ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: IMAGINARY ESCAPES: FUGITIVE IDENTITY CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE Rewa Burnham, Doctor of Philosophy, 2014 Dissertation directed by: Professor Zita Nunes Department of English Since the antebellum period, the fugitive has been one of the most consistent figures in African American literature. My dissertation explores the descendants of this figure, focusing on representations of black fugitive that have emerged in late post-civil rights literature by African American authors. I respond to recent debates about the usefulness of distinguishing African American literature as a category separate from American literature in the post civil rights era by examining literary texts in which the authors address their own difficulties articulating contemporary African American identity through inherited literary forms. Each of my authors, I argue, creates a fugitive writer-protagonist who, unable to produce a racial identity narrative to suit his or her experience, abandons traditional literary genres and reading practices—such as the written poem, slave narrative, autobiography, bildungsroman, and academic literary criticism—in favor of performance, interactive reading, speculative autobiography, and hybrid forms of scholarship. I maintain, ultimately, that the late twentieth century insistence that “race is socially constructed” is activated through experiments with literary form and interactive reading practices appropriate for our time. In chapter one, I examine Phyllis Alesia Perry’s novel, Stigmata, in which she presents the novel of slavery as a limited form for representing contemporary African American identity. Instead, Perry argues that African Americans should rely on more interactive forms of representation that focus on the duty to the future rather than the losses of the past. In chapter two, I focus on Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle. The novel suggests that the interactive spoken word form enables the collective articulation of racial grievance while validating individual racial narratives, which challenge ideas about race sedimented in the history of conventional literary forms. In chapter three, I turn to Gloria Naylor’s autobiographical novel, 1996 . Naylor resists realism as a method for representing contemporary black life. Instead, she positions herself as the central figure in a speculative novel about race in America in order to draw attention to the ways black people are literally and literarily policed. In the concluding chapter, I analyze innovative texts produced by Henry Louis Gates, Saidiya Hartman and Carla Peterson illustrate that African American literary scholars also struggle to find a form to represent African American history and identity in the twenty first century. IMAGINARY ESCAPES: FUGITIVE IDENTITY IN CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE by Rewa Burnham 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 2014 Advisory Committee: Professor Zita Nunes, Chair Professor Carla Peterson Professor Psyche Williams-Forson Professor Edlie Wong Professor David Wyatt ©Copyright by Rewa Burnham 2014 Acknowledgements I thank Jaron Bowman for his optimism. I thank Zita Nunes for her patience and encouragement and Carla Peterson for her support and enthusiasm. I could not have done this without the love and prayers of my family and the aggressive goodwill of my dissertation support team: Jackie Padgett, Ondrea Rhymes, Schuyler Esprit and Nina Candia. ii Table of Contents Introduction: Fugitive Figures and Fugitive Forms…………………….…………………………1 Chapter One: “Surely I Want to Get Out”: Escaping Slavery in Phyllis Alesia Perry’s Stigmata ………………...……. 38 Chapter Two: “Stay Black and Die”: Escaping the Canon in Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle ………………………………………..…… 72 Chapter Three: Black Literature Under Surveillance: Autobiographical Escape in Gloria Naylor’s 1996 ………...…………….…109 Chapter Four: Escaping History: The Fugitive Turn in African American Historical Writing………………………………… ...... ……………………………..........………...…148 Works Cited………………………………………………………………………………..181 iii Introduction: Fugitive Figures and Fugitive Forms “Steal away, steal away, steal away to Jesus. Steal away, steal away home I ain’t got long to stay here.” --African American Spiritual “Centuries down the line, the problem is how to explain the way by which ‘race’ translates into cultural self-production, at the same time that it is evidently imposed by agencies (agentification) that come to rest in the public/administrative sphere, or what we understand as such. The provocation is to grasp its self-reflexivity, which is presumptively ‘private’ and ‘mine ’” (Spillers 381). --Hortense Spillers “’All the Things You Could Be by Now If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother’: Race and Psychoanalysis.” “Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope—a faith in the ultimate justice of things,” writes W. E.B. Du Bois in the concluding essay of The Souls of Black Folks (162). In “Steal Away to Jesus,” an exemplar of the form, the hope for freedom and justice is embodied in the fugitive figure who “steals away” to a “home” outside of the plantation economy, a psychic space signified by Jesus. 1 Thus, the song suggests that the “gifts of the spirit” that Du Bois attributes to black culture are embodied in the figure of the fugitive—the one who dares flee oppression (162). The fugitive is one of the most familiar figures in the African American literary tradition. The prominence of this trope indicates its importance. In “Imaginary Escapes,” I analyze fugitive figures that emerge in late post-civil rights African American literature in an attempt to understand the continuities and discontinuities between post-civil rights African American literature and the literary traditions that preceded it. 1 Steal Away to Jesus was one of many songs used by enslaved Americans as a code for subversive action. The song is frequently attributed to Nat Turner who is said to have used it to call his followers to strategy meetings in preparation for the 1831 rebellion he led in Virginia. For more on this, see Dwight Hopkins’ essay, “Theological Method and Cultural Studies: Slave Religious Culture as a Heuristic” found in Changing conversations: religious reflection & cultural analysis (1996). 1 Even a cursory review of African American letters reveals that the fugitive of the sorrow songs has had a long afterlife. Indeed, it is difficult to identify a work of African American literature that does not contain a fugitive figure, meant here a character who embarks on an illicit journey with the hope that his /her migrations will enable escape from state sanctioned social confinement. During the antebellum period, authors of slave narratives traced the fugitive’s flight from southern chattel slavery to debilitating social restriction in the North. During the post-bellum years, the philosophy of racial uplift, characterized by the efforts of exceptional African Americans to move members of the race out of poverty through education and socialization, undergirded much of the literature. Although the African American intellectuals at the forefront of the uplift movement represent the antithesis of fugitives, the fugitive figure lives on in novels like Charles Chestnut’s The House Behind the Cedars (1900) , Pauline Hopkins’ Hagar’s Daughter (1901-1902) and James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912). These novels feature African American protagonists whose complexions allow them to “pass” as white. Passing novels document the efforts of fugitive protagonists to escape the stigma of blackness through the performance of whiteness. After the First World War, the New Negro Renaissance offered variations on the theme of the fugitive who “passes” yet fails truly to escape the crippling oppression of Jim Crow racism. Protagonists in passing novels such as Jesse Fauset’s Plum Bun (1928) , Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) , and George Schuyler’s Black No More (1931) attempt to escape oppression by slipping into whiteness. Writers also suggest flight to foreign lands as a reprieve from the racism of the color line. In the years following the Second World War, social realist literature in the 1940’s and modernist literature in the 1950’s each 2 provided their own versions of fugitives who run from the law in search of unencumbered personhood. During the Civil Rights Movement, African Americans united in public support of fugitive figures like Malcolm X and Angela Davis and voraciously consumed their autobiographies. As in the earlier periods, the fugitive figure appears frequently in post-civil rights literature. African American authors have produced neo-slave narratives that re-imagine the lives of fugitive slaves since the late 1960’s. The authors who participated in the Black Women’s Literary Renaissance in the 1970’s and 1980’s represent African American women as fugitive figures who, successfully and unsuccessfully, flee from the limitations imposed by both racial and gender stereotypes. In “Imaginary Escapes” I focus on fugitive figures that materialize during the late 1990’s, in the shadow of debates about canon formation and literary theory sparked by the publication of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature in 1997. The fugitive figures in this study flee from the restrictions that canonization and the subsequent commodification of African American literature