Keith Byerman. Remembering the Past in Contemporary African American Fiction.

Keith Byerman. Remembering the Past in Contemporary African American Fiction. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2005. 240 pp. $49.95 cloth/$19.95 paper.

In the open scene of Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada, protagonist Raven Quickskill broods about his relationship to the past: "Strange, history. Complicated, too. It will always be a mystery, history." Through his signifyin(g) revision of the slave narrative form, Reed reveals an obsession with US race history that also informs the work of many of his peers. Although many critics have addressed the question of how an individual writer might understand history, until now critics have wanted for a comprehensive theorization of history's function in contemporary African American letters. In Remembering the Past in Contemporary African American Fiction, Keith Byerman answers that need with a work that is simultaneously sweeping in its foundational claims and focused in its insightful readings of particular works.

Byerman begins with the observation that since roughly the mid-1970s, a great many of the "major" African American writers treat historical subjects--examples extend from the neo-slave narratives of Toni Morrison and Charles Johnson to the historical fiction of John Edgar Wideman and Raymond Andrews to the historically-obsessed novels of Ernest Gaines and Gloria Naylor. Furthermore, Byerman argues, this emphasis on historical settings and historical subjects marks a significant shift from the "present-time orientation" of earlier writers like Richard Wright and James Baldwin, whom he reads as having had a more pressing need to use their fiction to "advance the race" by commenting on events and attitudes in their own eras. This is not to say that contemporary African American writers are not interested in their own era; indeed, as Byerman ably demonstrates, the writers he covers in this study use the past as a means of commenting on the present, that their experiences in the present era in fact largely inform their choice of historical subject matter. At the root of these authors' choices, he claims, is a desire to recast "black experience as a survivor narrative." Doing so allows them to rewrite "the American grand narrative" to afford African Americans a different understanding of their place in that history and a concomitant recognition of the different possibilities open to them in the present.

Byerman grounds his readings of these historical novels in cultural criticism and trauma theory; from the first, he takes the notion that the texts themselves are historical documents that can be read against their historical contexts in order to gain insights into the pressing racial issues that characterize their moments of composition and publication. This notion elides effectively with trauma theory, which "argues for the understanding of narratives of the past in terms of compulsions to tell that are linked to suppressions of what must be told" (5). In this formulation, the dominant culture seeks to suppress knowledge of the atrocities perpetrated against blacks; the African American writer must speak, then, from the position of survivor to make sure that the forces shaping African Americans' experiences of their blackness can be identified and understood.

Within this framework, the text groups readings of various novels under the headings of Memory, Desire, and Family, an organizing principle that recognizes dialogic relationships among texts within the contemporary African American canon. This structure emphasizes one of the great strengths of Byerman's thesis: although his approach turns on the recognition of a common interest in history, his methodology does not become a Procrustean bed in terms of form and content. Indeed, his template proves quite flexible, as he demonstrates its use in reading the works of authors who take very different views of the specific uses of history in contemporary African American life and letters.

Consider, for instance, the section of the work on Desire, which comprises readings of works by Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Raymond Andrews, and Charles Johnson. Even apart from the rather well-known conflict between Johnson and Morrison, the choice of authors for this section raises the specter of the gender wars that have plagued the African American literary community since the 1970s. Indeed, Byerman evokes that conflict explicitly, as he argues that these gender-related tensions inform, even define, the treatments of desire that these four authors present. Furthermore, he demonstrates that although their specific ends might differ significantly, these authors share some common means of achieving those ends in their uses of history. For example, both Naylor and Morrison use history to engage the "master narrative" of African American women as objects of desire whose eternal lot in life is suffering. However, as Byerman notes, the two authors engage the dominant story to different ends: where Naylor "appears to reinscribe rather than erase the master narrative," Morrison is "consistently concerned with the possibilities for the shaping of black female selfhood" away from that place of subjugation (84-85). By contrast, both Andrews and Johnson concern themselves with the subject of black male desire and, through that lens, they examine the structure and function of the black family in a world riven by desire. Once again, Byerman claims, this pair of writers work with similar concerns to very different ends. He argues, in his assessment of Andrews's Muskhogean County novels (Appalachee Red, Rosiebelle Lee Wildcat Tennessee, and Baby Sweet's), that the author "offers little hope for either social justice or individual change" (106). By contrast, "Johnson offers hope for meaningful transformation" through the recognition and transcendence of personal desire.

No brief assessment of these "Desire" chapters can do them justice; in much the same way, one cannot get a sense of the scope of Byerman's project without actually handling the text. Remembering the Past in Contemporary African American Fiction provides readings of 21 novels by nine different authors, a range which demonstrates Byerman's breadth of knowledge. Even more impressively, not one of those 21 readings feels cursory, even though the text fills only 240 pages. Byerman achieves this remarkable feat because his prose is lucid, compelling, and concise; he has produced a very readable book that accomplishes a great deal in a relatively small space and thereby has made another substantial contribution to the field of African American literary studies. Remembering the Past in Contemporary African American Fiction is, if I may be so bold, a book that I wish I had written, and one that will serve scholars and students of African American literature well far into the future.

William R. Nash

Middlebury College