Remembering the Past in Contemporary African American Fiction

Keith Byerman

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780807876787
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

With close readings of more than twenty novels by writers including Ernest Gaines, Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson, Gloria Naylor, and John Edgar Wideman, Keith Byerman examines the trend among African American novelists of the late twentieth century to write about black history rather than about their own present. Employing cultural criticism and trauma theory, Byerman frames these works as survivor narratives that rewrite the grand American narrative of individual achievement and the march of democracy. The choice to write historical narratives, he says, must be understood historically. These writers earned widespread recognition for their writing in the 1980s, a period of African American commercial success, as well as the economic decline of the black working class and an increase in black-on-black crime. Byerman contends that a shared experience of suffering joins African American individuals in a group identity, and writing about the past serves as an act of resistance against essentialist ideas of black experience shaping the cultural discourse of the present. Byerman demonstrates that these novels disrupt the temptation in American society to engage history only to limit its significance or to crown successful individuals while forgetting the victims.

Chapter One

HISTORY, CULTURE, DISCOURSE

America’s Racial Formation

It is, of course, impossible to fulfill the promise of the title of this chapter. Major works of the past two decades in various fields have undertaken to explore small parts of the topic. Studies of popular culture, the legal system, media, gender, the arts, economics, politics, philosophy, theology, education, housing, and sports have brought race issues to the forefront of the nation’s intellectual and popular awareness.¹ Race, and particularly blackness, seem to be everywhere, both in structural concerns—policies, offices, practices—and in forms of representation. At the same time, however, we have seen attacks on and suppression of serious discussion of racial matters, especially as they directly affect those who have been the victims of racist and discriminatory practices. Alongside stories of “The New Black Intellectuals,” we have new versions of the Welfare Queen and the Black Beast. It is this dialectic of affirmation and denial, both in social conditions and in ideology, that I wish to briefly explore in this chapter. This pattern of contemporary racial formation is, I believe, central to the work of recent African American narrative artists. The particular focus here is on how the past has been defined within these discursive practices.

Michael Omi and Howard Winant, in the 1994 edition of Racial Formation in the United States, define “racial formation” as “the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed” (55). They add that “race is a matter of both social structure and cultural representation” (56); more dynamically, “an alternative approach is to think of racial formation processes as occurring through a linkage between structure and representation” (56). Structure encourages and informs racial representation, while representation as ideology validates and shapes a racialized social structure. Such a description implies that race is neither an aberration nor an illusion; it is a deeply embedded part of the social order and the forms of cultural expression. It conditions if not determines virtually every aspect of life, from personal identity, to political discourse, to religious, economic, and intellectual institutions.

But while race is ingrained in the society and the culture, it is a continuously transformed and contested aspect as well: “The effort must be made to understand race as an unstable and ‘decentered’ complex of social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle. With this in mind, let us propose a definition: race is a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies” (55; emphasis in original). By this definition, the tendency to see race in America as simply black versus white is misguided. The emphasis is on body differences as sources of power struggles. Such a definition, as shall be seen, is especially useful in examining African American historical narrative, in which black bodies, both male and female, are the sites of conflict over identity, exploitation, and relationship. While this point is most clear in neo-slave narratives, where control and ownership of the body is obviously at issue, I wish to argue that these works are also concerned with such issues in the present, when black women are stereotyped as sexually out of control and black men as predatory monsters.²

