“Woven of Many Strands”: Multiple Subjectivity in John Edgar Wideman's Philadelphia Fire

Abstract

Many of John Edgar Wideman's rich fictions scout the borderlands of African American collective identity, those places where blacks question and confute the hateful stereotypes that hegemonic white culture has written for them. At the same time, Wideman's residence for all of his adult life in the interracial middle-ground—the “goddamned middle” as it is called in Philadelphia Fire—has obviously made him sensitive to many issues that go beyond race, even if questions of race first triggered his awareness (71).1 In this essay, I examine how, in Philadelphia Fire, Wideman places African American subjectivity in the context of a broad field of social relations that are determined quite as often by gender, class, or intergenerational or professional interests and antagonisms as by race.