In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [Firs [223 Line —— -2.7 —— Norm PgEn [223 ⠕ CHAPTER 8 Putting down Parking Lots out There Morrison’s Unpaved Male Paradise Morrison’s seventh novel, Paradise (1997), lives up to its mystical number in her cosmos; it also figures as an inversion of its creator’s original handiwork, The Bluest become blackest Eye. The book represents in more ways than one a culmination. Third in a trilogy on the African American experience, its chronology encompasses the failed Reconstruction of the 1880s as well as the almost as unsuccessful second Reconstruction of the 1960s, marking with savagely ironic sexism and racism the date of the American bicentennial, July 1976. Signifying on Dante’s three-part Divine Comedy, Paradise discounts the American Dream. It insists on the impossibility, even the danger, of earthly perfection.1 If Dante’s Paradiso transcends earth, Morrison’s embraces the inextricability of the heavenly and the not-so-divine. While Il Paradiso confines itself to Catholic cosmology, Paradise articulates then extends Africanist, European, African American, and womanist spiritual and artistic sensibilities . Like Dante and Virgil, Paradise’s male characters are determined by what is “Out There.” The frontier myth continues to inform American masculinity. Michael K. Johnson finds contained within the frontier narrative ’s chronicle of conquest a plot of male identity formation, which rests upon the belief that an encounter with otherness transforms the subjectivity of the hero.2 The hero thus becomes a new man and the representative of a new manhood. His masculinity ranks superior to both the savagery of the American Indian and the ultracivilized maleness of 223 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [224 Line —— 0.0 —— Norm PgEn [224 the European because American manhood combines the best elements of both. If the white frontier master narrative accounts, then, for the achievement of an American masculinity, the black man has been denied his manhood. Johnson contends that African American male writers have, in fact, engaged the mythic narrative of the frontier, altering and extending its tradition in ways that transform the experience of journey into a black one. Like her colleagues, Morrison envisions the frontier allegorically as the imaginative realm of “what if,” an American place where black community thrives. However, unlike the exclusionist thinking of many black male writers, Morrison’s position remains antiutopian. Emblematic of the mass exodus of blacks from southern and eastern states into freshly settled frontier territory, the male founders of Haven and of the new haven called Ruby represent what William Loren Katz refers to as Black People Who Made the Old West. Peter R. Kearly summarizes the work of recent frontier historians who collectively acknowledge that “the American West was not just populated by heroic cowboys and gun-slinging desperados, nor white homesteaders threatened by tommy-hawk wielding Indians, nor macho hard-drinking and gambling bachelors with the only women being whores and mothers of too many children” (10). Frontier scholar Patricia Limerick suggests that the popular conception of the word westerner presents “an image of a handsome white man on a handsome horse” even though white males made up a minority of the western population (94). The concept of “the West” has been conflated with white migration westward so that “whites are given homogeneous authority over the history of the settlement of the West despite the fact that multitudes of African Americans and immigrating people from Asia were among the thousands who migrated to the territories west of the Mississippi” (Kearly 10). Historian John Ravage confirms that, since Spanish settlers arrived with over forty thousand blacks along with undetermined numbers of mulattos and mestizos, black people were already occupying land acquired later by the U.S. government in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. In addition, the French came accompanied by domestic servants from colonies in Jamaica, Haiti, and the West Indies. The great Indian peacekeeping purge of 1817 saw Cherokee, Choctaw, Seminole, Creek, and Chickasaw tribes segregated from their black family members. Ex-Union buffalo soldiers, assigned to keep frontier peace after the Civil War...

Share