Hackneyed images of black characters circulated by nineteenth century black and white literature are rewritten now, alongside with the destabilization of long-established codes of manner. Polytropic heroes in multiple, hybrid hypostases challenge former reductive models: either such “good” stereotypes as Uncle Tom or the Mammy, or such “bad” stereotypes as the rebellious mulatto or the Jezebel. What must be reconsidered is the dissemination of black images through significant nineteenth century texts: Frederick Douglass’ Narrative (1845, 1855, 1881), Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig (1859), Harriet Becheer Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), William Wells Brown’s Clotel (1853), Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents (1861), Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892), and many others.

Furthermore, this strategy of rethinking the past becomes the major task of those writers who revise the twentieth century history. Key moments—the Great Depression, the Black Arts Movement, and the feminist movement—signify basic sources for rewriting identity. The rich variety of black fiction makes a point in stressing racial value and coupling it with issues of class and gender, national and global power structures—as shown by William Melvin Kelley’s Dunfords Travels Everywheres (1970), Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972), Clarence Major’s Reflex and Bone Structure (1975), Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters (1980), Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982), Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place (1982), Ntozake Shange’s Betsey Brown (1985), John Edgar Wideman’s Philadelphia Fire (1990), Ernest Gaines’ A Lesson Before Dying (1993), and others.

Each of the above writers is a fetish-breaker, powerfully dismantling the wrongs of history:

So this is what we want: to sabotage history. They won’t know whether we’re serious or whether we are writing fiction. They made their own fiction, just like we make our own. But they can’t tell whether our fictions are the real thing or whether they’re merely fictional. Always keep them guessing. That’ll bug them, probably drive them up the walls. What it comes down to is that you let the social realists go after the flatfoots out there on the beat and we’ll go after the Pope and see which action causes a revolution. We are mystical detectives about to make an arrest (Reed, in O’Brien 1973, 179).

Black novels function accordingly as demythologizing instances where polytropic characters are forged through the subtle process of rewriting texts that span from Zora Neale Hurston and Jessie Fauset, to Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. In Gates’ view, the central trope of black fiction is that of “Signifying” as “repetition and revision, or repetition with a signal difference” (1988, 63). The activist role of literature, its power of changing racist mentality is thus illuminated by the recent black fiction.

The primary objective for contemporary black writers is to “carry out a countershaming agenda by graphically inscribing the savage and brutal—and shamefully perverse—message of the whites” (Bouson 2000, 159). This countershaming maneuver has the role of exposing whiteness as a coercive force that has systematically created social and mental patterns of subjecting the black mind/body. In this way, postmodern authors reveal the violence embedded in the multitude of past texts, whose racist views projected African Americans as the Other, placed outside the realm of humanity. Toni Morrison suggests that the aim of the black narrative is to create liberating discourses that counteract racist ideology. Morrison turns the tables on white oppressors and reveals their horrors as the source of the “jungle” planted in blacks:

Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift, unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood… The more coloredpeople spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside. But it wasn’t the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable) place. It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them (1997 a, 198).

To conclude, by yoking together black identity issues with acute social and political matters, the postmodern African American fiction rewrites the past racial hypostases: the “bad Nigger,” the violent man, the daring mulatto, the trickster, the highly objectified/highly sexualized black woman, etc. From past instances of “self-veiling,” characterized by “an unassertive, undemanding, adaptation to the environment,” contemporary polytropic heroes attain significant moments of “intimacy,” distinguished by “freedom from compulsion, and a lucid, prompt communication with [their] spirit and the world” (Cooke 1984, 8). The need to dismantle the racist snares of language makes black authors extremely conscious about the process of writing per se. The character’s achievement of authority over mind and body is constantly related with the writer’s authority over discourse, so that the thematic freedom coincides with the linguistic empowerment.

Postmodern black writers thus get involved in a significant act of reconsidering former images or filling in the gaps of earlier texts, so that what was misrepresented or left unsaid in the past becomes now a central theme.²⁵ In certain cases, this revisionist strategy is paralleled by the need to provide an alternative to the white culture, by informing readers about the African heritage as a main component of the American culture.²⁶ The importance of African Americans in the formation of the American national self is reinforced accordingly. They not only narrate a different story from their precursors, but they also make us see history differently. Through subtle reappropriations of the past, they unravel the polytropic character’s evolution along primary moments of an ethically and spiritually enriching journey.

NOTES