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Caribbean Autobiography: Cultural Identity and Self-Representation, and: Scarring the Black Body: Race and Representation in African American Literature, and: Voices of the Fugitives: Runaway Slave Stories and Their Fictions of Self-Creation (review)
- American Literature
- Duke University Press
- Volume 76, Number 3, September 2004
- pp. 608-610
- Review
- Additional Information
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Rent from DeepDyveAmerican Literature 76.3 (2004) 608-610
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These studies address the self-representation of people of color and the tensions that emerge between the self and cultural forces that surround it, including not only the immediate ethnic community but also expectations and assumptions of larger national and even international communities. Each author interrogates how writers negotiate a public self in the midst of these often competing influences.
In a most ambitious undertaking, Sandra Pouchet Paquet examines the multiplicity of self-expression in Caribbean Autobiography. Complicating the notion of autobiography as an account of personal and public elements of an individual life, Paquet introduces Caribbean culture as a multifaceted factor in itself. Paquet mirrors the Caribbean's multiplicity, due to its colonial and multiethnic past, by interpreting no less than sixteen texts that range from nineteenth-century women's narratives to twentieth-century autobiographies. Paquet expands our notions of autobiography by examining other literary forms, such as travel and conversion narratives, within traditional prose autobiography and by considering a poem as well as fragmented personal narratives. What these different genres and authors share, Paquet insists, is a tendency to create intricate identities that utilize the multidimensional backdrop of Caribbean culture.
Despite their commonality, these writers differ widely, Paquet argues, in their explorations of their Caribbean context, expressing sentiments ranging from nostalgia to ambivalence to antipathy. Challenging the notion of home as a celebrated sanctuary, Mary Seacole's The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands "disengages the autobiographical subject from the Jamaican community and repositions her in the metropolitan heart of the empire" (62). As a result, Mrs. Seacole adopts a colonial perspective that precludes any sympathy for Jamaica. Claude McKay's two autobiographies divide his consciousness into African American and Jamaican portions. A Long Way from Home fashions McKay's persona as a citizen of anywhere except Jamaica, while My Green Hills of Jamaica celebrates him as a native son. Rather than a stable site, the Caribbean figures as an ever changing factor as individuals shape their life stories to achieve particular goals. [End Page 608]
In Scarring the Black Body, Carol Henderson explores self-representation in the context of African American fiction. The body becomes the literal and figurative text employed by black writers to articulate a public self. While the larger society, Henderson writes, reinforces the notion of African Americans' inferiority by inflicting wounds and scars upon the black body, black writers use those body markings as "metaphor[s] for the reinvention of African American subjectivity" (7); they represent both the trauma of wounding and the process of healing. Henderson's critical paradigm combines "body woundedness," which centralizes the physical body as a text, with DuBois's concept of double consciousness and with methods used in cultural studies to examine the psychological and literary ramifications of wounding.
Henderson finds continuity in African American literary experience by linking wounding in the antebellum and postbellum eras. Slavery's harshness clearly represents a site of wounding for African Americans, and Henderson identifies Reconstruction (with its violent acts, such as lynching) as a continuation of the scarring of the black body. Viewed in this light, Toni Morrison's Beloved is about reconciling "the freed body and the enslaved soul/psyche" by acknowledging the physical and psychological wounds of slavery (88). Those psychological wounds are mirrored in fiction about the modern African American experience, where the trauma emanates from the urban experience. The characters...
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