Reimagining the Middle Passage: Black Resistance in Literature, Television, and Song

Abstract

Reimagining the Middle Passage: Black Resistance in Literature, Television, and Song by Tara T. Green (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press 2018) is a critical synthesis of twentieth- and recent twenty-first-century African-descended art. Green's work uses water and its connection to the tragic legacy of the Middle Passage as a metaphor to describe the depth of African-centered cultural memory and its transmission through art as narrative.In Green's work, the Middle Passage becomes a grounding trope that signifies African-descended artists' use of memory to resist racialized and gendered oppressions. Through this means, she suggests that certain artists embody a type of resilience in the face of oppressions. Green works hard to document the trajectory of the Middle Passage as a narrative trope that expresses itself across genres, history, and individual experience but she carefully resists reducing the artists she studies, or their creative efforts, to her singular narrative theme. Green carefully traces how many African-descended artists have and continue to use the Middle Passage as a strategy to communicate the deep structure meanings attached to remembering trauma to their audiences. Her theory of literary criticism assumes a conscious author/artist who methodically crafts their work to speak to an audience rooted in—or at least desirous of a more in-depth understanding of—the traumatic cultural history produced by the African American experience. Her critical approach inflects the widely held view that the Black voice signifies more than it says on the surface of its sayings.Using Hurricane Katrina and its horrific flood damage as a starting point for her exploration of water as memory in art, Green says that memories are “passed down through both captives and captors, causing the tension of the trauma” (29). These tensions of trauma passed along as memory reverberate throughout the corporate body of a society and are exacerbated by “the captors” being the dominant agents who document and pass down what becomes remembered as memories. Green's argument emphasizes that the African-descended artistic imagination counters this trend by using narrative and myth as “a medium useful in the liberation of oppression” (145). Her point is that African-descended artists often supplant dominant and oppressive narratives of memory by creating space for the oppressed to remember. She says stoically, “Nature never forgets, and the same can be said of humans who rely so heavily on water and land to survive physically. As seen in the work of African descendants, water, as a spiritual site, stores memories and makes its connection to human emotions tangible and remarkable” (26).Readers will find Green's journalistic prose compliments the rigor of her research. Green writes with the artistic imagination of a painter coupled with the thoroughgoing intellectual insight a veteran scholar. The breadth of artists, artistic genres, and theorists that she engages in this compact work underscore the ubiquity of her chosen theme and her research into the subject. The text is intuitively sectioned into two parts that set up her theory and then demonstrate it in action. Masterfully, Green weaves a penetrating literary thread that makes her research accessible to scholars, critics, and lay researchers alike. Green's analytic lens will aid researchers and readers interested in applying it to works as diverse as W. E. B. Du Bois's Dark Princess (1928) and Bernice McFadden's Gathering of Waters (2012) for years to come.