One characteristic of contemporary racial formation relevant to this analysis is the dialectic of racism and racelessness that variously manifests itself. This pattern is apparent in several ways: economic and employment status, celebrity and notoriety, education, housing patterns, political rhetoric and power, academic and media analysis, legal standing, and ideological debate. In all these areas, simultaneous claims have been made of major progress toward a race-neutral society and of regression toward segregation and racial oppression. Ronald Reagan’s assertion in the early 1980s that we had ended racism was only the most prominent claim that the goals of the civil rights movement had been achieved and that corrective measures such as affirmative action were not only unnecessary but actually detrimental to final achievement of a color-blind society. What remained depended on individuals—both to end now-discredited prejudicial attitudes and to accomplish, through personal effort and regardless of color, their goals for themselves and their children. It was, as Dinesh D’Souza said, “The End of Racism.” At the same time, a plethora of works by cultural critics, educators, economists, and social scientists insisted on the reality of ongoing social problems that were strongly associated with race. New fields emerged, such as critical legal studies, critical race studies, multiculturalism, and discourse studies, which built cases for the presence of race as an integral part of American culture, ideology, and social policy and practice. Debates over political correctness, affirmative action, education, and welfare reform, among other issues, have been largely shaped by assumptions about the meaning of race in the history and life of the nation. But because the discourse itself operates within a commodity culture, it is often reduced to ideological packages in the form of best-selling books, television appearances, and sound bites for the evening news. To participate directly is to be trapped within preformed positions. Other forms of speaking become necessary, and this is the situation of contemporary writers. While it is impossible to fully map the current racial formation, I want to suggest in some detail some of the elements that have shaped recent narratives and to which their creators have responded.

Contemporary African American culture as conventionally understood may be said to begin in the last stages of the civil rights movement with the increasing importance of media representation. As images and not merely reports of marches and violence in the South entered the living rooms of America, race took on a different meaning. In her novel Meridian (1976), Alice Walker describes the impact of watching televised images of singing activists, bombed churches, and funerals on a group of college students. At the same time, those who offered an alternative to nonviolence found the media receptive to their messages as well. Malcolm X succeeded in part because he was a master of what came to be called the “sound bite,” though his actual analysis was much more significant. Somewhat later, the Black Panthers manipulated the imagery of black berets, leather jackets, and rifles to promote their agenda as part of “radical chic.” When civil disorder broke out in urban areas throughout the nation, cameras were there to record the violence and implicitly to define it as “riots,” thereby building on the traditional representation of black men as savages.

Throughout the 1960s, then, black reality increasingly became image and commodity. Cultural nationalists and revolutionaries sold their writings through major white publishing houses, and African-related materials became commercially successful products. America, both black and white, bought “blackness.” The complex history of racial interactions that had shaped the nation since 1619 was largely erased even as it was supposedly being embraced. Slogans, fashion, and fragments of historical information (“the first black to . . .”) were offered as substitutes for serious analysis.

At the same time, opportunities emerged in the entertainment field for safe, reassuring representations. Black singers, actors, and comedians, such as Sammy Davis Jr., Sidney Poitier, and Flip Wilson were rewarded richly for projecting integrationist possibilities for the nation. They were followed by Diann Carroll, Bill Cosby, the Supremes, and others, often even more successful. Any scars of the past were magically covered over by beauty, humor, and popular talent. Thus, what was considered the full range of black life was brought within the discursive universe of American culture. That this “blackness” did not in fact include the totality of African American experience and that it did not portend a resolution of racial conflict was irrelevant.

The key event of the 1970s in this context was the publication and subsequent television serialization of Roots (1976). By creating a saga of a black family with a heroic ancestor, Alex Haley brought African American experience within the framework of mass culture; by claiming historical veracity for his narrative, he made the connection between the motherland and the New World for blacks. That the story was highly problematic as history generally and as personal history specifically was secondary to its value in bringing into the mainstream notions of ancestry that had largely been limited to nationalist groups. It made a link to African royalty at the same time that it generated the image of the proud individual who is preeminently American in his insistence on rising above the emasculating effects of slavery. Moreover, it subtly undermined radical solutions to the nation’s problems by showing that blacks consistently failed to achieve freedom through escape or violence. Rather, they learned to accommodate themselves to the existing oppressive order. While they might retain some elements of African culture, these did not aid in gaining agency in the New World. The lesson for modern African Americans, then, was clear: as long as you adapt to American reality and do not presume to challenge it in any fundamental way, you can enjoy the appearance if not the substance of a meaningful black past.

