African American Novels Research Articles

Gloria Naylor's early novels

The essays collected in this text discuss the work of contemporary African-American novelist Gloria Naylor. The complex themes explored include: race, class, domesticity and sexual identity.

“Sublime Patriots”: Black Masculinity in Three African-American Novels

This essay analyzes the topic of black masculinity in three novels by African-American authors published around the turn of the century: Sutton Griggs's Imperium in Imperio (1899), David Bryant Fulton's Hanover (1900), and Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition (1901). Specifically, the essay examines how these authors appropriated the rhetoric of white leaders of the American Revolution like Patrick Henry to construct images of courageous black men fighting against white supremacists who repressed black American freedom. These three authors depicted fearless, righteous black men to debunk the popular images of the violent black brute that white men often used to maintain their power over African-American men.

Contemporary African American novelists: a bio-bibliographical critical sourcebook

Contemporary African American novelists: a bio-bibliographical critical sourcebook

Ten is the Age of Darkness: The Black Bildungsroman

In Ten Is the Age of Darkness, Geta LeSeur explores how black authors of the United States and English- speaking Caribbean have taken a European literary tradition and adapted it to fit their own needs for self-expression. LeSeur begins by defining the structure and models of the European genre of the bildungsroman, then proceeds to show how the circumstances of colonialism, oppression, race, class, and gender make the maturing experiences of selected young black protagonists different from those of their white counterparts.Examining the parallels and differences in attitudes toward childhood in the West Indies and the United States, as well as the writers' individual perspectives in each work of fiction, LeSeur reaches intriguing conclusions about family life, community participation in the nurturing of children, the timing and severity of the youngsters' confrontation of adult society, and the role played by race in the journey toward adulthood.LeSeur's readings of African American novels provide new insights into the work of Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, and Richard Wright, among others. When read as examples of the bildungsroman rather than simply as chronicles of black experiences, these works reveal an even deeper significance and have a more powerful impact. LeSeur convincingly demonstrates that such African American novels as Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain, Wright's Black Boy, and Morrison's The Bluest Eye concentrate to a large extent on protest, while such African West Indian works as George Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin, Austin Clarke's Amongst Thistles and Thorns, Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John, and Erna Brodber's Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home reflect a more naive, healthy re-creation of what childhood can and should be, despite economic and physical impoverishment. She also gives a special space within the genre to Paule Marshall's BrownGirl, Brownstones and Ntozake Shange's Betsey Brown and the importance of woman time, woman voice, and mothers.While enlarging our understanding of both the similarities and the differences in the black experiences of the Carribean and American youngsters coming of age, Ten Is the Age of Darkness also suggests that children of color in similar spheres share many common experiences. LeSeur concludes that the bildungsromane by black writers provide uniquely revealing contributions to the Afro-World literary canon and point the way for others to examine literary pieces in Third World communities of color.

"Every Goodbye Ain't Gone": The Semiotics of Death, Mourning, and Closural Practice in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon

... we think terms of crisis rather than temporal ends; and much of subtle disconfirmation and elaborate peripeteia. And we concern ourselves with conflict between deterministic pattern any plot suggests, and freedom of persons within that plot to choose and so to alter structure, relations of beginnings, middle, and end. --Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending Closural practice twentieth century African American literature is, to borrow Wallace Stevens's trope, discourse in act of finding what will suffice.(1) The strategies that black writers construct to bring their to a sense of an ending create order out of welter of experiences that shape our collective existence. The apocalyptic significance human beings assign to endings--and their relationship to middles and beginnings--are, as Frank Kermode asserts, fictions shaped by our collective need to assign value to life as well as to death: Men, like poets rush `into middest,' medias res, when they are born; they also die medias rebus, and to sense of their they need with origins and ends, such as give meaning to lives and to poems. The End they imagine will reflect their irreducibly preoccupations. (The Sense of an Ending 7) Birth, death, marriage, and aging are universal intermediary that contribute to vast European literary landscape with which Kermode is concerned. The desire to make sense of [our] span is one of many possible primordial sources of human imagination. Human beings find fictive concords that will suffice to living meaningful by connecting seemingly random moments life to seamless geometry of beginnings, middles, and ends. Closure life, then, as closural strategy fiction, emphasizes what David Richter referring to moral fable calls completion, or, as Marianna Torgovnick puts it, a sense that nothing necessary has been omitted from work (Closure Novel 6). Successful closure, however, does not depend on completion any strict structural or thematic sense. Endings that fill gaps or indeterminancies (Iser) text ways that preclude further interpretation, fairy tales for example, or that restrict reader's participation making meaning by such devices as authorial intrusions occur infrequently twentieth century narrative practice. In Torgovnick's view, structural symmetry is far less revealing litmus test for successful closure than the honesty and appropriateness of ending's relationship to beginning, middle, not degree of or resolution achieved by ending (Closure Novel 6). This important point is virtually an article of faith modern and postmodern closural practice African American novel.(2) Most twentieth century African American novels general, and Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977) specifically, resist finality or resolution achieved by ending expressed as organic wholeness, i.e., structural unity, or themes that mirror prevailing social mores, or cultural constructions of preoccupations such as death and mourning. Song of Solomon accomplishes this by its dependence on narrative fragments that ultimately form interconnected circles within circles that resist simple or closure by stressing familial, experiential, and human ties that bind constantly changing ways. The broad cultural resonance of this teleology is implicit, for example, traditional African American aphorism, goodbye ain't gone, every shut eye ain't sleep. As trope of resistance, goodbye ain't gone is textual site for any number of possible political, physical, and metaphysical struggles that form an historical map of universal particularity of African American experience, including slavery, migration, racism, religion, and family. …

Narrative Style in Oscar Micheaux's Within Our Gates

Within Our Gates is the title of Oscar Micheaux’s rediscovered 1919 feature film. Restored in 1993 from a single known surviving print from Spain, the film adds new insight into the workings of Oscar Micheaux, an incredibly prolific African American filmmaker, writer, producer, novelist, and businessman. Since so few of Micheaux’s estimated forty-eight feature films survive, it is difficult to generalize about the entire oeuvre. However, Within Our Gates is a stunning film, the first surviving feature by an African American director, and an example of his silent-era work. I wish to concentrate exclusively on Within Our Gates not as a fragment from an elusive career, but as a complex, self-sufficient text that stands alone.

Blacks in Eden: The African American Novel's First Century

This work examines African-American fiction, discussing how African-American novelists worked with the same mythic materials as their white counterparts, but inverted Anglo-American constructions. Relating the novel to history, it shows how they refuted Anglo-Americans' record of history.

Echo and Narcissus: The Afrocentric Pragmatism of W. E. B. Du Bois

In unique assignment for Independent in 1904, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois reviewed his own book, Souls of Black Folk. He characterized style as African. Du Bois made no apology, contending that the blood of my fathers spoke through me and cast off English restraint of my training and surroundings. The resulting accomplishment, he concluded, matter of taste. It lost in authority but gained in vividness because of its African perspective: It might tempt certain readers to contest every statement impatiently, but revelation of how world looks to me cannot easily escape even those readers. One who is born with cause -for so he assessed himselfis predestined to certain narrowness of view, and at same time to some clearness of vision within his limits with which world often finds it to reckon.' world has found it well to reckon with Souls of Black Folk ever since. Du Bois's ideas about color line and double consciousness have guided discussion of race relations from moment book appeared. It received immediate attention not only from African Americans but on national and international scale as well. Booker T. Washington, whom Du Bois criticized severely in most controversial essay in book, saw to it that it received little notice in African American newspapers he influenced. Nonetheless, it was read widely. For many, including Langston Hughes andJohn Hope Franklin, it served as a cultural initiation rite. Several classic African American novels are based on its ideas. response of mainstream white press ranged from neglect to guarded praise to fanatical

Gendering the History of the Antislavery Narrative: Juxtaposing Uncle Tom's Cabin and Benito Cereno, Beloved and Middle Passage

