The Chaneysville Incident and the Research Narrative in Contemporary African American Literature

Abstract

The research narrative is a genre of contemporary African American novels told from the narrow point of view of one character who is obsessive in their frustrating and pleasurable pursuit of knowledge through long periods of textual study. The protagonist of a research narrative is often affiliated with an institution of higher education. Research narratives are littered with dissertations and academic books; many of these novels include excerpts from the texts that their protagonists study or write. Narration closely focalized through one character is necessarily unreliable; these novels invite readers to oscillate between sympathy for and skepticism of their protagonists. Research narratives are simultaneously invested in and skeptical of historical knowledge, particularly knowledge of enslavement and fugitivity. David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident (1981) establishes traits of the research narrative. The genre has flourished in works including Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist (1999), Victor LaValle's Big Machine (2010), Mat Johnson's Pym (2011), and Danzy Senna's New People (2017). This essay argues for the research narrative as a genre of Black novels that theorize an ambivalent relationship to the past.