Roots also enabled whites to come to terms with racial issues by emphasizing the pastness of the past. Since the story locates racist evil clearly in periods disconnected from the present, it becomes possible for everyone to condemn such evil because they do not have to relate it to experiences of the present. All people can admire Kunta Kinte for his resistance and resilience; his color is secondary to his all-American desire for freedom and selfhood. Coming at the end of the civil rights and Black Power eras and during the nation’s bicentennial celebration, it provided closure and the promise of a new, color-blind America. Blacks can be strong and proud, can overcome evil and deprivation, just like other groups in the society. And they can do it, as the hero did, on their own, without special programs or government intervention or even white involvement. The book encourages a turning to the harsh past as a matter of genealogical and antiquarian interest, not as a means of raising questions of social justice.

Roots also stimulated and reinforced the commodification of black images. Blaxploitation films, such as Shaft and Superfly, neutralized concerns about urban unrest by parodying ghetto life. The slave hero was joined by the pimp-gangster as the key representations of the black man; Kunta Kinte was remade into Mandingo, the “black buck” who is the only one who can sexually satisfy the lascivious plantation mistress and who must pay for his prowess by being burned in oil. This new image, in fact, simply repackaged the Black Beast of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century literature and film but, consistent with contemporary racial discourse, emasculated it through exaggeration of costume, violence, and language. Such figures could not challenge the social order because they could not be taken seriously.

The extent to which black power could be trivialized is evidenced by the similarities of these figures to the buffoon characters of television of the time. The Jeffersons and Good Times on the surface provided distinctions from stereotypes; after all, George Jefferson was a successful businessman and the family of Good Times, in part at the insistence of its star Esther Rolle, was a conventional working-class nuclear family. But the dress, manner, and speech of the key male characters reflected, in the case of George Jefferson, the reincarnation of Kingfish of Amos and Andy, and in the case of JJ, a minstrel version of urban black youth. Whether “movin’ on up” or stuck in the ghetto, such representations reassured white America that black men were not people to be taken seriously in any revision of the social order. The emergence of Bill Cosby as a televisual star in the 1980s provided similar belief, though in a somewhat different way. By creating an upper-middle-class family, he implicitly asserted a claim that African Americans had the same desires, ambitions, and values as their white counterparts. Material success could displace color as the central concern of life, and, moreover, it had already been achieved by those who mattered. The display of expensive artifacts of African and African American cultures on the set also suggested that culture could be defined in terms of objects, not historical engagement. In fact, such representations suggested that there was no black past except as commodities. In the achievement of black wealth and status, there was no need to remember anything unpleasant from either the past or the present. The move into modernity and even postmodernity was represented as seamless. Any contentions otherwise were simply unjustified grumblings from malcontents or from those who had a vested interest in maintaining for their own benefit a racialized order.

If anything, the 1980s and 1990s intensified the neutralization and simultaneous reinvigoration of racial discourse. A key development was “racelessness,” the ability of some blacks to appear at least to transcend their color. Cosby was a leading figure as he not only produced and starred in a crossover hit show in which race was largely irrelevant but also became a pitchman for mainstream American products. He could be seen with America’s children of all races consuming the nation’s products. At the same time, Michael Jackson became a global celebrity whose talent, ambiguous sexuality, and plastic surgery made him the ultimate nonthreatening mass cultural commodity. He could make use of putatively ghetto settings and sexual gestures in performance without intimating that these were anything other than performance. In athletics, Michael Jordan combined remarkable skills with a nonracial, nonpolitical persona that made him one of the most recognized and respected figures in the world. He perfectly served the marketing needs of his sport and of elements of the corporate world because he not only reinforced the association of blackness with the body but also demonstrated that the aggressiveness associated with the black male body could be profitably channeled and controlled. To “Be Like Mike” was to be carefully bounded, to keep explosions of energy and domination within clearly defined limits.

