The African Diaspora & Autobiographics: Skeins of Self and Skin (review)

Chinosole's book has a preface, nine chapters (each devoted to an author or a book), a conclusion, a selected bibliography of books cited, and another of books for further research (which I take to be books whose material the author was unable to accommodate), and an index. The first set of individual chapters includes essays on Olaudah Equiano's Autobiography, Richard Wright's Black Boy, Peter Abraham's Tell Freedom, Agostinho Neto's collection of poems, Sagrada, and George Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin. These texts are by men. The second set of chapters, this time on books by women, is organized "around the theme . . . matrilineal diaspora," as the preface explains. This arrangement is apparently designed to allow for what is called "a gender-sensitive discourse which [sic] is distinctly womanist" (p. xii). The four chapters in this second set are devoted to Harriet Jacobs's Incidents, Assata Shakur's Autobiography, Evelyn Williams's Inadmissible Evidence, and Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name.

The first draft of this book was apparently completed in 1989. Apart from occasional references in the footnotes (which alarmingly look like they were prepared using the 1975 MLA stylesheet), very few indeed of the post-1988 scholarship of the kind envisioned in the series introduction features in the book.

We are encouraged by the series editor to read the book as intended "to challenge social and philosophical preconceptions that block the integration of philosophy with other disciplines" (p. vii). I see very little of that challenge beyond several general thoughts on the nature of narrative, the constitution of the self, its relationship to community, motherhood, and Descartes. In the chapter on Agostinho Neto's Sagrada, for example, Chinosole insists that the "distinctive feature" of that work, a feature that "ties it to the other autobiographical writings already treated," is "Neto's use of narrative" (p. 59). What narrative? It turns out that the narrative is simply the recall of "actual life experiences" (p. 59), not necessarily Neto's. Chinosole knows better than to equate the voice in every poem with Neto's. To do so, she says, would "render a naive reading"; she proceeds, nevertheless, to regard "narrative voice, the speaker, and Neto's textual self as roughly corresponding though not identical" (p. 59). Whence, in her reading of the poem "Whom I Greet," she holds that "The voice . . . is like that of an actual person. Instead of masking the existence of an actual speaker, a specific person and a place are highlighted as the subjects" (p. 60).

Chinosole's preface explains why this book's argument is muddled up. "First, I examine the narratives discursively, focusing on how each work shapes the autobiographical self and protests slavery, colonialism, and racism; secondly, I use eclectic literary methods to examine narrative strategies" (p. xi). And further: "No hidden ephemeral idea hovers above this collection of essays descending in the end as one grand pan-theory. I draw from several schools of discourse and literary criticism to suit the stated and understood aims of each narrative" (p. xiii). This is no way to proceed with a project that, quite correctly, finds fault with "critics and theorists [who] fall in step and replicate issues of identity and ambivalence as if these were central concerns of the oppressed people represented" (p. 158), and posits (contra the poststructuralists and deconstructionists) that "[T]o view eace outside the epistemological and ideological formations that manufacture it would simply replicate the grossest aspects of racist ideology" (p. 159). For a work ostensibly influenced by W. E. B. DuBois, Cedric J. Robinson, John Gwaltney, and Stephen Butterfield, and aims to challenge the received authority of Edward Margolies, Harold Bloom and "even Henry Louis Gates, Jr." (pp. 15-16), a great deal more discipline and rigor is clearly...