Where the Talented Tenth Meets the Model Minority: The Price of Privilege in Wideman's "Philadelphia Fire" and Lee's "Native Speaker"

Abstract

Two years before the publication of Philadelphia Fire (1990), John Edgar Wideman was asked to comment on his oeuvre up to that point, more specifically to reflect on what had become his most well-known and acclaimed work, Brothers and Keepers (1984). This work of non-fiction, which earned him a National Book Critics Circle nomination, attempted, as Wideman put it, to make sense of the enormous gap between himself and his incarcerated brother, and more generally the breach between himself and the communities in which he was born and grew up. Very quickly, however, Wideman shifts from this personal reflection into a kind of cultural commentary, from his artistic successes to their societal consequences. The pathos, tinged with guilt, is palpable: