The Black Columbiad: Defining Moments in African American Literature and Culture

African American Review, Winter, 1996 by Wolfgang Karrer

The readings in the nineteenth century oppose "romantic readings" of African survivalism or continuity (11), a position well-known from Werner Sollors's Beyond Ethnicity (1986). Isidore Okpewho criticizes John Roberts for his survivalist thesis on oral traditions in From Trickster to Badman (1989). Ann duCille confronts the rhetorical strategies of Afrocentrism and postcolonialism to point out oversimplifications in both as well as in the academic reactions to them. Global empire and essentialism come together in African American studies, which rejects delocalization as well as nativism. Carl Pedersen charts the Middle Passage to rewrite the transatlantic European imagination. (He does not seem to know Wolfgang Binder's essay on the same topic from 1992.) Genevieve Fabre traces the Caribbean Jonkonnu festival as negotiated role reversal, expressing a utopian desire for freedom. Extensions could be drawn to John the Conqueror in the United States. Wilson J. Moses discusses slave trials as Kafkaesque rituals of scapegoating. Annalucia Accardo and Alessandro Portelli offer a gendered analysis of the house slave, focusing on the ambivalence of that role. Steffania Piccinato provides a structuralist comparison of the slave narrative with the picaro novel. Christopher Mulvey reads Clotel as an example of the American dilemma of reconciling freedom with slavery, the Fugitive Slave Act with the Declaration of Independence. Rosemary F. Crockett attempts to rescue Frank J. Webb (The Garies and Their Friends) from oblivion by reconstructing his biography. Michel Fabre, finally, describes the delighted discovery of a profound consonance between France and the African American soul from Frances Ellen Harper to Melvin Dixon. Although the degree of scholarship varies (if we count scholarship in critical references), there is one thing these contributions share: Almost all the criticism to which these scholars refer comes from the seventies and early eighties.

This hardly changes in Part Two. Shamoon Zamir reads The Souls of Black Folk as an allegorical "Bildungsbiographie," revising the transcendentalist prophetic role of leadership into a stance of carefully listening to the voices of the past that invites comparison to the Eric Sundquist's method in To Wake the Nations. Josef Jarab studies jazz and blues reception in Czecholosvakia; Malgorzata Irek's contribution is an influence study of Berlin ethnography on Alain Locke. Paola Boi, in one of only two articles in this section reflecting recent criticism, deconstructs Zora Neale Hurston's autobiography as a record of conceptual regression. Also methodologically up-to-date is Robert Gooding-Williams's examination of the re-coding of racial difference in Casablanca, in which he finds a new stereotype - black cupids meditating white desire. Lynn Weiss offers a new reading of Pagan Spain; Sigmund Ro traces the existentialist transformation after 1945 to two root metaphors; and Gerald Early explores black magic and fraud in the twenties.

Part Three takes us to the contemporary scene and political correctness. Ishmael Reed's feud with feminists carried over into editorial policy and exchanges of letters about Harvard "thought cops" (249 ff.). The Reed section is the liveliest in the whole book, and finally reflects criticism of the nineties. Jeffrey Melnick - in an excerpt from his dissertation - identifies some of Reed's outrageous caricatures of ethnic conflict, especially in the field of African American and Jewish relations, and identifies the underlying issues: "The manipulation of ethnic boundaries can cause real divisions, and usually serves ruling-class interests. It is the responsibility of the committed multicultural artist to reveal and combat discourses that marginalize 'ethnic' expression" (311). Katrin Schwenk examines rape and lynching in terms of gender and race to discover complementary aspects of both in Alice Walker and Reed. Sami Ludwig takes a fresh look at Reed's Neo-Hoodoism in terms of Bakhtin's dialogism; Reed uses a metaphorical system of invertible loa possessions which mirrors that of Bakhtin's language theories (or those of Lacan, one might add). All three contributions open new debates, refer to contemporary critics, and are refreshingly politically incorrect.

Section Three also contains two other innovative articles: Fritz Gysin examines literary tattoos and albinos as predicaments of skin. He argues for boundary constructions more complex than those found in most Afrocentrist or assimilationist positions, and illustrates this symbolic practice from novels by Charles Johnson and John Edgar Wideman. The concluding essay on African American literary politics reaches even further. Not only do Abby Arthur Johnson and Ronald Johnson provide a critical framework for most of the other contributions and a necessary complement to duCille's opening statements, they also allow us to see the politics of collection itself in a clearer light. The Johnsons chart the new developments after the demise of the Black Arts Movement through the rise and fall of literary magazines. After 1976 the new magazines and editorial policies formed new alliances of theoretical pluralism (Baker and Gates) and gender revision (Wallace and Hernton), increasingly marginalizing Marxist and multicultural positions (Baraka and Reed). In the nineties the pluralist group has allied itself around Transition, the official publication of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University, embarking on a global expedition to (re)discover African American culture. The authors' conclusion points to the conference in Seville (1992), from whence this collection and its title metaphor spring. The collection, the workshop, the founding of the Collegium for African American Research, and the mooring at Harvard all try to overcome earlier parochialisms in African American studies and put the discussion on a multinational level: global empire or essentialism, nativism or delocalization? The forum is wide enough for feminists, regionalists, Marxists, deconstructionists, multiculturalists, and pluralists to invite dialogue. But the challenge is clear: It is up to the other literary magazines the Johnsons discuss to decide whether Gates, Harvard, and Transition will lead the field in African American studies.