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Spaces of Possibility in African American Literature Elizabeth Boyle 'Home - or a hole in the ground'? Spaces of Possibility in African American Literature Elizabeth Boyle Submitted for the degree of Ph.D. School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics February 2008 Summary of "'Home - or a hole in the ground'?: Spaces of Possibility in African American Literature" Elizabeth Boyle Submitted for the degree of Ph.D., School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, February 2008. This thesis argues for a complex relationship between African American literature and liminal space, predicated on the historical facts of transatlantic slavery. While recent critics of African American literature have argued for the importance of historical and civic space in shaping raciaJised discourse, the role of liminal space has not been well examined. This thesis examines texts by three African American writers - Harriet Jacobs, Ralph Ellison and John Edgar Wideman - and one Caribbean Canadian author, Nalo Hopkinson, to argue that their literary representations of Iiminality perform two functions: firstly, symbolising the experience of slavery and its attendant experiences of incarceration; and secondly, problematising mainstream categories of race and identity. By investigating the narrative construction of these liminal spaces, this thesis will extend the categories of 'African American' and 'literature' in two important directions: towards the future and into the black Atlantic. The following five chapters will address how the symbolic use of narrative Iiminality enables black writers to resist or appropriate the cultural and ideological structures imposed by white Europeans in the New World and also those structures later developed within a rapidly urbanising North American society. Firstly, Harriet Jacobs's slave narrative addresses the restrictive architecture of slavery and domesticity and, through Linda Brent's attic hideaway, Jacobs expresses a concern with endurance and female authority. The Ralph Ellison chapter examines the shifting nature of Iiminality and subjectivity in the post-slavery migration environment; Invisible Man's cellar engages with racialised tropes of deterritorialisation and desire. John Edgar Wideman addresses ideas of race and artistic responsibility in his treatment of a contemporary suburban bombsite, assessing the difficulty of achieving spaces of possibility in the face of racialised urban decay. The concluding chapter uses Nalo Hopkinson's speculative fiction to challenge the essentialist construction of an African American liminal aesthetic by enacting its subversive qualities across the geographical boundaries of the black Atlantic. Hopkinson's projection of a racialised underground onto the new spaces of technology also disturbs traditional models of genre and discourse. ii Abstract This thesis argues for a complex relationship between African American literature and liminal space, predicated on the historical facts of transatlantic slavery. While recent critics of African American literature have argued for the importance of historical and civic space in shaping racialised discourse, the role of limInal space has not been well examined. This thesis examines texts by three African American writers - Harriet Jacobs, Ralph Ellison and John Edgar Wideman - and one Caribbean Canadian author, Nalo Hopkinson, to argue that their literary representations of limlnallty perform two functions: firstly, symbolising the experience of slavery and its attendant experiences of incarceration; and secondly, problematising mainstream categories of race and identIty. By investigating the narrative construction of these liminal spaces, this thesis will extend the categories of 'African American' and 'literature' In two important directions: towards the future and Into the 'black Atlantic'. The following five chapters will address how the symbolic use of narrative liminality enables black writers to resist or appropriate the cultural and ideological structures imposed by white Europeans in the New World and also those structures later developed within a rapIdly urbanising North American socIety. Firstly, Harriet Jacobs's slave narrative addresses the restrictive architecture of slavery and domesticity and, through Linda Brent's attic hideaway, Jacobs expresses a concern with endurance and female authority. The Ralph Ellison chapter examines the shifting nature of IIminality and subjectIvity in the post-slavery migration environment; Invisible Man's cellar engages with racialised tropes of deterrltorialisatIon and desire. John Edgar Wideman addresses ideas of race and artistic responsibility in hIs treatment of a contemporary suburban bombsite, assessing the