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The Quest for Identity in the Afro-American Novel
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17597 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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7 / 1990 |
9,681 Words |
| Author
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Bernard W. Bell
Bernard W. Bell is professor of English at the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst. His latest book is The Afro-American
Novel and Its Tradition (1987). |
If being an American of European descent is, as Henry James wrote, a complex fate, then being an American of African descent is doubly so. Much of this complexity for Afro-Americans, as Ralph Ellison's narrator and black discourse reminds us in Invisible Man, is derived from our paradoxical visibility and invisibility to most white Americans. In the words of Ellison's nameless narrator, "When they [whites] approach me [the nonwhite other] they see only my surrounding, themselves, or figments of their imagination - indeed everything and anything except me."
To the most popular high Western culture jeremiahs of the 1980s, former Secretary of Education William Bennett and Professor Alan Bloom, the author of the best-seller The Closing of the American Mind, contemporary reaffirmations of white hegemony in the literary canon may be an auspicious sign of a return to the good old days before the Black Arts movements and the feminist movement of the 1960s. To me and probably many black readers, however, this peculiar invisibility is yet another sign of a white cultural ideology that marginalizes Afro-American texts and of the unique double consciousness that most black Americans experience in their quest for identity. For, to paraphrase James Tuttleton's observations on the American novel in "Teaching the American Novel into the Void" in the May 1989 issue of this magazine, to try to define an Afro-American novel, or the Afro-American novel, is to provoke issues of complex cultural significance, comparative national definition, and literary form: issues that "touch upon our deepest sense of ourselves s a people."
Double Consciousness and Afro-American
... (1914 of 61725 Characters)
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