Stowe and Brown Revisited: Fiction-Made Characters in Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada

Abstract

Debates on Ishmael Reed’s neo-slave narrative Flight to Canada (1979) and its rewriting of African American identity and history can benefit from an in-depth comparative analysis focused on the writer’s reconfiguration of two significant nineteenthcentury figures - the black pacifist and the rebellious mulatto. Drawing on a variety of theoretical and philosophical views as well as on African American studies, this paper discusses the way in which Reed’s novel de/re-constructs the images of the black pacifist and the rebellious mulatto, in close intertextual connection with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and William Wells Brown’s Clotel (1853). If nineteenthcentury authors insisted on self-made models of manhood, Reed’s postmodern writing proposes fiction-made characters, parasitically feeding on earlier texts. In true postmodern fashion, Reed’s heroes refuse to be labeled as either “real” or “imaginary,” to wear only nineteenth-century costumes, and to be pinned down to a certain temporal or spatial dimension. By rewriting the nineteenth-century texts, Reed exposes the conventional versions of black identity that transform “black history into mythic fiction,” warning us that we should be equally afraid of romanticized or demonized representations of the African American character (Campbell 1986, xi)