Building a Tradition: African-American Literature in the University

BUILDING A TRADITION: AFRICANAMERICANLITERATURE IN THE UNIVERSITY LoreleiCederstrom Robert Bone. Down Home: Originsof theAfro-American ShortStory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. xxviii + 328 pp. Margaret Perry, ed. TheShortFiction of RudolphFisher. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987. xiv + 228 pp. Deborah E. McDowell and Arnold Rampersand, eds. Slaveryand theLiterary Imagination. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. xiii + 172 pp. Kerry Mcsweeney. InvisibleMan: Race and Identity. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988. xiv + 139 pp. Literary scholarship is just beginning to catch up with the demand for materials to support developing university programs in African-American studies. These four books suggest the breadth and depth of the materials now becoming available; each of these studies provides either detailed information about a single author or work, or significant insight into the literary traditions that surround the development of an African-American canon. Each can be recommended without hesitation. The new edition of Robert Bone's 1975 study, Down Home, remains the most comprehensive attempt to establish a tradition within which the individual works can be considered. Bone not only describes the common basis of the African-American short story in specifically Negro traditions-folklore and black music--but also reveals their linkages with conventional literary traditions. Although Bone has added little new material to this edition, it remains a definitive study of the cultural background of the major black American writers. Bone pays special attention to the "mixed ancestry" of the AfricanAmerican short story, noting that it is composed of a blending of two cultural heritages: "the one Euro-American, literary, cosmopolitan; the other Africanderived , oral in expressive mode, rooted in the folk community" (xxi-xx.ii). Bone names these traditions the pastoral and anti-pastoral, and relates each of the authors discussed to one or other. One might quibble with Bone2s 370 Lorelei Cederstrom choice of terms, for pastoral creates an immediate image of the stilted and artificial Renaissance form with its unreal characters and incredible plots. Bone, however, uses the term to refer to an underlying assumption of "the superiority of simple, peasant life to that of the sophisticated, urbanized, or courtly upper class." He observes, as well, that black American writing was "regional before it was an ethnic literature"; hence it contains elements of the "local color" and "plantation" schools of the South, which are both clearly pastoral in mode. For Bone, the anti-pastoral, on the other hand, is essentially the result of the black writer's confrontation with the ironies of experience and includes both realism and the picaresque modes of contemporary literature. Moving beyond the pastoral and anti-pastoral, Bone enriches his study with an assessment of the way in which these traditions are colored by the historical experience of the black author. He notes that while pastoral and anti-pastoral are the "deep structures" of African-American fiction, they are overlaid with elements derived from three other sources: the black writer's attachment to the Protestant tradition (the Bible), the writer's affection for the rural South, and the writer's anxiety concerning his or her place in American society, which is manifest as a "painful vacillation between hope and despair" (xxvi). Bone is particularly good at sorting out the inter-relationships and literary cross-pollination among the writers he discusses, and the groupings he has devised still provide useful parameters for the critic today. His study is chronological and is broken down into two large sections. The first, "The Masks of Slavery: 1885-1920," begins with a discussion of the black abolitionists, who wrote between 1845 and 1860. In this, the "Age of Douglass," the black writers modelled their work after that of the white abolitionists and wrote primarily for political purposes. The slave narratives, which are themselves becoming a key topic in literary study, are a product of this age and are well-amplified by the contextual information Bone provides. In the 1890s the bold assertions of the "Age of Douglass" gave way to the accommodationist tactics of Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee Institute. Characterized by patience, humility and forbearance, the writers of the "Age of Washington" remain a bitter memory for many contemporary black writers, especially, as Bone notes, for the revolutionary nationalists of...