Gendering the History of the Antislavery Narrative: Juxtaposing Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Benito Cereno, Beloved and Middle Passage Sarah Robbins (bio) Studies of the numerous contemporary African American novels about nineteenth-century slavery have sometimes argued for interpreting those texts as postcolonial efforts to revise race history through re-formation of traditional historiography. Toni Morrison’s Beloved has generated a good deal of such discussion, partly because of the author’s own repeated references to her novel as an attempt to rewrite and revitalize history. 1 Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage has evoked similar critical response. 2 A number of studies of twentieth-century slave narratives have effectively bolstered their arguments for generic links among the texts by pointing out recurring techniques for resisting the “master’s” versions of historical experience. 3 Understandably, through its focus on a race perspective to explore the revision process, this growing body of scholarship has deemphasized gender and other categories of analysis (social class, for example) when exploring what should itself by now be recognized as historicizable as well—the changing genre of the antislavery narrative. However, some voices have called for careful consideration of both race and gender—especially in the study of individual texts and hybrid genres based on African American women’s experiences. 4 Morrison herself has suggested the importance of attending to gender differences when interpreting African American literature. 5 Meanwhile, [End Page 531] especially given his recent lively criticism of Beloved and Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson’s questioning of the idea of “empowerment through literature” and his reluctance to embrace the concept of a “black aesthetic” may be better understood within the context of the gendered historical development of narratives of slavery rather than exclusively through a race-centered interpretation of the genre. 6 On one level, then, I am arguing here for the need to draw more fully upon gender as a category of analysis when studying the as yet rather loosely defined genre of “antislavery story.” But I am also beginning to study the antislavery narrative’s own cultural history by reviewing particular instances of its writing as occasions when multiple aspects of authorial subjectivity have come into play—along with considerations of publication venue, anticipated audience, and rhetorical purpose—to help shape textual production. 7 As feminist theorists like Nancy Fraser and Jana Sawicki have pointed out, in interpreting writing and other potential claims to individual agency, we should recognize that subjectivity is both “endowed with critical capacities and culturally constructed”; that the very fact that “discourses and institutions are ambiguous” leaves open the possibility for a “resistant subjectivity” exercising individual agency. 8 Therefore, when evaluating complex cultural practices like the writing of an antislavery narrative, we need to build on studies of American authorship like those by William Charvat and Cathy Davidson to see texts as shaped by such cultural factors as editorial interventions, but also by authorial choices responding to and perhaps resisting such influences. 9 Historicizing our view of writing and publication through case studies like this one will highlight the complicated ways that genres like the antislavery narrative develop and shift characteristics as part of cultural history themselves. 10 Along those lines, in this essay I will retrace the composition and initial publication histories of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Benito Cereno as gendered antislavery narratives from a common antebellum moment, then return very briefly to preliminary consideration of Beloved and Middle Passage as influenced by connections to the gendered history of the genre. In focusing first on these works by Stowe and Melville, I affirm Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s recent call to move beyond essentialist 1970s and 1980s divisions between “black” and “white” American literatures to more thoughtful examination of “the interplay of traditions and voices” in both. 11 Furthermore, in exploring what at first [End Page 532] glance might seem an identical compositional context for Stowe’s and Melville’s works—grounded in middle-class white Northerners’ 1850s experiences of slavery—I hope to show how attending to gendered differences in these two texts can help avoid the tendency to overgeneralize the “white” category now receiving increased attention in social histories and literary studies. Thus, I concur with arguments...

"It's a Time in the Land": Gendering Black Power and Sarah E. Wright's Place in the Tradition of Black Women's Writing

