in tales of past pain can be cathartic, offering readers “self-knowledge, authenticity and psychic healing” (3). Meanwhile, other critics object to these narratives as needlessly traumatizing audiences and offering “false hope about the possibilities for historical repair” (5). The posture of “prohibitive reading” insists that “fictions of historical return are dangerous and to be avoided” (5). Both positions assume that reading can transform audiences but disagree about whether those historical narratives serve audiences for the better (therapeutic) or for the worse (prohibitive).Levy-Hussen contends that this binary has overdetermined the African American literary canon, and to move beyond its limits, she highlights a “missing archive” of post–civil rights texts that have been misread or neglected because they do not adhere to the black literary protocols for representing history and struggle. For example, Levy-Hussen highlights Andrea Lee’s novel Sarah Phillips (1984) as underappreciated because, rather than showing the expected anger of protest narratives, the book shores up Sarah’s depressed response to “the premature decline of the modern Civil Rights Movements and its attendant forms of faith and desire” (96). Turning to psychoanalytic theory, Levy-Hussen identifies depression, trauma, and masochism as a trio of “psychic logics” embedded in both contemporary black fiction and its assessment (171). As the book concludes, “The point is not to cure, or even to mobilize, but to invite a more supple and comprehensive reading of blackness” (171).Levy-Hussen’s move to reveal the “psychic logics” at play in African American literary criticism also underwrites Freeburg’s Black Aesthetics and the Interior Life. Freeburg suggests that critics have been projecting their own political desires onto black texts or historical figures, trying to read them as representative of an imagined black collective rather than as complexly individual. In doing so, he claims, “we miss something that equally defines [black aesthetics]: ongoing moments where black artists repeatedly invoke and dramatize questions like who am I, what do I value, where do I find community,” and how can one be an individual apart from the demands of racial representation (4). The book disrupts politicized readings that tend to interpret African American literature and expressive culture primarily in relation to black freedom struggles, such as abolition, racial uplift, civil rights, and antiracist protest. Instead, Freeburg tracks how black artists represent themselves and their characters as sentient individuals whose thoughts, desires, and motivations may remain personal and inscrutable. To have an interior life and something of the self that one may share—as well as withhold and privatize—figures as the means of claiming personhood. Under these terms, Freeburg proposes, the historical conditions that ordinarily have been read as denying black Americans’ humanity, such as white mob violence and stultifying urban conditions, ironically emphasize the force of black personhood. The book’s four main chapters focus on pivotal assertions of black interiority in the works of nineteenth-century writers (Anna Julia Cooper, Charles Chesnutt, and Paul Laurence Dunbar), twentieth-century novelists (James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison), and visual and expressive artists (such as singer Nina Simone and visual artist Glenn Ligon). The book takes up complex ideas of ontology and animality in admirably clear prose. But perhaps one effect of this concision is that key concepts such as “the personal form” or “epistemic estrangement” (3) remain loosely defined or underutilized across the chapters. The fuller stakes of this provocative study are sometimes more implicit than direct.Strikingly, all three books converge in responding to how Beloved has influenced the historical turn in black fiction and criticism for nearly thirty years. Comparing how each study frames the novel reveals the fruitful conversation they stage together. Tracking the thematic and narrative patterns that give rise to a character like Beloved, Chassot explains, “Deciding that whatever it was I had witnessed—a ghost, a figment of my imagination, something else altogether—was intriguing enough to deserve further inquiry, I set out on a ghost hunt through the literature of the African diaspora” (2). By noting how Beloved drew her in as a “witness” to an immersive experience with the book’s haunting subject matter, Chassot frames her reading practices with the kind of affect that Levy-Hussen identifies as “therapeutic reading.” To be clear, How to Read African American Literature does not deprecate this approach but rather illuminates how often it operates as audiences’ response, making us ask just why we believe that reading will change us and the world around us. Beloved or similar historical fiction seems to invite readers’ masochistic identification with the characters’ pain (53), while prohibitive readers insist that may be precisely why the books shouldn’t be engaged (especially by young readers). Meanwhile, for Freeburg, Morrison’s attention to Sethe’s interior life accomplishes more than allowing readers to imagine what some, any, or all formerly enslaved women may have felt. Rather, the novel establishes Sethe’s personhood and individuality, especially when, near the novel’s end, Sethe realizes her own self-worth. Freeburg interprets this moment as Sethe claiming self-possession not only from white authority but also from expectations to represent “heroic black history or a reinvigorated black community and black politics” (Freeburg 119). Taken together, the three studies all model compelling new approaches to interpreting—and sometimes setting aside—the psychosocial, historical, and political readings of African American literature.