Postmodernism, Traditional Cultural Forms, and African American Narratives

Chapter 2: Multiple Representations of Philadelphia and John Edgar Wideman’s Philadelphia Fire

64 — 2 — Multiple Representations of Philadelphia and John Edgar Wideman’s Philadelphia Fire According to Jacques Derrida, meaning in the West is defined in terms of binary oppositions, “a violent hierarchy ” whereby “one of the two terms governs the other” (Positions 41). Within the white-­ black binary opposition in the West, the African American is defined as devalued Other. One of the aims of many experimental/postmodern African American writers such as Ishmael Reed, Toni Morrison, Clarence Major, Bonnie Greer, Percival Everett, Samuel R. Delany, and Xam Cartiér has been to deconstruct in fiction this binary opposition, unleashing, liberating, and repositioning African American subjectivities. To escape but not leave Western logocentrism, of which the novel is a subsystem, these and other writers, as Charles Johnson earlier suggested, have returned to certain African and African American cultural forms such as the blues, jazz, Yoruba gods, the African collective unconscious, and Voodoo not to retreat from but instead to expand and/or reconfigure modernity/postmodernity and to challenge Enlightenment reason, particularly as it defines the African American, and the Eurocentric horizon of the novel. Philadelphia Fire (1990) belongs to John Edgar Wideman’s postmodern literary phase, which also includes Reuben and Brothers and Keepers.1 Of the three, Philadelphia Fire is most effective in challenging the traditional novel form, undermining the white-­ black binary opposition, rerepresenting African Multiple Representations of Philadelphia and John Edgar Wideman’s philadelphia fire 65 American male subjectivity, highlighting the crisis in representation , and challenging the violent representation of the African American as deviant. Philadelphia Fire uses a peripheral, cultural paradigm or technique to challenge the conventions of the novel. In this chapter, I examine how Philadelphia Fire contests the traditional modern novel as it aims to redescribe African American male subjectivity. I also explore how Philadelphia Fire undermines the Western quest narrative by giving heteroglossic perspectives on the MOVE (also known as the MOVE Organization) bombing. Finally, I examine how Philadelphia Fire shows its heteroglossic limits in its treatment of women in not having a femininity in its writing, that is, a writing that incorporates the self’s relation to the Other. In its desire to challenge the traditional novel, Philadelphia Fire plays with instrumental reason and other Enlightenment ideas. In an interview with James Coleman, Wideman discusses his conscious, overt efforts to violate the conventions of the modern/realistic novel, which attempts to impose a single, unitary language on heterogeneity , and to unleash differences. Wideman states that “I don’t think that you can write a very meaningful book about a culture that’s in flux, a culture that is changing all the time, and a culture [that] is infused with minority points of view . . . and [still] use the conventions and traditions of narrative fiction” (159). Also, using a peripheral cultural paradigm, the concept of radical democracy—­ a diversity of perspectives and points of view that parallel, intersect, and contradict each other, without the desire for hierarchy, totality, or mastery—­ that he borrows from Africa, Wideman’s Philadelphia Fire contests Eurocentric hegemony and gives a different perspective on the African American, one that does not construct him as experientially monolithic. In an interview with Lisa Baker, Wideman states that For African American people I am in the business of inventing reality—­ that stands on its own feet, that gives a different perspective on history, on crime, on art, on love. I’m very actively deconstructing the 66 Chapter 2 given formulas and definitions of African American culture and life, and trying to put in their place those that seem more reasonable, more real, more lively, more potentially positive. (264–65) Engaging a democratic search for the flux, or multiple meanings, Philadelphia Fire gives the reader a radically democratic text where African Americans from different socioeconomic, educational, and cultural levels represent the same event/social reality, the bombing of the MOVE row house in Philadelphia. With each African American, Philadelphia Fire shows how each station in life, along with its own individuality, affects his or her construction/ perception of the event/reality. Although Philadelphia Fire is sensitive to the immense plurality of experiences among African Americans, the book does not disassociate difference from economic and social inequality. It gives us radical democracy at the narrative and ideological levels, but it remains Eurocentric and hegemonic in terms of subjectivity except for the masculine , where, theoretically, it affirms difference but obscures this difference by positing representations...