Thus, the racial formation generated a black imaginary that appeared to establish the terms by which racial harmony could be achieved within the culture. And through the demonization of gangsta rappers and young black men who did not accept these terms, the society demonstrated the discipline and punishment it could invoke to sustain the formation. A parallel discursive move allows black women to be Miss America and entertainment stars (Cicely Tyson, Oprah Winfrey, Whitney Houston) while verbally assaulting Anita Hill and Lani Guinier and depicting welfare recipients as promiscuous young black women so as to destroy the system of public assistance.³

While the past and present were being constructed in this manner in popular culture, related developments were occurring in the academy. The demands of 1960s protest led to the formation of Black Studies programs and accelerated scholarship in the field of black history. Black Studies resulted from the admission of significant numbers of African American students into predominantly white universities. While administrators expected these students to be grateful for the opportunity to “improve themselves,” the students, many of whom were brought in from poor inner-city neighborhoods, felt isolated and alienated. “Stripped of their identities as black people and forced into a curriculum that denied their heritage by an unconscious conspiracy of silence, black students found themselves completely, irreconcilably alienated within the ivy-covered walls of the white universities” (Fischer, 18).

What was demanded was not only a revised content within established fields and a new interdisciplinary field, Black Studies, but also a rethinking of the function of the university and of intellectual activity: “Black Studies was committed in the first instance of its determination to undoing all prevalent ‘authentic’ notions of such disciplines as history and English. Hence, at the site of the university, Black Studies presented a hugely unsettling challenge. For even as it sought in its own voice to lay claim to disciplinary status as a normal academic subject, its very conjunctive and stylistically diverse energies eradicated the referential lines of both subjectivity and disciplined academic knowledge” (Baker, Black Studies, 12-13). At the time of the creation of these programs, Nathan Hare made explicit their central purpose: “A black education which is not revolutionary in the current day is both irrelevant and useless. To remain impartial in the educational arena is to allow the current partiality to whiteness to fester” (3). Thus, Black Studies originated in the desire to advance a political agenda; one means of doing so was to promote racial pride through the recognition of black achievement. Courses in black history, literature, and other arts initially operated as sites of recovery of those persons, events, and texts that had been eliminated from the subject matter of established fields.

But this function complicated and often obstructed the other function, which was to gain recognition as a valid intellectual discipline with its own content and methodology. The political and inspirational origins of Black Studies limited its credibility in the university, since they were not consistent with the traditions of objectivity and balance that were said to be the underpinnings of modern education and research. This lack of respect among the professoriate allowed administrators to effectively “ghettoize” these programs by underfunding and understaffing them and by using them as a means to demonstrate their commitment to diversity by hiring only African Americans in them and then not making such hires in more traditional fields. In this way, the intellectual and political challenge of Black Studies could be minimized and exploited.

Black history as a specific field has followed a somewhat different trajectory, since it has been practiced in some version since the late nineteenth century. Beyond the amateur work that was produced in the Reconstruction era, W. E. B. Du Bois produced work in the 1890s that met the standards of scholarship and that also took a critical position vis-à-vis those who oppressed blacks. In this sense, his work defined what came to be understood as black history, as opposed to historiography that did not see African Americans as significant or that accepted the stereotypes of the time.

Despite Du Bois’s work and that of Carter G. Woodson, major rethinking within the profession of the role of blacks in American history did not take place until the 1950s, when Stanley Elkins and Kenneth Stampp published groundbreaking studies that saw slaves as crucial to the meaning of the “peculiar institution.” Elkins represented the enslaved as holocaust victims, trapped within a dehumanizing and psychologically and culturally destructive system; Stampp revised this view by insistin...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter One - HISTORY, CULTURE, DISCOURSE
• PART ONE - Memory
• PART TWO - Desire
• PART THREE - Family
• PART FOUR - The End(s)
• Notes
• Bibliography