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introduction Faithful Vision Its Definition and Significance in African American Culture and Fiction religious and biblical traditions that engender faith are arguably the most important cultural feature to African Americans, and therefore also to African American writers who write about black culture. However, despite the large amount of recent theoretical and philosophical work that addresses religion, critics who write about black novels seldom deal with religious and biblical traditions in fiction. It is interesting, for example, how often commentators have denied the seriousness of the treatment of the Bible and Christian faith in James Baldwin’sGo Tell It on the Mountain (1953) and how many others just ignore it and write about different aspects of the text.1 Perhaps not all black writers incorporate the Bible in some important way into their fiction, following the cultural pattern in which black people make it an integral part of life communally and individually, but black novels reveal that most writers with a significant opus explore the Bible as a dominant part of some text. Yet no study of African American fiction deeply examines how religious tradition based on faith and centrally bound in the Bible manifests itself in a significant number of novels from the late twentieth century, when black writers had the freedom and formal resources to portray the tradition as complexly as possible. Perhaps critics of African American fiction are too insulated and concerned largely with the critical discourses holding sway in the academy, reminiscent of how mid-twentiethcentury writers like Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison focused on mainstream literary traditions to establish themselves. These academic discourses do not necessarily preclude a cultural analysis showing that faith stemming 1 from the biblical and religious is a primary rather than secondary or symbolic reality in black life and oftentimes in black writing, which is what my analysis reveals. However, it is not popular practice to apply academic discourses to investigate the aspects of black novels that I analyze in this study. I would argue that many—perhaps most—African Americans have faith in the sacred, spiritual, and supernatural because belief is the only thing possible, in the final analysis, in the context of the African cultural background and black American culture and history. Particularly in light of a history of oppression, only faith can contain the unfathomable evil of the past and present and project future deliverance from it. InGo Tell It on the Mountain , the black slave woman Rachel is illiterate, but she knows the story of God’s liberation of his people in the Bible. She says, “When the Word has gone forth from the mouth of God nothing can turn it back” (71), and she thus has faith in the coming of the freedom of black people. W. E. B. DuBois in “Of the Faith of the Fathers” in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) talks about a similar faithful “religious feeling of the slave” (190). This belief is a large part of what sustained black people through slavery with “souls” that represent the essential expression of American humanity. Thinking about oppression historically, black people look at the range of human possibility and explanation and what is beyond. The African American past shows the intentions of white people with power to destroy the humanity of powerless blacks through the process of making them chattel. From this perspective, what I call “faithful vision” represents reality because it is beyond comprehension that African Americans could emerge from the destructive past as complex human beings without the agency of the sacred, spiritual, and supernatural that subverted the plans of people with power. Faithful vision also emphasizes a daily individual struggle related to the group experience, just as the Bible does, and encompasses the personal need to do what is necessary —good, bad, and indeterminate—to survive and accomplish goals. Biblical grace is a practical doctrine relating to personal and individual action because it enables forgiveness and salvation through faith. In neitherGo Tell It on the Mountain, The Souls of Black Folk, nor in life is faithful vision simplistic and otherworldly; oftentimes, it is a self-serving but powerful religious belief that relates to actions in this world.2 The Bible is the main text in cultural tradition that supports a generally faithful vision—expressed in ritual, song, and saying—of collective and individual worldly endurance, success, and divine salvation in African American culture. However, with 2 faithful vision [3.145.47.253] Project MUSE (2024-04-26...

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