By insisting on various ways of revising the literary tradition and its “racially infected language” (Morrison 1992, 12), the present book analyzes various ways in which postmodern black texts reshape the African American identity. It questions the black and white texts that have proliferated the subordinate status of African-Americans in relation to the superiority of white Americans, as well as those texts that have fixated blackness into heroic postures that copy white models. The work also discusses how postmodern black authors fill in the gaps of the literary tradition that keeps silent over racial or sexual aspects of the physical and moral enslavement—the tradition that “drops a veil over proceedings too terrible to relate” (Morrison 1987, 109).

Born out of the critical alertness of the contemporary revisionist context, this work redefines the postmodern black character’s identity as polytropic.¹³ A semantically loaded concept, the polytropic identity does not presuppose only a geographical and spiritual movement away from imprisoning conditions, but also a disruption of rigid social, moral, and gender norms. African American identity becomes a verb and not a noun, a process, and not a state, so that progress is made possible from browbeaten dependence to redemptive independence. Achieving autonomy is not only a physical act, but also a psychological one, in which the major objective is the awareness of one’s freedom. As Morrison beautifully puts it, after escaping physical bondage, comes the hardest part of “claiming ownership of that freed self” (Morrison 1997 a, 95).

The black self is no longer a unified entity, but a plurivocal one, whose multiple existential roles must be seen in connection with important historical moments. Treading along the figurative avenues of this always-shifting existential itinerary, such polytropic protagonists evolve from a powerless state of lack of acknowledgement to a liberating one of self-naming. Paul L. Dunbar’s famous line—“Speak up… an ‘spress yo’se‘f”—so compellingly reiterated in Ntozake Shange’s Betsey Brown, characterizes black protagonists (1985, 22).

The change in perceiving racial identity is reflected by the black authors’ ability to control language, so that the struggle for increasing self-confidence is subtly paralleled by the struggle for discursive power. At the existential level, the polytropic characters strive to rip the sociopolitical web in which they are caught; at the textual level, African American authors dare to go out of the prison-house of language—to depart from stultifying roles imposed on black identity by the white intellectual tradition. This is the main reason why postmodern black writers have turned discourse into a backlash, a possibility of going back in time to free language from fixed, essentialist, or universalizing definitions. True enough, the return of the writer to past texts is paralleled by the metaphorical movement of the polytropic (“round”)¹⁴ characters toward freedom—a complex movement that no longer follows the linearity of the traditional narrative pattern.

In aligning themselves with the postmodern techniques, contemporary black authors make use of new narrative forms, such as parody, pastiche, irony, paradox, and fragmentariness. However, by asserting their belief in the ethical notion of communal values, postmodern black writers distance themselves from those contemporary authors mostly preoccupied with reinventing form and style. While paying attention to language, African American writers “are not inclined to neglect moral and social issues in their narratives” (Bell 1987, 284).¹⁵ Through discourse, they change our perception of racial power, and proceed to dislocating the pattern embedded in the previous story.

Via the process of rewriting, the postmodern African American writers do not only propose new definitions of black identity, but also present past characters in a new light. One of the essential aims of this book is to reveal how these postmodern authors make us reread the earlier texts by taking into account their contemporary perspectives. In this way, Herman Melville’s ambiguous black characters are reread differently after Charles Johnson’s rewriting of “Benito Cereno.” Harriet Beecher Stowe’s black pacifist and bellicose mulatto can be fully reconsidered after Ishmael Reed’s scathingly parodic view. Harriet Jacobs’ image of the black Jezebel is powerfully reshaped by Toni Morrison’s insightful neoslave chronicle. The cliché of the nineteenth century “good girl” is displaced by Alice Walker’s subversive rewriting of gender roles. Also, Richard Wright’s concept of “bad nigger” or violent man is redeemed by Ernest Gaines’ heroic embodiment of black masculinity.¹⁶