Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form.

Ashraf H. A. Rushdy. Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. 286 pp. $45.00.

Many African-American novels have a political sub text, however veiled it may be, and this is especially true of neo-slave narratives, which seek to re-articulate the community's historical memory. Ashraf Rushdy concentrates on the political sub texts of four novels--Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada, Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose, and Charles Johnson's Oxherding Tale and Middle Passage--and upon the political discourses that make up "the field of cultural production" in which a revival of the genre of the slave narrative was possible. The Civil Rights and Black Power Movements are from the outset identified as conducive to this revival, the first examples of the genre appearing in the late '60s. The social conditions for the emergence of the literary form are mapped in admirable detail, comparable perhaps to the method of Georg Lucacs, who is mentioned in the introduction. Rushdy can show how all four neo-slave narratives engage in a dialogue with Black Power, a dialogue which focuses on the various strat egies available for the formation of political subjects and directed against neo-conservative tendencies of later critics of Black Power and of the Reagan era in general.

Rushdy begins his argument with a master text of the '60s, William Styron's Confessions of Nat Turner, which, along with Elkins's ideas regarding the interdependence of slavery and personality formation, triggered great controversy. Styron and Elkins on the one hand, Fanon and the Black Aesthetic critics on the other, provide the master texts for the ongoing dialogue with the sixties to be found in the novels analyzed, a dialogue which focuses on questions of black agency and subjectivity. The reactions are complex and often ambivalent. Reed and Johnson criticize Black Power for its racism and aim at aesthetic diversity more than at any clearly articulated program for political empowerment. Rushdy can show, however, that the key questions recur: about agency and stereotyping; about property, power, and cultural self-determination; about Uncle Toms and Nat Turners; and about the strategic necessity of violent acts.

Ishmael Reed was, when he wrote Flight to Canada, highly critical of Black Power, mainly because of its inability to acknowledge aesthetic values in nonprotest literature--a criticism that to some extent applies to Rushdy's book as well: In Flight to Canada the political message, however garbled it may appear in the camivalized postmodem world of Reed's Neo-HooDoo Aesthetics, is subversive, but the adaptable trickster-figure Robin, a kind of Uncle Tom, is presented as more successful than any Nat Turner-figure could be. A clear revolutionary message can only be found at the cost of demystifying the white master Swille's death. For Rushdy, Swille must have been killed by his servant Pompey, not by Mrs. Swille or her ghostly sister. Whereas Reed's novel explodes into possibilities and multiple stories, into hilarity and paradox, Rushdy sacrifices aesthetic complexity to the univocal in order to find the political agenda hidden behind carnivalesque grotesquerie. Swille's murder is compared to "the destruction of the imperialist impetus within a multinational corporation," and behind it Reed adheres to "a larger social program" and to Black Power ideas.

It is easier to plot a dialogue with Black Power and the master text of Styron's Nat Turner in Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose. The commodification of black lives by the white master and the critique of the stereotyping of the black mammy--as a female equivalent to "Sambo"--are exemplary for their subversive intent. Much of the argument is implicitly directed against the paternalistic presentation of female bondage in Styron's novel. A second line of liberation that can be linked to Black Power is the question of articulateness. Dorcas's voice is generally hidden in the novel and translated through the voices of others, while Dessa in the end finally finds a voice of her own. The novel moves from a master text in more than one sense to the rebirth of an oral slave narrative.

The dialogue with the '60s becomes more skeptical again in the works of the arch-critic of Black Power, Charles Johnson, as the postmodem love of parody, pastiche, and carnivalization subverts clear political messages. In Oxherding Tale Johnson turns against protest literature in favor of a search for individual redemption, in which slave and slave-catcher, William Harris and Horace Bannon, become more or less interchangeable. In Middle Passage slavery can be thought of as an ontic wound, and all moral judgment is sublated because of a general deconstruction of values in the face of the universal condition of man. Behind Johnson's mystic universalism Rushdy can, however, uncover an economic subtext in Middle Passage, which aims at a critique of the value of money and of the capitalist system, as love finally replaces exchange values and a revolution of the system of production is tentatively indicated. Rushdy finds a Marxist message in Middle Passage, veiled by the traditional romance and fairytale elements. He concentrates on the subversive messages of Black Power which resurface in spite of Johnson's mystic universalisms.

Many elements of the novels--such as play, paradox, ambivalence, laughter--are backgrounded in favor of the ongoing debate about race, economy, property, and violence. These themes are surely there too, but some of the novels discussed seem somewhat anemic when reduced to Black Power doctrine. Nevertheless Rushdy's book is an admirable tour-de-force. His forte is the projection of the historical horizon and the reconstruction of the multiple discourses conducive to the vogue of the neo-slave narrative. The complexity of the ongoing debate on race, economy, property, and violence, on Uncle Toms and Nat Turners, and on strategies of self-determination is mapped with remarkable expertise. Rushdy has analyzed the sociopolitical contexts of a major African-American genre. This is a noteworthy contribution to the history of political ideas as embodied in a new literary form.