South of Tradition: Essays on African American Literature (review)

The chapters that make up Trudier Harris-Lopez's collection on African American literature, as the author states in the preface, are not united by a common concern or a central argument. Instead, the "points of connection" between them are rooted in the author herself, in her "position as a southern African American scholar of African American literature," a position that compels her to "seek an unusual approach" to the texts she considers (vii, viii). The result is a volume of twelve distinct essays, each written in isolation, examining a variety of issues in a range of novels, plays, and short fiction that "are not in keeping with expected responses" (viii). Readers are provided with only glimpses of what, precisely, these "expected responses" might look like; Harris-Lopez is more concerned throughout the volume with closely reading texts in her particular way than she is with responding to previous assessments of those texts. She characterizes each of these readings as being "south of tradition," locating her critical practice at a "slant, an angle, or a jolt just below the line of what would be considered the norm" for responding to twentieth-century African American literature and to the American South. Taken together, the essays relate to each other and to Harris-Lopez's concept of "south of tradition" in two distinct ways: in some cases, they provide what the author considers to be unexpected readings of African American texts not set in the South; in other cases, they take up myriad aspects of southern African American culture and its representation in an array of texts set in that region.

Providing a summary of such a scholarly endeavor is a difficult task, but a necessary one if readers of this review are to appreciate the range of Harris-Lopez's critical gaze. The almost counterintuitive use of humor in Alice Walker's The Color Purple is the subject of the essay that opens the collection, and it is followed by an excellent reading of how racial otherness functions as a metaphor for sexuality (and vice versa) in James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room. In these two essays, Harris-Lopez is concerned with analyzing commonly unacknowledged aspects of well-known texts, an approach she likewise takes to domestic architecture in Ann Petry's The Street and to prison experiences in the plays of August Wilson. Other essays—on William Melvin Kelley's A Different Drummer, on Brent Wade's Company Man (which compares that novel to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man), and on Zora Neale Hurston's autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road—are partially motivated in a desire to bring attention to new authors (Wade) or to overlooked texts (Hurston's autobiography and Kelley's work). African American literary constructions of the South are a central concern in essays on Kelley's novel as well as in chapters on Randall Kenan's "The Foundations of the Earth" and Raymond Andrews's Appalachee Red. Issues of sexual identity frame the author's readings of Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, Wade's Company Man, Andrews's novel, and Kenan's "Foundations," as well as Harris-Lopez's denunciation of current African American entertainers in the last essay of the collection. This final essay is the one where the unexpected nature of the author's approach is most apparent and, not coincidentally, it is probably the chapter that will spark the most debate among readers. Her no-holds-barred assessment that films like Soul Food, television programs like Living Single, and even certain current novels depicting African American life display a "plantation mentality" that "would please Thomas Dixon immeasurably" is sure to provoke equally strong responses (214, 204). Along with her concern for these issues of place, space, sexuality, and racial identity, Harris-Lopez also pays attention to matters of faith—how religious belief can liberate and oppress—and on how folk culture (her knowledge of which is obviously extensive) informs African American literature...