Alan Rice. Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic

African American Review, Spring-Summer, 2005 by Edward Margolies

Alan Rice. Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic. London: Continuum, 2003. 244 pp. $115.00 cloth/$24.95 paper.

Somewhere Mark Twain wrote that Wagner's music was better than it sounds. Similarly one could say Alan Rice's Radical Narratives is a better book than it reads. If one is able to plow through dense and turgid academic jargon, replete with words like "problematize," "deprivilegize," and "literalize," one might find some rather astute insights. To compound readers' impatience, Rice sprinkles large doses of terms from Marx to Lacan to deconstruction that further muddy the matter. To be fair, however, several of the scholars from whom Rice quotes sound not unlike him. I dwell on this density because not only does such writing obfuscate and distance us from what Rice wants to say, but it tends also to dehumanize the lives and sufferings and achievements of his subjects--African slaves and their descendants. This kind of dehumanization is precisely what Rice wants not to do as he inveighs against what he regards as the white West's self-deceptions.

Among other things Rice attempts to discover common threads of resistance in the lives of North Atlantic blacks. In effect he believes that from the seventeenth century to the present day, black men and women have produced counter messages under the trappings of white mainstream culture. He insists that these subversions are not confined to America alone, as many seem to believe, but communicate their otherness by a variety of means throughout the whole region. Finally Rice deplores the West's general ignorance (or willful blindness) of the black presence as a major determinant in the development of European and American economies.

Much of the above has been explored and mined by other writers and to Rice's credit he cites most of his sources, but if there are no startling revelations, he does summarize and synthesize material that might otherwise be considered extraneous. At the same time, he concedes that much of the African American and African British subcultures are necessarily malleable. That is to say, they may change their outward appearance, but in the end what they describe are strategies of survival. Certainly readers may feel that Rice here and there strains to make his case, although even at his most tendentious he is provocative. Mainly missing are the positive life-affirming aspects of black culture independent of white hostility. Moreover, Rice might have given more attention to how black culture has penetrated Western mainstream cultures. Conversely, Western ideals of equality and individual freedoms have permeated black ideologies. Indeed as early as 1793 Haitian rebels justified their uprising on the same grounds as did French and American revolutionaries.

Be that as it may, Rice does undertake to inspect large chunks of history. Underlying much of the book are the misperceptions blacks and whites have of one another. As an instance, the first white slavers viewed their newly purchased chattel as potential cannibals; at the same time Africans feared that their white captors wanted to eat them. A more up-to-date example of contrasting reactions is the 1913 sinking of The Titanic on her maiden voyage. The establishment press and white public responded to the news as a disaster, but Rice uncovers black "toasts," jokes, and chatter mocking the event. Momentarily setting aside endemic racial resentments, the more immediate causes lay in the policies of the Titanic ship owners who had stipulated no blacks as passengers or crew be allowed aboard.

The sea looms large in black culture from the agonies of the Middle Passage to African dreams and fantasies of a return to their native lands. In more recent times blacks have crossed and recrossed the Atlantic carrying messages of freedom to all who would listen. One chapter tells how pre-Civil War black abolitionists lectured widely in England as well as in the States, and how in the twentieth century figures like Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois followed suit. The latter were not unaware of racial injustices in their host countries but felt the greater good would be served by "embarrassing" America from abroad. White apologists, on the other hand, argued at the very start that whatever their status--even bondage!--blacks were better off in higher Christian civilizations. Euro-American communities did, of course, acknowledge that slaves not only provided cheap essential labor but also possible libidinal surplus value. To illustrate, Rice describes in detail an 18th-century engraving (reproduced in the book), The Voyage of the Sable Venus from Angola to the West Indies, suggesting the erotic possibilities of black women. But as a general corrective, Rice cites recent conceptual paintings by black artists designed to awaken a suppressed historical consciousness.

Rice's last chapters lay more emphasis on what he calls the West's historic amnesia. He also rues the dearth of monuments and other public reminders of the traumas of the African diaspora. A more flagrant example of the suppression of memory is the disguised racism of the 1935 film King Kong. Here the giant gorilla (a metaphor of the American Negro) is overcome by the white man's superior technology as the poor beast stands atop the Empire State Building, swatting away fruitlessly at swirling airplanes. Fears of miscegenation are expressed by Kong's lust for a white woman and, importantly, Kong's enforced passage to New York from the Borneo jungles (the equivalent of the horrors of an African slave ship) is conveniently omitted.