"Shifting Spirits": Ancestral Constructs in the Postmodern Writing of John Edgar Wideman

Abstract

We are difference....our reason is difference of discourses, our history difference of times, our selves difference of masks. That difference, far from being forgotten and recoverable origin, is this dispersion that we are and make. (Michel Foucault) One of hallmarks of discourses often differentiated by term minority is that they evoke some form of ancestor as a means of negotiating of past. In fact, Toni Morrison has argued that a fundamental aspect of black literature is presence or absence of an ancestor. According to Morrison, ancestor functions as an elder who, rather than constituting a parental figure, is a kind of timeless entity that provides a certain continuum in Black or African-American art. The of ancestor can be seen in work of writers such as Ralph Ellison and Toni Cade Bambara, but Morrison also notes that absence of ancestor in works by writers like Richard Wright and James Baldwin results in an element of destruction and disarray in work itself (Rootedness 343). In another critical essay from early 1980s, Morrison situates her idea of ancestor in African village, where clan provided a collective of community and protection. The ancestor figure in black literature here functions as the matrix of ... yearning for village life and thus serves in capacity of a sage who is advising, benevolent, protective, wise Black ancestor. The wise ancestor values connection and racial memory over individual fulfillment, yet at same time true ancestor, according to Morrison, is frequently a social or secret outlaw in hostile environment of enemy--and in case of black literature in America, enemy is continued of past, oppressive white culture. Like grandfather in Ellison's Battle Royal, Morrison's ancestor strives to undermine system, and offer alternative wisdom in an effort to sustain succeeding generations (City Limits 39-40). Morrison's genealogical configurations demonstrate that literary ties between present and past ancestors are rather than givens, but such nevertheless perpetuate significant suppositions. Analyzing postmodernism and minority literature, W. Lawrence Hogue argues that contemporary minority writers like Morrison finally reproduce themes of wholeness, community, and historical continuity that appeal to essentialist assumptions. Postmodern minority writers such as John Edgar Wideman and Richard Perry, on other hand, are often ignored by cultural critics because their works do not exhibit a similar nostalgia to reconstitute and sanction 'pre-modern values' about identity that no longer exist (Hague 193). Of significance to Hogue is not only that postmodern narratives more accurately address lived experiences of individuals negotiating a multitude of traditional, racial, sexual, political, economical, and psychological configurations, but that critical/cultural advocates discr edit these postmodern experiences as abnormal (194). bell hooks similarly cautions that criticisms of directions in postmodern thinking should not obscure insights it may offer that open up our understanding of African-American experience (28). The portrayal offered by Hogue seems to me a legitimate assessment of a number of current critical perspectives dominating published scholarship on minority literature, yet these arguments create and maintain a polarity between authors of minority discourse rather than examining way in which postmodern writing of John Edgar Wideman, for instance, inscribes a sense of wholeness and historical continuity at one and same time that it subverts and exposes limits of its own desire. My study analyses two of Wideman's works, an early short story entitled Damballah (1981) and his recent novel The Cattle Killing (1996), to show how inscription of what I term ancestral constructs in Wideman's writing both summons and undermines a nostalgic recuperation of elder and continuity. …