Corina Crisu - Polytropic Identities in the Postmodern African American Novel - Chapter I: A Constructive Critique: “Double-Coded Texts”

Corina Crisu

Rewriting

Polytropic Identities

in the Postmodern African American Novel

Chapter I

Cultural and Theoretical Contexts:

Rewriting, Revision, and Black Postmodernism

A Constructive Critique: “Double-Coded Texts”

The term postmodern may very well be the stumbling block of the present endeavor to discuss rewriting identity in the postmodern African American novel. This is due not only to the difficulty of pinning down a clear definition of postmodernism, but also to the ideological resistance to postmodern discourse felt by many black writers.² Nonetheless, the term is unavoidable: for one reason, it delineates the period of black fiction after the 1970s, and for another, it refers to the specificity of late twentieth century black writing, which is particularly focused on revision.

By initiating an analysis of the cultural and theoretical contexts of the postmodern African American novel, this chapter investigates black intellectuals’ insistence on their own constructive critical enterprise by means of unflinching resistance to the white forma mentis, as well as constant attention to the black tradition.³ In this direction, Wahneema Lubiano asks: “What is at stake for positioning a reading of a black American novel within the discourse of postmodernism?” (1994, 149). Lubiano’s question can be a theoretical leitmotif traceable in the works of those critics who have especially examined the idea of black postmodernism (bell hooks, Madhu Dubey, and Lawrence Hogue), and it can be further explored within a larger context (in writings by Michael Awkward, Houston A. Baker, Keith Byerman, John F. Callahan, Barbara Christian, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Mae Henderson, Deborah McDowell, Toni Morrison, Barbara Smith, Valerie Smith, James Snead, Robert Stepto, Alice Walker, Susan Willis, and others). Most of these critics have disseminated their theories upon the culturally fertile soil of African American studies. These theories promptly accommodate the black writers’ goal to create new cultural representations, while insisting on the importance of race-class-gender definitions.

To reformulate Lubiano’s question, we can ask: In what way have African Americans delimited their own black postmodernism within the general discourse of postmodern criticism? An answer to this question can be found in Hans Bertens’ The Idea of the Postmodern, where he observes that “it is not the world that is postmodern, here, it is the perspective from which that world is seen that is postmodern” (1995, 19). Bertens cogently differentiates between two kinds of postmodernism: first, a “good” version, “which critics refuse to call postmodernism,” and, second, a “bad” version, “which they contemptuously call postmodernism” (1995, 9). The first type is supported by those theorists who are “engaged in the necessary process of erasing the old, harmful, intellectual structures of liberal humanism in order to make room for new ones.” The second type is promoted by those who “are merely engaged in the wanton destruction of intellectual property without the ultimate aim of rebuilding” (1995, 9).

Bertens’ illuminating comment on a type of a good, creative postmodernism suits most black authors’ efforts to question previous racial concepts and explore new methods of reconfiguring African American identity and history. Moreover, in the context of the contemporary debate on postmodernism, African American authors are not simply engaged in an act of intellectual erasure, but primarily in one of cultural revision. In this sense, the politics of rewriting in black postmodern texts are “double coded,” so that black texts reconfigure the literary canon, while focusing on their own cultural specificity (Hutcheon 1997, 107). Major texts by Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Ishmael Reed, and others, undermine inasmuch as they underline; they subvert certain meanings inasmuch as they legitimize others. Evoking Jean Fran�ois Lyotard’s famous phrase, these writers’ “incredulity toward metanarratives” does not solely manifest itself as a means of destruction, but mostly as a means of rewriting both their black heritage and the Eurocentric tradition (Lyotard 1984). Black authors castigate hegemonic cultural forms, in the same way as white authors do; however, black authors’ “parody of high culture is sustained by an alternative value system” (Byerman 1985, 219).⁴

This revisionist aspect of black literature is consistent with the argument of the present book that the postmodern African American novel offers new constructions of the African American identity through rewriting the black and white traditions alike. Since rewriting is an intentional authorial process of rethinking previous texts, my selection of novels by Charles Johnson, Toni Morrison, Ishmael Reed, Alice Walker, Ernest Gaines, and Ntozake Shange is based on their redefinitions of black identity by rewriting either black or white authors, or both. Proposing this flexible, triangulated model, the present work explores black authors’ reconstruction of significant representations of the African American character. In this way, my objective is to reveal how postmodern black novels forge new ideological frameworks of knowledge through novel ways of understanding the experience of the black character. Hence, the specificity of the black postmodernism as a meaningful, constructive critique delineates itself from a vague, widespread understanding of postmodernism.

Indeed, the crisis of representation, the annihilation of moral values, and the aesthetic chaos—which have generally been seen as attributes of postmodernism—are no longer primordial for black postmodern writing. Contemporary black authors are part of a late, mature stage of postmodernism that moves beyond the premises of the postmodern condition marked by meaninglessness, fragmentariness, and uncertainty. Even if postmodern black authors still make use of fragmentariness, irony, parody, metafiction, self-reflexivity, masquerade, playfulness, and simulacrum, these authors employ these postmodern devices not simply for demystifying earlier literary conventions, but mostly for their strenuous goal of redefining the meaning of their racial inheritance.⁵

Many postmodern black authors rewrite former texts through revisionist methods that create progression, contrast, and difference. As Christian Moraru remarks, rewriting “does more than just lay bare its own techniques, linguistic apparatus, fictionality, and, in relation to this, intertextual make-up” (2001, 20). The mode of rewriting refers to the “re-formative and transformative nature of postmodern rewriting,” so that “rewriting re-writes” (2001, 20-21). Thus, rewriting has little to do with copying, remaking, and duplicating, and more with redefining, rethinking, and reshaping a literary tradition. Rewriting is defined as a postmodern phenomenon of reworking emblematic texts of the past in order to reshape racial, social, and cultural values. Rewriting becomes a constructive method whose purpose is not simply one of repetition, but mostly one of producing change, of making readers envisage cultural representations in a new light.⁶

As further argued in the next sections, the present work becomes part of a broader theoretical endeavor that involves both resistance and revision, while insisting on portraying the African American identity within an intertextual, intercultural, and interracial framework. More precisely, the next two sections anchor this chapter in two consequential movements deeply related to the postmodern literature: the Black Arts Movement and Black Feminist Movement. Ultimately, the final part supports my approach to the culturally rich phenomenon of rewriting by offering an insight into the principal directions of a black revisionist literary theory. Like the rest of the book, this chapter has been conceived out of the idea that no literary text can be understood in isolation from its cultural and theoretical context.

NOTES

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