"If the City Is a Man": Founders and Fathers, Cities and Sons in John Edgar Wideman's "Philadelphia Fire"

Abstract

ohn Edgar Wideman's 1990 novel Philadelphia Fire assesses the contemporary implications and outcomes of black activism of the 1960s and 1970s-the promises of the civil rights and the demands of the Black Power movements generally, and the example of the radical African American communal group MOVE (short for The Movement) specifically. Wideman roots his assessment of the recent past in a detour through the nation's colonial history, returning to foundational American assumptions about power and creativity, race and gender. This recourse to history allows him to ground his main concern, the fractured dyad of the black father and son, in the raced and gendered spaces created by white founders. In Philadelphia Fire, Philadelphia stands as map and metaphor for the colonial past and (post)colonial present that position black men as dispossessed sons of white fathers rather than men in their own right. But Wideman also makes Philadelphia representative of alternative notions of history that challenge deeply held national ideals of what constitutes a man in his own right. Wideman chooses William Penn's founding vision of Philadelphia to serve as epigraph to his novel: