Imagining Grace: Liberating Theologies in the Slave Narrative Tradition. - Review - book review

African American Review, Winter, 2000 by Reggie Young

Kimberly Rae Connor. Imagining Grace: Liberating Theologies in the Slave Narrative Tradition. Urbana: U ot Illinois P, 2000. 311 pp. $32.95.

Imagining Grace uses a self-referential approach which combines elements of Marxist and Black Aesthetic liberation theologies while arguing for the inclusion of nonreligious theological perspectives in the consideration of slave narratives. Using Pablo Freire's conception of the interrelated interests in liberation of the oppressed and oppressor (Pedagogy of the Oppressed), Connor argues that the ongoing slave narrative tradition conveys liberation messages for both blacks and whites in the United States. Although slave narratives are generally considered indigenous to African American expressive culture, the text draws on Herbert Aptheker's claim that "the religion of abolitionism 'differed little from what today is called the theology of liberation.'" For Connor, this means that the slave narrative tradition is rooted in the antebellum abolitionist movement and that its theological underpinnings are more related to a shared liberation theology between blacks and whites than to an Afro-Christian religious cu lture that developed in slavery. In a study directed at the African American studies market, some will question the invitation for "nonblacks" (read 'whites') to find grace through a highly subjective excursion into blackness. Such a foray, even figuratively, may arouse suspicions of gentrification.

Connor raises the issue of her race ("born of white parents") and social perspective ("entitled") while asserting that "the abomination of slavery and the ongoing implications of racism could be linked to the failure of the imagination of nonblack people who resisted seeing anyone of color like themselves." She argues that slave narratives empower non-blacks to share in the experiences of the "dispossessed," allowing them to imagine grace as they share in the liberation of the enslaved while actualizing their own liberation from prejudice and willed ignorance. Connor challenges white society to open its eyes to deep-seated and continued racial inequalities, and to overcome the oppressive legacy of "whiteness" by assuming a space within "blackness." Though noble in theory, this places the burden of redeeming whites from the sins of their past racial oppression on African American expressive culture. In constructing a liberation theology to serve as a vehicle for the imaginative liberation of whites from their participation and complicity in slavery and its lingering effects, many African American readers will hear the voice of Ellison's Mr. Norton proclaim, once again," 'You are my destiny.'"

Connor backs her assertion that non-blacks have the ability to assume blackness by statements such as one by James Cone which claims that "being black in America has very little to do with skin color. To be black means that your heart, your soul, your mind, and your body are where the dispossessed are." This allows Connor to "become as the authors of these testimonies might suggest, 'black like me.' "The statement, however, taken from Cone's book The God of the Oppressed, specifically addresses the reconciliation of white and black churches and not individuals outside of a religious context. Connor's study risks reducing blackness to a condition of oppression and dispossession and relegating black life to little more than a resistance movement that anyone can join through imaginative acts. John Howard Griffin's use of we in Black Like Me to describe himself and the African Americans with whom he interacted during his racial-crossing experiment is license for Connor to assume a "transformative identification" of blackness, although Griffin clearly warns readers that "to get from the white world into the Negro world is a complex matter."

Dismissing the work of Dwight Hopkins and others involved in the development of a black liberation theology that grows out of the black church tradition, Connor claims it to be "problematic ... as a resource for the kind of analysis I am undertaking in this study." By not fully examining many of the conflicting differences between black liberation theology and the liberation theology movement of Latin America (Cone does this in Black Theology: A Documentary History), Connor too easily applies elements of this form of liberation theology to African American literary and cultural production when the relationship between the two is tenuous, at best. Connor cites Ellison's Shadow and Act while arguing for a liberation theology based on "revealing shared human dimensions," but ignores the problems Ellison exposes in Invisible Man concerning the dynamics of conflicting black and white cultural and social interactions in the brotherhood of a shared human dimension.

Discussions concerning autobiographer Richard Wright, novelist Ernest Gaines, visual artist Glenn Ligon, and dramatist Anna Deavere Smith illustrate Connor's desire for a multigenre consideration of the slave narrative tradition. This leads to a chapter which proposes an extension of the tradition to include non-blacks. In examining jazz artist Charlie Haden's participation in the classical black musical form and his commitment to universal social justice, the text justifies his addition, in part, by invoking "authorial prerogative." But in a study that excludes African American poetry in its consideration of the slave narrative tradition, the inclusion of a white musician is not the most cogent gesture toward a real or imagined reconciliation of the races. It makes one question whether Connor is truly able to subscribe to the concept she cites from Freire which states that the repentant oppressor must step "into the situation of those with whom one is solidary." Reserving the rights of prerogative and choic e while claiming solidarity with African Americans may be unintentionally close to what Freire calls "an oppressor tactic." In the reality of a market economy, making space for white artists in the slave narrative canon, despite their possible commitment to social justice, may result in the displacement of those who are actual descendants of African slaves. In selecting works which best represent the author's agenda to extend the tradition into a shared black and white cultural space, what results is a study that insists on imagining grace from a position of the privileged and not of the oppressed. Grace, however, implies unmerited favor and not something that is self-bestowed.