Activism and the American Novel: Religion and Resistance in Fiction by Women of Color

2. Spiritual Temporalities and Histories: Cristina García and LeAnne Howe

2 / Spiritual Temporalities and Histories: Cristina García and LeAnne Howe If a democratic public sphere is to be reconstituted, it must be infused with a complex understanding of history. Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge assert that since capitalism “has consistently excluded history,” “a fully developed historical awareness is necessary for the constitution of a proletarian public sphere” (82, 81). A common characteristic of fiction by contemporary women of color is its appropriation and active reconstruction of a past that has largely been suppressed in dominant historical narratives. This fiction seeks to expand readers’ “historical awareness” in the hope that a fuller knowledge of the past will provide useful models for present political engagement and the reconstitution of a working public sphere. While dominant narratives of history view the past as merely contributing to present progress, fiction by contemporary women of color portrays the past as more directly informing the present. Rather than portraying, and thus containing, the past as having passed, the new fiction suggests that the past actively engages with the present. Of course, this idea resists Enlightenment narratives of linear time and the power dynamics they assert. Walter Benjamin describes the concept of linear time as a “progression through a homogenous, empty time,” where the past is viewed as a meaningless transition toward a better, transcendent future (261). In contrast to the emptiness of linear time, Benjamin posits “messianic time” in which “time stands still” in an instantaneous present (263, 262).1 An instantaneous present has “revolutionary” possibilities because it seeks to wrest historical narratives from the “conformism” and reduction of meaning that the “ruling class” uses to assert its power 54 / AC TIVISM AND THE AMERICAN NOVEL over the oppressed (263, 255). In contrast to a past stripped of meaning by global capital, the concept of a simultaneous present highlights those moments in the past that might prove meaningful and applicable to reconstituting a contemporary public. Novels by women of color since the 1980s seek to recover moments in the past in ways that resist the historical erasures associated with linearity . They recover lost narratives of history that demonstrate the politically diverse and heterogeneous nature of the colonial Americas. Many of these texts describe political and familial alliances among diverse peoples: voluntary kinships and sharing of beliefs across cultures, interracial slave revolts, and political alliances among indentured Asians, enslaved Africans , and Native peoples. Rather than repeat the erasures associated with mainstream narratives of the past, replacing them with a utopian view of interracial relations, the texts also describe tensions among different peoples during colonialism. They provide detailed, researched descriptions of historical conflicts and atrocities. What emerges is a fuller view of the past that looks much like, and directly relates to, the present. Many contemporary novels by women writers of color strategically use people of color’s spiritual notions of time to disrupt linear temporality, explicitly connecting colonial and contemporary times on the page. The simultaneity of past and present they assert emphasizes the importance and influence of the past in the present, in terms of both oppression and resistances to oppression . These novels suggest that political alliances in the colonial past, and the alternative publics that existed simultaneously with them, can be used as possible models for contemporary political activism. Further, they warn contemporary readers not to repeat colonial tensions between peoples, as historically these tensions led to increased oppression and the failures of interracial resistances. Revisiting this critical time in the history of the Americas is a deliberate means to inspire a re-creation of the democratic alliancesanddialoguesthatexistedthen.Whatmakesthisbodyofcontemporary novels so compelling is that it values early history in the Americas differently from many other accounts. While several voices in American literary criticism revisit the colonial past in order to find a unified culture and a body of beliefs based on Protestantism,2 these novels assert that the colonial Americas were culturally, religiously, and politically diverse, and contained numerous opportunities for political participation. Their recovery of this past maintains it is possible to re-create democratic spaces using early interracial alliances as models. The rediscovery of forgotten interracial alliances in literature coincides with a recovery of these alliances in other arenas. Historians like Spiritual Temporalities and Histories / 55 George Reid Andrews, Matthew Restall, Jack Forbes, and others provide material evidence of productive interracial alliances. Latino/a studies, American Indian studies, and hemispheric American studies (what John Carlos Rowe calls “new American studies...