The concept of Black Power rests on a fundamental premise: Before a group can enter open society, it must first close ranks. By this we mean that group solidarity is necessary before a group can operate effectively from a bargaining position of strength in a pluralistic society. (Carmichael and Hamilton 44) Written during height of Black Power Movement, Sarah E. Wright's This Child's Gonna Live (1969) offers a woman-centered vision of an impoverished, besieged black community finally closing ranks in order to combat systemic and individualized racism that seeks to destroy whatever community it cannot control. Set on Maryland's Eastern Shore in 1930, Wright's novel implicitly draws a parallel between nationalist, back-to-Africa movement led by Marcus Garvey in 1920s and Black Power movement gaining strength in late 1960s. Wright's novel is informed by dual influences of Black Power and women's rights, asserting as it does black women's self-respect as a necessary, foundation for the coming black nations of world (Wright, This Child 179). A forerunner of texts such as Alice Walker's Meridian (1976), Wright's novel is a powerful rejoinder to male-gender-specific notions of race reform. When Stokely Carmichael assumed leadership of SNCC in 1966, the civil rights phase of black liberation struggle was drawing to a stalemated conclusion.... traditional southern-based nonviolent civil rights movement had largely ground to a halt and was in its death throes (Allen 27). The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 had been passed into law through direct nonviolent actions led by Martin Luther King, Jr., but effectiveness of these laws for poor and working-class black Americans was undermined by inconsistency with which they were enforced. In his critique of these laws, historian Robert L. Allen writes: Perhaps most significant indication of middle-class nature of civil rights movement was fact that it did absolutely nothing to alleviate grim plight of poorest segments of black population. As late as 1968, a group of six doctors found evidence of widespread and long-standing malnutrition and starvation in rural south. (27) For Stokely Carmichael, Charles V. Hamilton, and other leaders of Black Power, solution to problems wrought by systemic, institutionalized racism was economic and cultural expressions of group solidarity that would strengthen standing of black communities politically, economically, and psychologically. Sarah Wright's This Child's Gonna Live interrogates male-oriented perspective articulated by Black Power spokesmen.(1) Like her contemporary Ralph Ellison, Wright wrote only one novel. But unlike Invisible Man, now regarded as among most important African-American novels, Wright's This Child's Gonna Live, named the most important book of 1969 by New York Times (29 June 1970), is mentioned only sporadically in bibliographies of African-American literature, even those whose exclusive focus is African-American women writers.(2) I hope this essay will serve both as an introduction to Sarah E. Wright's work for readers not yet familiar with her and as a spark to rekindle interest of those who are. Her novel is not an easy one to read, but for anyone interested in African-American literature, in modernist novel, in American history, or in relationships between men and women, Wright's novel can be richly rewarding. This Child's Gonna Live needs to be restored to its place in tradition of African-American women's writing because it bridges movements for Black Power and for women's rights. While careful in her own creative work to create positive portrayals of African-American men, Wright nonetheless criticizes all American men, including African-American men, for for a popular recognition of what is fictitiously called `manhood,' a begging which takes form of attacks on women launched from many different directions (Negro 8). …

Towards the Poetization of the "Field of Manners"

In awarding 1993 Nobel Prize for literature African American novelist Toni Morrison, Swedish Academy called Morrison literary artist of first rank whose work is unusually finely wrought and cohesive, yet at same time rich variation. The Academy statement then applauded Morrison's linguistic achievement by proclaiming that writer delves into language itself, a language she wants liberate from fetters of race. As Paul Gray correctly observes, Academy made an honorable choice Morrison, but for at least one wrong reason. Her purpose, Gray notes, is the blackness of her characters and bestow them an abstract that can understand. It is, instead, insist upon particular racial identities of her fictional people - black women and men under stresses peculiar them and their station U.S. - and to break through limitations and prejudices of those lucky enough read her fiction (Gray 87). Indeed, what is so problematic about Swedish Academy's statement is that search for abstract universalities only justifies, but also necessitates, what British scholar Raymond Williams calls of essential. Williams posits that traditional notion of typicality literature is in effect a rendering of 'universals,' those characteristics which purport be permanently important elements of human nature and human condition (101). The problem with upholding traditional definition of typicality, Williams suggests, is that, instead of looking at social and historical reality as a dynamic process, people, seeking out permanent elements of human social situation, gravitate toward not only recognition of essential but through this recognition . . . its desirability and inevitability (102). African American feminist scholar Mae G. Henderson sees problem of the rhetoric of universality be as cultural as it is political. Rather than canonizing any voice, including African American voice, Henderson would prefer the privileging of difference, or multiplicity of 'interested readings,' order resist the totalizing character of much theory and criticism - readings that can enter into dialogic relationship with other 'interested readings' - past and present. Henderson remains concerned that the rhetoric of . . . has excluded gender, race, and class perspectives from dominant literary-critical discourse as well as socio-political centers of power, and she observes that the reduction of multiplicity undifferentiated sameness . . . has empowered white feminists speak for all women, black men speak for all blacks, and white males speak for everyone (156).(2) Indeed, contrary what is suggested Swedish Academy's statement about Toni Morrison's achievement with language, best writings African American literature are those that use languages that transcend African American experience, but those which are inspired by what Morrison calls huge silences literature, things that had never been articulated, printed or imagined (M. Brown 6A). The best writings African American literature challenge cultural, political, and social configuration of literary voice America with their insistence on celebrating African American cultural heritage. As Morrison once told a reporter from New York Times, My world did shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.(3) To understand ethos of contemporary African American literature is, therefore, reappropriate our understanding of dialectical relationship between specificity and and between marginality and centralization; appreciate contemporary African American writers' accomplishments is understand importance for African Americans achieve what Houston A. Baker, Jr. …

