John Edgar Wideman and Modernity: A Critical Dialogue by Michel Feith

Abstract

Reviewed by: John Edgar Wideman and Modernity: A Critical Dialogue by Michel Feith Robert Butler Michel Feith. John Edgar Wideman and Modernity: A Critical Dialogue. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2019. 269 pp. $45.00. Since the appearance of A Glance Away in 1967, John Edgar Wideman has published over twenty important books of both fiction and nonfiction. Scholarly interest in his work has remained strong, particularly in recent years, as is evidenced by the appearance of four important book-length studies since 2010. The latest of these books, Michel Feith's John Edgar Wideman and Modernity: A Critical Dialogue, by submitting Wideman's work to a meticulous critical and cultural analysis, will draw added attention to the fact that Wideman is a major American writer who has charted new directions in African American literature with his bold fictional experiments and his unique vision of Black experience. Thematically rather than chronologically organized, Feith's book focuses intensively on Wideman's lucid critiques of certain aspects of modernity that date back to the rise of capitalism, industrialism, and colonialism, and stresses their rootedness in various structures of racial oppression. Feith argues persuasively that Wideman's [End Page 260] response to modernism is kaleidoscopic, providing multiple perspectives that "decenter" narrative (244) and give voice to marginalized people. Viewed from one angle, modernism provides a "harmonious, organized universe ruled by universal, mathematical laws" (207) that promise progress and justice. But when Wideman's kaleidoscopic vision tips and is viewed from "a minority perspective," it reveals "a nightmarish culture of death" (23). Modern rationalism, far from releasing humanity from ignorance and superstition, has created structures of social and political oppression, beginning with slavery and later developing into colonial dominance and ghettoization. Seen from this perspective, "Prison becomes a metaphor for modernity as a whole" (46); Feith persuasively argues from this view that "a continuous thread in Wideman's œuvre" (69) is an intensive scrutiny on how literal and metaphoric prisons function as a way of defining a carceral society. Wideman, like Michel Foucault, envisions the modern prison system as originating with the humanitarian project created by the Philadelphia Quakers, whose progressive reform deteriorated quickly into a brutal means of social control and political repression. Feith's brilliant analysis of Brothers and Keepers discusses Wideman's treatment not only of his brother's unjustly prolonged incarceration but also his vision of prison as "a total institution" (46), which serves as a model of the modern state that is centered in "an enclosed, formally administered life" (47), a "rational plan" (48) designed by a dominant group to control marginalized people. (In this sense, Feith claims that Brothers and Keepers, published in 1984, prefigures Michelle Alexander's landmark 2010 book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.) Feith's highly original structural analysis of The Cattle Killing explores another central metaphor in Wideman's books: disease. Wideman's kaleidoscopic imagination is a critical instrument also in this work, as he triangulates Philadelphia during the 1793 Yellow Fever Epidemic, South Africa during its era of slavery, and the contemporary United States. Challenging the modern faith in linear time's unerring ability to produce a steady development of "progress," Wideman draws revealing parallels between a disease devastating eighteenth-century Philadelphia, a "plague" (146) raging through eighteenth-century Africa, and various forms of cultural sicknesses afflicting modern America—urban violence, drug abuse, racial segregation, and family collapse. Ironically, the disease of American racism is traced back to a period when such Enlightenment thinkers as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were laying the foundation for American democracy while inscribing slavery into the Constitution. Like Paul Gilroy, Wideman makes "a strong connection between the Enlightenment and slavery" (16). Feith traces a clear line of development in Wideman's work from modern alienation and isolation in works such as A Glance Away (1967) and Hurry Home (1970) to a search in his later works for roots in African American history and communal life. He regards the short story "Fever" and the Homewood Trilogy as pivotal texts because they redirect Wideman toward "a recovery of community and oral culture" (41) to which he devoted the remainder of his career. Brothers...