A Home Elsewhere: Reading African American Classics in the Age of Obama (review)

Speak the name Barack Obama while discussing just about any topic you can think of—from NCAA football, to health care, energy, or U. S. military policy—and the conversation will take a sudden turn. Deployed by supporters and detractors alike, the first “Obama” that enters an exchange almost invariably triggers a string of qualifying statements and prefatory claims. After this moment of recalibration, the flow of the conversation is likely to be redirected by explanations and declarations of “how-much-I-like” or “why-I-disagree-with.” Against this grain, Robert B. Stepto establishes a conversation about Barack Obama with an alternative point of entry and a distinct trajectory. In A Home Elsewhere: Reading African American Classics in the Age of Obama, Stepto fulfills his mission as a pioneering voice in African American literary studies by measuring Obama’s exceptional reach in the U. S. national imagination. Regarding the President as an African American writer first and foremost, Stepto brings Obama into dialogue with three literary heavyweights: Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Toni Morrison. Identifying the President’s contribution to African American letters, A Home Elsewhere establishes a context for evaluating Obama as a cultural phenomenon both African and American. The collection thus provides readers with an opportunity to situate the President on the American cultural landscape with the kind of precision that sound bites, photo-ops, talk shows, and editorial pages neither offer nor deliver.

Two dissimilar sections structure Stepto’s volume. Part one collects the three lectures he developed following Obama’s victory in the 2008 presidential election and delivered as the W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures at Harvard University. Stepto here offers close readings of moments from Obama’s Dreams from My Father as a way of understanding the Obama phenomenon and acknowledging its relationship to other autobiographical narratives within the African American tradition. Part two of A Home Elsewhere is comprised by a series of Stepto’s previously published essays that provide readers with additional purchase on part one’s explorations of Obama as an African American writer. Here, Stepto considers issues of race, education, blackness, displacement, and the reception of African American authors in conversation with Obama and his writing. Part two thus appends and enriches the arguments presented in the opening section.

In his introduction to part one, Stepto notes that the inspiration for the Du Bois lectures came to him in the fall of 2008, while writing an introduction for a new edition of Douglass’s 1845 Narrative. He explains that “I couldn’t help thinking about Douglass’s Narrative and Obama’s Dreams being first books, books that were black male bildungsromans, books that were unto themselves part of each man’s effort to create a self and an identity.” Recognizing that such thoughts were not isolated in the wake of the 2008 presidential election, Stepto realized “that there was a project to pursue that involved being attentive to how we read African American literature in the present moment knowing and actually being stunned by the fact that an African American writer is our president” (3). Stepto undertakes this project by making the case that Dreams from My Father entered a conversation with a long, well-established tradition in African American letters. A Home Elsewhere accordingly brings Obama’s work into direct contact with African American questions about belonging, fatherhood, and Africa that Douglass, Du Bois, and Morrison raise as well. Following Obama through a series of public and private spaces—the airport customs office, the schoolhouse, and the basketball court—Stepto contends that it is along the American color line that Obama learned to lay claim to the phenomenon going by his name.

The acquisition of names is in fact discussed in Stepto’s second lecture, “W. E. B. Du Bois, Barack Obama, and the Search for Race,” as Stepto examines Obama’s account of his first day of school in the U. S...