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Brave New Narratives: Postrace Identity and the African American Literary Tradition

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Brave New Narratives: Postrace Identity and the African American Literary Tradition ABSTRACT Title of Document: BRAVE NEW NARRATIVES: POSTRACE IDENTITY AND THE AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERARY TRADITION Laura Camille Williams, Doctor of Philosophy, 2012 Directed By: Professor Mary Helen Washington, Department of English This study examines late twentieth-century and millennial black middle-class fiction, often described as the New Black Aesthetic (NBA), as a vital and expansive aspect of literary studies and racial discourse. I focus on fictional depictions to analyze the narration of race in a so-called postrace era. The novels in my study have in common protagonists who are writers that resemble their NBA authors. As imagined writers creating narratives in texts, these protagonists show how narratives make race. Because they exhibit the unique position that the NBA occupies in a post- Civil Rights U.S., the protagonists featured here provide both counter-narratives and dominant narratives of race. The term “postrace” dominates current discourse about race in the U.S., often to imply a class arrival and an advance beyond racial constructs. I argue that NBA fiction characterizes the post-Civil Rights black middle class as not moving past race, but rather inexorably engaging and confronting race in tandem with gender, class, sexual orientation, and/or nationality. Black middle-class protagonists in NBA fiction occupy a transient social position in which they experience figurative returns to the past. I call these returns “postrace moments”—narrative moments that connect contemporary protagonists to collective memories and political histories of race and other forms of social identity. My introduction historicizes twentieth-century constructs of blackness and postraciality in African American literature. In Chapter One I argue that fiction is the ideal form for examining the narration of race. I show how the protagonist of Trey Ellis’s Platitudes narrates himself both in and out of heteronormative definitions of social identity. Chapter Two illustrates how Percival Everett’s Erasure allows the author and protagonist to disappear into multiple narratives and counter-narratives of identity and authorship. In Chapter Three I argue that the protagonist of Danzy Senna’s Symptomatic narrates herself in relation to a foil to challenge and confirm conventional tropes. And, in Chapter Four, I show how the protagonist of Andrea Lee’s Lost Hearts in Italy narrates black femininity both on the periphery and at the center of empire. My conclusion shows how the NBA and postrace identity can expand literary studies. BRAVE NEW NARRATIVES: POSTRACE IDENTITY AND THE AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERARY TRADITION By Laura Camille Williams Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2012 Advisory Committee: Professor Mary Helen Washington, Chair Professor Kandice Chuh Assistant Professor Randy Ontiveros Professor David Wyatt Assistant Professor Michelle Rowley, Dean’s Representative (Associate Professor effective August 23rd, 2012) © Copyright by Laura Camille Williams 2012 Dedication For my parents, Odell and Isora Williams. ii Acknowledgements In an article for the New York Times’ “Writers on Writing” series entitled “Goofing Off While the Muse Recharges,” novelist Richard Ford concludes that the hardest part of being a writer lies in the conviction that “nothing in the world outside the book is as interesting as what I'm doing inside the book that day. What's most demanding is to believe in my own contrivances and to think that unknown others with time on their hands will also be persuaded.” My advisers, colleagues, friends, and family took turns locating and recharging my muse to persuade me that I was not alone in believing that this project was worth completing. I am indebted to my director, Mary Helen Washington, for her guidance and countless conversations about literature and life. I am also indebted to Kandice Chuh for shaping and pushing my thinking, David Wyatt for challenging my assumptions (and offering me a place to work), Randy Ontiveros for expanding my definitions of race and identity, and Michelle Rowley for sharing her insight. I thank the Department of English for financial support. I also thank the Minority Cultural Studies Reading Group and Yvette Pittman, Robin Smiles, Shanna Smith, Kaylen Tucker and Nazera Wright for intellectual and emotional support. Shaun Myers, Christin Taylor, and Marie Troppe endured countless discussions and drafts and raised the questions that helped to formulate my argument at various stages of the writing process. Gina Daniels, Linda Moss, and Sam Peresechensky offered gut- wrenching, levity-inducing friendship. My mother and brother provided unconditional faith. I suspect my father (never late nor absent while he lived) also had a hand in recharging my muse, particularly while I was “goofing off.” iii Table of Contents Dedication ..................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................... iii Introduction: Brave New Narratives: Postrace Past and Present .................................. 1 Chapter One: ‘Have you never read Baldwin?’: the New Black Aesthetic of Trey Ellis’s Platitudes ......................................................................................................... 30 Chapter Two: ‘No boundaries but walls everywhere’: Framing the Disappearing Author and Subject in Percival Everett’s Erasure ...................................................... 75 Chapter Three: ‘Between truth and fiction’: Race and the Uncanny in Andrea Lee’s Symptomatic and Caucasia ....................................................................................... 115 Chapter Four: Brave New World: The New Black Aesthetic in the Fiction of Andrea Lee............................................................................................................................. 151 Conclusion: Postscript on Postrace: Narrating Past and Present ............................. 198 Works Cited .............................................................................................................. 207 iv Introduction: Brave New Narratives: Postrace Past and Present Perhaps now more than ever, there is a general awareness that race is a story under constant revision in the United States. Following the course set by Critical Race Theorists, like Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado, Michael Omi, Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, and Howard Winant, who argue that the story of race is told through dominant narratives and counter-narratives, I am concerned here with how we narrate race. Unlike Critical Race Theory’s focus on the narration of lived experience, I focus on the fictional depiction of imagined experience. My project examines late- twentieth century and millennial fiction that depict the narration of race in a so-called postrace era. The authors featured in my study are middle-class Americans of varying degrees of African descent who were educated in legally desegregated environments in the U.S. Their parents are, or were, educators, doctors, writers, and ministers, sometimes even second-generation members of these professions. And, as the generation that shouldered the Civil Rights Movement, their parents changed the story of race in the U.S. Their parents’ generation advanced a narrative of racial progress through marches, demonstrations, sit-ins, and civil disobedience and litigation that led to voter registration and desegregation. I feature the next generation in my study because, as the heirs to the legacy of the Civil Rights story, these post- Civil Rights authors are primed to narrate a new version of the race story. Given their class privilege and legal recourses, we might imagine that these writers featured would create a new narrative to continue the story of racial progress advanced by 1 previous generations. While these writers do give us something new, it is not about racial progress. My dissertation determines how fiction produced by post-Civil Rights authors helps us to understand the current discourse that surrounds the narrative of race, particularly blackness, Americaness, and postraciality. The novels in my study have in common protagonists who are writers in the post-Civil Rights Era. These fictional writers are useful because they resemble their authors as the citizens in the U.S. who were specifically groomed for revising the race story. Because these imagined writers are creating narratives in texts, they focus the reader on the process of writing and show how narratives make race. And, because they exhibit the unique position that the post-Civil Rights black middle class occupies in the U.S., the protagonists featured in my study show how this kind of contemporary black expression provides both counter-narratives and dominant narratives of race. In Trey Ellis’s Platitudes (1988), for example, a postmodern novelist resists telling a traditional race story. Instead, he ultimately deconstructs black, masculine, and class identities through his flirtation with writing racial realism because it “sells.” Similarly, in Percival Everett’s Erasure (2002), an experimental novelist finds literary success only by constructing a “black” alter ego and writing racial realism—in this instance, a satirical version of Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Sapphire’s Push (1996).
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