The Hammers of Creation: Folk Culture in Modern African-American Fiction

In The Hammers of Creation, Eric J. Sundquist analyzes the powerful role played by folk culture in three major African American novels of the early twentieth century: James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, Zora Neale Hurston's Jonah's Gourd Vine, and Arna Bontemps's Black Thunder. Sundquist explains how the survival of cultural traditions originating in Africa and in slavery became a means of historical reflection and artistic creation for modern writers. He goes on to illustrate and compare how the three representative novels use aspects of African American culture, including the folklore of slavery, black music from spirituals to jazz, black worship and sermonic form, and African American resistance to slavery and segregation. The Hammers of Creation focuses on the unique narrative form of each of the three novels - Johnson's fictive autobiography, Hurston's ethnographic commentary combined with personal narrative, and Bontemps's historical fiction based on Gabriel's slave rebellion - to illustrate the range of fictional strategies black writers have employed. Through their attempts to gain cultural integrity, Sundquist explains, these writers were able to recover and preserve vital aspects of African American history. Sundquist argues that by incorporating vernacular culture and the oral tradition into their works, Johnson, Hurston, and Bontemps challenge the primacy of written narrative while creating an African American literary tradition that links the world of African ancestors and antebellum culture to the world of contemporary letters.

Sweet Home: Invisible Cities in the Afro-American Novel (review)

