Is This Resistance? African American Postmodernism in Sarah Phillips

Both critical and classroom responses to Andrea Lee's novel Sarah Phillips can be characterized by question marks and discomfiture. These responses are due in no small part to the first chapter of the novel, which includes perhaps the most racist vignette in the text: Sarah's boyfriend Henri depicts her as the offspring of a half-Irish, half-Jewish mother who was raped by a "jazz musician as big and black as King Kong, with sexual equipment to match" (11). Sarah does not respond with fury or protest, but instead runs away from her accuser and hides in a bathroom. In her review of the novel, Mary Helen Washington asks, "Why isn't Sarah angry at this insult? Why does the narrator offer intellectual explanations and refuse to identify her feelings?" (3). Washington does not come up with an answer, but ends by critiquing the novel's complicity with the narrator in evading "the disturbing implications in these racial encounters" (3). On a similar note, Valerie Smith opens her introduction to the novel with an anecdote about how Sarah Phillips "disconcerts" her students (ix). Their discomfiture, Smith writes, reveals that the novel "does not conform to their preconceived notions about black women's writing" (ix). Such notions are based upon the stories of Janie Crawford, Maud Martha Brown, Selina Boyce, and many other strong black women characters seeking self-definition in a racist and sexist world. Sarah Phillips' refusal or inability to be angry, to speak up, and to challenge the racist and sexist realities she encounters contradicts the expectations many students bring to the classroom, expectations that are shaped by a clear sense of bad and good, oppressor and oppressed. Having read Harriet Jacobs, Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, Lucille Clifton, and Sonia Sanchez—just to name a few—students come to expect that black women's writing should "center on a character engaged in a project of political or personal resistance" (Smith, x). When they encounter Toni Morrison and Nella Larsen, these same students find their understandings of these categories begin to shift, especially as they read of Helga Crane's decidedly untriumphant "return" to the United States and her eventual descent into a particular brand of black, middle-class motherhood. Yet Sarah Phillips retains her unique ability to vex her readers, whether they are students or literary critics. For Sarah Phillips is a text that raises questions about the middle-class black woman's ability to recognize, let alone resist, racism and sexism as they intersect with class privilege.

African-American Literary Postmodernism

One of the reasons students—and other readers—respond to Sarah Phillips with discomfiture stems largely from Sarah's numerous failings as an interpreter. Sarah provides her readers with no model upon which to base their interpretations of how class, gender, and race intersect to shape her life. Thus, to read (or teach) Sarah Phillips the novel, I approach Sarah Phillips the character as an embodiment of misinterpretation. Her inability to interpret how her class, gender, and race intersect in her subjugation are all evident in the scene described above and throughout the first chapter; Sarah romanticizes her economic situation in Paris, aestheticizes her objectification as a sexual commodity by Henri and his friends, and, through her inability to interpret Henri's racism for what it is, renders racist thinking merely a "special brand of humor" (12). These misinterpretations of the intersections of racism, sexism, and class privilege in Chapter 1 provide a template for reading Sarah's experiences throughout the remainder of the novel—all of which precede Chapter 1 temporally. This temporal structure combined with Sarah's misinterpretations and her refusal of African-American traditions suggest that, to understand Sarah Phillips the character and Sarah Phillips the novel, we would do well to consider them both within a postmodern literary context.

Literary postmodernism resists definitions, but can be identified through such characteristics as disjunction, open-endedness, misinterpretation, dispersal, and indeterminacy. The line between what counts as a modernist text and a postmodernist text is fuzzy to say the least, and gets even fuzzier when...