Is This Resistance? African American Postmodernism in Sarah Phillips

Abstract

Both critical and classroom responses to Andrea Lee's novel Sarah Phillips can be characterized by question marks and discomfiture. These responses are due in no small part to first chapter of novel, which includes perhaps most racist vignette in text: Sarah's boyfriend Henri depicts her as offspring of a half-Irish, half-Jewish mother who was raped by a jazz musician as big and black as King Kong, with sexual equipment to match (11). Sarah not respond with fury or protest, but instead runs away from her accuser and hides in a bathroom. In her review of novel, Mary Helen Washington asks, isn't Sarah angry at this insult? Why narrator offer intellectual explanations and refuse to identify her feelings? (3). Washington not come up with an answer, but ends by critiquing novel's complicity with narrator in evading the disturbing implications in these racial (3). On a similar note, Valerie Smith opens her introduction to novel with an anecdote about how Sarah Phillips disconcerts her students (ix). Their discomfiture, Smith writes, reveals that novel does not conform to their precon- ceived notions about black women's (ix). Such notions are based upon stories of Janie Crawford, Maud Martha Brown, Selina Boyce, and many other strong black women characters seeking self-definition in a racist and sexist world. Sarah Phillips' refusal or inability to be angry, to speak up, and to challenge racist and sexist realities she encounters contradicts expectations many students bring to classroom, expectations that are shaped by a clear sense of bad and good, oppressor and oppressed. Having read Harriet Jacobs, Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, Lucille Clifton, and Sonia Sanchez—just to name a few—students come to expect that black women's writing should center on a character engaged in a project of political or personal resistance (Smith, x). When they encounter Toni Morrison and Nella Larsen, these same students find their understandings of these categories begin to shift, especially as they read of Helga Crane's decidedly untrium- phant return to United States and her eventual descent into a particular brand of black, middle-class motherhood. Yet Sarah Phillips retains her unique ability to vex her readers, whether they are students or literary critics. For Sarah Phillips is a text that raises questions about middle-class black woman's ability to recognize, let alone resist, racism and sexism as they intersect with class privilege.