382 CLA JOURNAL Frydman, Jason. Sounding the Break: African American and Caribbean Routes of World Literature. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014. 184 pp. ISBN: 9780813935737. Paperback: $24.50. Sounding the Break: African American and Caribbean Routes of World Literature explains the rationale for Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1827 statement that “[n]ational literature is now rather an unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature [Weltliteratur] is at hand” (1). In the introduction, Jason Frydman uses Paul Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic periodization” to offer an alternative narrative of world literary history that promotes “a diasporic idea of Africa before European hegemony, extending to our own contemporary moment through the works of Du Bois, Hurston, Carpentier, Walcott, Condé, and Morrison” (7-8). Frydman’s subsequent examination of the interplay among European, African American, and Caribbean authors who historically have been analyzed within different global, national, and regional frameworks is as important for the study of world literature as it is for the study of African diaspora literature, because it decenters Europe’s role in world literature, destabilizes temporal narratives of literary progress, and deconstructs reemerging binary oppositions in contemporary literary criticism. In Sounding the Break, Frydman reconsiders African American and Caribbean authors’ diverse twentieth-century literature in a world literary context. While examining early to mid-twentieth-century literature in chapters one through three, Frydman demonstrates Du Bois’s appreciation of the classics, deconstructs oral/textual binaries in Hurston’s writing, and examines Carpentier’s attempts to “break [the] Latin American dependency on European literary trends” (66). In chapters four through six on mid-to-late twentieth-century literature, Frydman emphasizes Walcott’s movement across theoretical binaries like “‘African/ European’”and“‘colonial/anticolonial’”(Dash qtd. in Frydman 92), maps Condé’s “material involvement with world narrative systems” (102), and reconsiders Morrison’s “African American vernacular culture as one node rhizomatically linked to a sprawling global array” (131). At times, Sounding the Break’s loosely chronological structure and reiteration of historical narratives and oppositional binaries that have been used to privilege Europe over Africa seem to go against the grain of Frydman’s broader theoretical aims to more fully recognize the “African diasporic textuality” of “world literature’s longue dureé” (142); however, Frydman’s nuanced comparative analyses expose significant transatlantic connections among European, African American, and Caribbean authors and genres, such as Du Bois’s modernist aesthetics, Carpentier’s baroque techniques, and Condé’s “gothic elements” (113). More specifically, the examination of Goethe’s and Du Bois’s mutual appreciation of the classics emphasizes world literature’s earlier African origins and diasporicroutes. InTheNegro(1915),DuBoisrepresentsAfricaasthe“foundation” of the classics (25), and his integration of “classical culture” (36), such as in The Book Reviews CLA JOURNAL 383 Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), unravels perceived differences between “AngloAmerican ” and “Afro-American” modernisms (39). After demonstrating world literature’s“longue durée,”such as Africa’s earlier and more foundational roles, and the modernist overlap among twentieth-century European and American authors, Frydman reconsiders oppositional binaries that reappear in literary criticism of twentieth-century African American and Caribbean literature (12). The comparative analyses of diverse twentieth-century texts that traditionally havebeenexaminedwithinAfricanAmericanandCaribbeanliterarycontextsrather than world literary contexts meaningfully deconstruct unevenly valued binaries that have been associated with Africa and Europe, such as orality and textuality. Relevant examples of twentieth-century African American and Caribbean literature’s diasporic routes and hybrid networks include the simultaneous orality and textuality of the Pentateuch in Hurston’s Tell My Horse (1938) and the focus on “Afro-Caribbean culture”as a means to“displace Europe as the privileged center of perceptual and artistic authority” in Carpentier’s Bildungsroman, ¡Écue-Yamba-Ó! (1933) (65). The fusion of folk and elite discourses in Walcott’s play, The Sea at Dauphin (1954), and the destabilization of mythical and historical binaries vis-àvis criticism of the griot in Condé’s Ségou (1984-85) also are notable examples. SoundingtheBreakinsightfullytracesworldliterature’sevolvinghistoriography and African American and Caribbean literature’s global origins, intertexts, and networks. In the conclusion, Frydman explains the importance of recognizing the global intertextuality of African American and Caribbean literature, even if texts resist a global context, such as in Morrison’s novels. By reconsidering...
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Oct 1, 2018
Zeynep Temiz + 1
Open Access