Reviewed by: Sweet Home: Invisible Cities in the Afro-American Novel Keneth Kinnamon Charles Scruggs . Sweet Home: Invisible Cities in the Afro-American Novel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993. viii + 296 pp. $37.50 cloth. Since most African American novels have urban settings, it seems surprising that we have had to wait so long for a substantial critical study of the role of the city in this rich body of fiction. Charles Scruggs has now amply rewarded our patience by treating fully, learnedly, perceptively the imaginary as well as actual cityscapes in four key works of the black novelistic tradition—Native Son, Invisible Man, Go Tell It on the Mountain, and Beloved —while mentioning numerous other novels and, perhaps most importantly, establishing the intellectual as well as historical context needed to consider his complex theme. Readers expecting an encyclopedic survey will be disappointed to find only passing reference to Frank Webb or Chester Himes or Gloria Naylor and no mention at all of Cyrus Colter or John A. Williams or Nathan Heard, to cite only a few. Nor does Scruggs examine foreign settings, though Wright's and Baldwin's Paris, Claude McKay's Marseilles, Nella Larsen's Copenhagen, and William Gardner Smith's Berlin might yield fruitful comparisons to Chicago, New York, and nineteenth-century Cincinnati. But the author deliberately avoids "the shotgun approach—half a page for this novel, half a page for that one." The resulting depth of treatment in Sweet Home more than compensates for lack of scope, especially since Scruggs wisely accepts the responsibility of enriching his discussion with "all the [relevant] information—historical, political, sociological, psychological, philosophical—that the scholar can bring to bear on the texts." Such information in Sweet Home includes, in addition to the usual historical sources, numerous biblical passages, Augustinian theology in The City of God, the urban sociology of The Philadelphia Negro of W. E. B. Du Bois and the Chicago School of Robert Park and Louis Wirth, Alain Locke and The New Negro, the criticism of Kenneth Burke, and the cultural commentary of Waldo Frank and Lewis Mumford. On this foundation Scruggs constructs an argument focusing on the contrast between the visionary "City on a Hill" or "Beloved Community" of utopian expectations and the grim dystopian actuality of the South Side, Harlem, or the raw outskirts of Cincinnati. The tensions generated by this contrast pervade and animate [End Page 364] much of the best African American fiction. It is certainly central in the four novels to which Scruggs devotes a chapter each. Chapter Three on Native Son takes its place immediately as one of the best things ever written on that much discussed novel, and the following three chapters are also impressive interpretations. Beloved does not fall neatly into the Wright-Ellison-Baldwin triad, but its dissonance with the black male tradition is itself instructive. The research and writing of this book are so careful that errors are scarce indeed. One might note, though, that The South Side Boys' Club appearing in Native Son actually existed—Wright worked there in the mid-thirties—and was not "a veiled reference to the YMCAs." Seville's Giralda, the model for the Wrigley Building in Chicago, was the minaret for a mosque built at the end of the twelfth century, not the cathedral incorporating it that was started more than two centuries later. But these slips and two or three typos are the only minor blemishes that this reviewer could find in this excellent book. Sweet Home begins with an epigraph from "Sweet Home Chicago" of Robert Johnson and B. B. King fame and ends with Toni Morrison's antebellum plantation named Sweet Home. In between any student of modern fiction will find much to admire and almost nothing to criticize. African Americanists will find it indispensable. Keneth Kinnamon University of Arkansas Copyright © 1994 Purdue Research Foundation

Passing in the Fiction of Jessie Redmon Fauset and Nella Larsen

Passing, which both destabilizes and reinforces the construction of ethnic identity, is seen by African-American women writers principally in the context of the denial of the right to one's chosen work. When white people pass for black they may or may not have to change the colour of their skins. Ray Sprigle, author of In the Land of Jim Crow, simply let it be understood that he was black during his foray into the South, and in a month was challenged only twice once because he talked too much.1 John Howard Griffin, author of Black Like Me2 and Grace Halsell, author of Soul Sister,3 both used chemicals to dye their skins black. Black people passing for white do not change any reality, but only exploit the fiction that 'black' people are necessarily black. Two African-American women novelists wrote fictions about this fiction: Jessie Redmon Fauset's There Is Confusion (1924), Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral (1928), and Comedy American Style (1933),4 and Nella Larsen's Passing (1929).s It should be remembered what powerful inducements there were for African-American women to pass, even if only on a temporary basis, right up to 1964, when the Public Accommodations element in the Civil Rights Act of that year, the first comprehensive package of anti-discrimination legislation since Reconstruction, imposed legal, enforced penalties for the barring of black people from any kind of social space. Even some of the most ardent anti-racist women campaigners, such as Mary Church Terrell and Lucy Parsons, did not condemn passing. Mary Church Terrell, born a slave in Tennessee in 1863, was, like Ida B. Wells, author of the celebrated pamphlet Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892) ,6 a friend of the Tom Moss who was lynched in Memphis in 1892: as a consequence she visited the White House with Frederick Douglass to ask President Benjamin Harrison

The Emerging Self: Young-Adult and Classic Novels of the Black Experience

During the last two decades, fiction written for young adults-formerly a taboo-constrained, white, upper-middle-class enclave-has come of age. Young-adult fiction now probes societal problems with frankness and often with grace. No authors have done more to bring about this change than three African American writers who are leaders in the field: Alice Childress, Rosa Guy, and Walter Dean Myers. Their reflections on growing up black in America offer thematic connections to the work of African American novelists writing earlier in this century: Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston, who were part of the Harlem Renaissance, and Ann Petry, who wrote just after World War II. Cultural roots of the differences between white and black attitudes toward both legitimate and spurious middle-class values are easy to trace. Propelled by the availability of frontier land and high wages, most white immigrants came to America hoping to achieve upward mobility and material success. Espousing the belief that hard work was justly rewarded, they embraced a lifestyle in which competitive relationships, built upon a cash nexus were the norm. Obviously, African Americans were brought to America as slaves. Until Eman ipation, their survival depended upon their ability to n urish a sense of community, partly throug a rich folk culture and fervent religious observance. After Emancipation they faced formidable barriers to economic opportunity. As Langs on Hughes writes in Puzzled,

