Legba's Crossing: Narratology in the African Atlantic

Conclusion: Dialectics of Globalization, Development, and Discourse

Conclusion Dialectics of Globalization, Development, and Discourse In the previous five chapters, I have examined structures of narration informed by African diasporic hermeneutics. These interpretive modes provide models that imagine and work through the dialectics of race, nation, and/or national belonging and textual representation. James Weldon Johnson’s struggle to articulate African American subjectivity in the face of Jim Crow segregation, rampant antiblack violence, and systemic thwarting of blacks’ citizenship rights mandated that he cross the boundaries of genre, breaking free from the discursive and epistemological expectations of conventional form. Audre Lorde’s Zami attempts to write an autobiographical African Atlantic self unfettered by conventions of autobiography; the narrative authorizes its critique of Western imperialism We have come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note . . . It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned . . . America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.” —Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “I Have a Dream” De Busha hab five to six horse, dem lib well, nyam belly full, lib na good house; we lib na hut . . . we pay half a dollar rent; den dem want to gib we shilling a day. Tell me now, how much lef fa ya when week out? No half a dollar lef fe you? Den wha fa buy fish? Den wuh fe gib parson? De Busha get ten shilling a day; dem want to rob we . . . —Woodville Marshall, “Blacks’ Hopes and Expectations of Emancipation” { 165 } { 166 } conclusion by situating the African Atlantic self symbolically within the material geographies of a Grenada both revolutionary and subsequently invaded. In No Telephone to Heaven, Michelle Cliff’s “quilted structure” of narration tasks readers with acquiring an “African Atlantic literacy” in order to glean more fully enduring legacies of the ravages and challenges of colonialism that African Atlantic peoples face in the context of colonialism’s inherited hierarchies of color and class. Earl Lovelace’s Salt asks readers to consider what it might look like for African Atlantic peoples to in fact be “liberated” rather than “set free” and “granted Independence.” Liberation from strictures of conventional Western freedom discourses provides an intriguing and multiethnic model for national development. Liberation through Great Time and its multiple narrators and stories operationalizes democratic principles for those who remain trapped by strictures of colonial and neocolonial epistemological formations. The Cattle Killing, by John Edgar Wideman, imbues the act of narration with potently liberating power. As with Cliff and Lovelace before him, Wideman’s readers are imbricated directly within the creation of a narratology of black subjectivity. They are liberated from conventional Western epistemology and, in particular, Western exegetical formations. All of these texts, to varying degrees, rely upon African Atlantic paradigms that impact the production of meaning and oversee the process of interpretation. African Atlantic literacy inheres in entities, concepts, and processes such as the Legba Principle, àshe, Great Time, quilting, and jazz. The narratives of Johnson, Lorde, Wideman, Lovelace, and Cliff are energized by ruptures, fissures, and formal departures that fundamentally challenge Western logocentricity. They create multivocal quiltings for new national possibilities. Our own energetic interpretive engagement with such narratological arrivals and departures precisely necessitates our development of African Atlantic literacy. Such literacy (as I have argued in the introduction) includes recognizing and recouping the literal (and frequently suppressed) history of black resistance to white hegemony; resistance to linear, cause-and-effect simplifications replete within “official” versions of African Atlantic history; and self-conscious resistance to any propensity to impose upon African Atlantic narratives the valued and normalizing expectations of Western epistemological and hermeneutical traditions. Dialectics of Globalization { 167 } What is at stake for African Atlantic narrative is not a role in postmodernist narratological play but an extension and deepening of a very different and long-standing tradition of black narrative. For these narratives are most actively energized by their resonant accounts of the failures of symbolic historical moments to actualize their promises of black liberation . Johnson’s text clearly demonstrates the failure of the U.S. nation fully to deliver the promises of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution; his text indicts, in its symbolic energies, the abysmal failure of Reconstruction. In...