difficulty of achieving spaces of possibility in the face of raclallsed urban decay. The concludIng chapter uses Nalo Hopkinson's speculative fiction to challenge the essentialist construction of an African American liminal aesthetic by enacting Its subversive qualities across the geographical boundaries of the black Atlantic. Hopkinson's projection of a racialised underground onto the new spaces of technology also disturbs traditional models of genre and discourse. iii Acknowledgements I am grateful to my supervisors Duco van Oostrum and Alex Houen, and to numerous other colleagues and members of staff in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at the University of Sheffield for their help during the writing of this thesis, especially Rachel van Duyvenbode, Danny Karlin and Marcus Nevitt. I would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding through my MA degree and three years of my PhD degree. I would also like to thank the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies, University of Virginia for a Visiting Scholarship during January - February 2006, also made possible through AHRC funds. Lastly, and most importantly, I would like to thank Isobel and Hugo for their love· and support. iv Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgments iii List of Illustrations v Introduction: Space, Text and Racialised Discourse 1 One Loopholes of Retreat: Henri Lefebvre, Lived Space and 37 Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) Two A Fall into Space: Deterritorlalisation and the Rhizome in 70 Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) Three Disobedient Ways of Dwelling: Race, Text and Urban 106 Decay in John Edgar Wideman's Philadelphia Fire (1990) Four The Hollow Loses Its Bottom: Heterotopia, Signifying and 151 the Urban Landscape in John Edgar Wideman's Philadelphia Fire Five Warping the Mirror: Cyberspace and Nalo Hopkinson's 197 Midnight Robber (2000) Appendix: Summary of Midnight Robber 259 Bibliography 262 v List of Illustrations Figure 1 Plans of the Liverpool slave ship, the Brookes, in 1789, 7 showing 482 slaves. Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament, vol. 2 (London: L. Taylor, 1808). Image courtesy of Wilberforce House, Kingston upon Hull City Museums and Art Galleries. Figure 2 Resurrection of Henry Box Brown, at Philadelphia. 13 Henry Box Brown, Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself (Manchester: Lee and Glynn, 1851) [Frontispiece Image] Figure 3 Map of Edenton, North Carolina, 1813-1842. 44 Developed by George Stevenson and drawn by Kathleen B. Wyche, North Carolina State Archives. Figure 4 Molly Horniblow's house: reconstruction to scale of 50 elevation and floor plan showing Jacobs's hiding place. Designed and drawn by Carl L. Lounsbury, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Figure 5 Smoke from Osage Avenue on the day of the bombing, 137 May 13, 1985. Photograph by Bettmann/Corbls. Figure 6 Aerial photograph of Osage Avenue after the bombing, 137 May 18, 1985. Photograph by Bettmann/Corbls. Figure 7 Esu-Elegbara. 199 Figure 8 Map of the Atlantic World c.1750, showing slave trade 201 routes. Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. vi­ vII. Figure 9 'In Tune with the Times .. , Africa!' Yuri Gagarin salutes 227 the African people from space. The Morning of the Cosmic Era (Moscow, 1961). Reproduced In Walter A. McDougall, 'Technocracy and Statecraft in the Space Age--Toward the History of a Saltation', The American Historical Review, 87.4 (1982), pp. 1010-1040 (p. 1012). 1 Introduction: Space, Text and Racialised Discourse One day I hit my head against something, and found it was a gimlet ... [I] succeeded in making one hole about an inch long and an inch broad. I sat by it till late into the night, to enjoy the little whiff of air that floated in. In the morning I watched for my children. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girll Stepping out of the elevator that had brought her to the roof, she was led to a table just in front of a long window whose gently moving curtains suggested a cool breeze. It was, she thought, like being wafted upward on a magic carpet to another world, pleasant, quiet and strangely remote from the sizzling one that she had left below ... [She] looked out over some lower buildings at the bright unstirred blue of the lake reaching away to an undetected horizon. Nella Larsen, Passing2 In a scene from Nella Larsen's 1929 novel, Passing, an African American woman, Irene Redfield, ascends to the roof of the Drayton Hotel in order to escape the sweltering summer heat of the Chicago streets. Irene rides the hotel elevator like a 'magic carpet' and is ushered to a seat near a window from where she can look out 'over
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