Fixing Methodologies: Beloved

commercially inclined commentators. Reviewers almost unanimously proclaimed it a masterpiece. In just six years the number of critical essays published on this novel rivals those written on only a few other contemporary African American novels: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), a favorite of American English departments, and Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982), a favorite of women's studies departments. Like these two novels, Beloved has passed into the mainstream curriculum of our universities, at least for the time being. That passing could be seen as a measure of an increasing awareness of multiculturalism and feminism in the academy, an awareness for which many people of color and women writers and scholars have struggled. Yet I am perturbed by the attention, by the kind of critical attention Beloved has tended to receive, or to put it in our current literary critical language, by the critical discourses that I fear are beginning to appropriate this complex novel. I am not worried that Beloved will be destroyed by these discourses, for given the

Claiming the heritage: African-American women novelists and history

Claiming the heritage: African-American women novelists and history

A feminist ethic of risk

Risk is not just about specific actions fraught with danger. Sharon Welch's ethic of risk is captured beautifully by the Adrienne Rich poem Natural Resources which appears in her book: it means seeing all that needs to be repaired, acting without the illusion of certainty or victory, joining in solidarity and community with others, working without waiting for (or necessarily wanting) conventional political power, always moving forward in bravery and commitment. Welch wants us to ask ourselves If What improbable task, with which unpredictable results, shall we undertake today? If She urges us toward not a chain of singular unrelated actions, but an of the long haul, one that inspires us to reject both despair and complacency. What is broken and needs fixing, she argues, is not just deep-seated societal problems, but Western constructions of what constitutes ethical responsibility and what counts as goodness. She argues against a (EuroAmerican middle-class) cynicism which, in the face of complexity, too often leads to a paralysis of will, sanctions doing nothing, all but ignores our obligation to work on structural, long-term issues, and serves to preserve gross societal inequities and problems. Welch offers her own definition of maturity: a recognition of the depth of evil in the world (and thus the need to act), and an acceptance that barriers to justice will not be removed by any one group or one generation (and thus the need to accept the world of limits). She calls for a communicative ethics of responsible action in which one is always engaged in collective reflection and action, including mutually self-critical engagement and accountability, in order to build the conditions for the pursuit of justice and peace,and sustain moral action and political activism. Her own reliance on teachings drawn from female African-American novelists embodies this very approach. She draws on womanist writings (a term preferred over feminist among many African-American women) [nlot because [theirs] is the only 'true' voice, but because these voices disclose a knowledge of ethical responses and strategies [including narratives of engaged goodness] that is critical of my social location and [visions] of the possibilities for social change. Better editing might have made this book less dense, or shorter and less ambitious. But its powerful rendering of a joyful and passionate path towards justice, even while acknowledging our limitations, is well worth the effort. Jews and Judaism as such are virtually invisible from this book, as are our multi-layered positions in relationship to the critique of '' Euro-American '' approaches and the consequent valuing of non-dominant voices. One Jewish critique of (and thus contribution to) Welch's approach: it's true that a theology of a transcendent God with absolute power can make human beings feel as though they are falling short and are powerless in the face of the work to be done. This presents a model of the good (Le. absolute power) that is often unattainable for those working for justice, while also reinforcing human pursuits of absolute power in the name of God. Yet the passionate Jewish commitment to a covenantal partnership with God, to our obligation to act in imitation of God's own ways-performing acts of caring, healing, and justice-can offer a both/and approach to reconciling a transcendent God-notion with the of risk, and with new definitions of responsible action in the world.