The One All-Black Town Worth the Pain: American Exceptionalism, Historical Narration, and the Critique of Nationhood in Toni Morrison's Paradise - African - Critical Essay

African American Review, Summer, 2001 by Katrine Dalsgard

I am aware that arguing that Morrison discerns an exceptionalist strain in African American discourse is risky business. Because of the slave experience, African Americans have always stood in a fundamentally problematic relationship to the exceptionalist narrative. Paraphrasing Vincent Harding, Albert J. Raboteau aptly reminds us of "one of the abiding and tragic ironies of our history: the nation's claim to be the New Israel was contradicted by the Old Israel still enslaved in her midst" (9). [3] it is not surprising that those later American writers, such as the ones mentioned above, who helped re-form and develop the American intellectual canon along exceptionalist lines, were for the most part of European origin. As Europeans, they were more likely to see "themselves as heirs to the Puritans and other exceptionalists." As Byers suggests, if "the first anthologies used in American literature courses had been edited by powerful critics who were also the children or grandchildren of slaves-the canon might have looked a good deal different" (93).

The African American skepticism toward exceptionalism has not been least pronounced in the last quarter of a century, in which African American writers and critics have sought to establish a separate cultural tradition. Rather than being seen as a small and aberrant part of a largely white tradition, the argument goes, African American texts should be studied in relation to the culture patterns and forms of expression developed in Africa, during slavery, and among Southern black folk. Using Morrison as an example in her book American Exceptionalism (1998), Deborah L. Madsen suggests that Morrison's Beloved (1987) is only related to exceptionalism indirectly and by contrast. "By reinstating the history that exceptionalism would forget," Madsen argues-that is, by working within the paradigm of slavery rather than that of the city upon a hill-Morrison challenges the assumptions and exclusions of exceptionalist rhetoric (152). Similarly, Madsen holds, by identifying the Africanist presence in American culture as the hidden referent at the canonical American tradition in her essays in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), Morrison "recontextualizes American literature so that classic 'white' texts are seen afresh within the historical moment of their production and reception, uncensored by exceptionalist expectations" (150).

Yet, while the Afrocentric insistence on cultural separatism has generated a wealth of important new knowledge about African American culture, the hegemanic character of European American culture implies that exceptionalism is not so alien a concept to African American culture as Madsen's argument might suggest. On the contrary, Byers argues that, "even in the case of voices from the position of the other, those who seem to have the most powerful impact are figures such as, in the African American tradition, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, Ralph Ellison, Martin Luther King, and Toni Morrison, who do invoke exceptionalism" (101). To Byers's list, I will add that even Malcolm X, the foremast proponent of black nationalism and African American cultural separatism in the early 1960s, occasionally resorted to the exceptionalist strategy of critiquing his contemporaries by referring to the ideals of the founding fathers. [4] All in all, Paradise is far from the first African American text to narrate the com munity's aspirations in exceptionalist terms.