This chapter starts by sketching the Euro-American intellectual tradition, in which the black image used to be either reified or demonized by the white people. A shudder of apprehension crosses the mind of the contemporary reader while comprehending the moral and psychological damage done by the degrading, monolithic views on racial identity. As further demonstrated, the eighteenth and nineteenth century negative definitions have produced what Du Bois calls double consciousness, the ability of the black people to project dichotomized self-definitions.

Importantly, the main section of the chapter argues for a basic redefinition of the African American identity as polytropic—a perspective that denies both monolithic and dichotomized representations, and affirms multi-faceted, fully realized characters. This redefinition of the African American identity is part of the postmodern rewriting of the literary black and white inheritance. African American postmodern novels do not simply have the role of magnifying mirrors turned toward the past, haunted by images of the unfreed, untutored black self. On the contrary, my point is to reveal that the rewriting techniques of postmodern novels disrupt supremacist cultural patterns in order to find imaginative ways for redefining black identity.

This redefinition brings forward “the excavation of black history and literature from the perspective of African Americans” (McKay and Gates 1997, 2012). The postmodern phenomenon of rewriting thus urges us to look back at those texts whose message is so intimately embedded, so adamantly chastised, in contemporary works. As readers, we get caught in this authorial love-hatred embrace—where rewriting means rereading—and we need to go back and critically reevaluate master texts of the past.

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