How to Read African American Literature: Post-Civil Rights Fiction and the Task of Interpretation by Aida Levy-Hussen (review)

In her timely and original book How to Read African American Literature: Post-Civil Rights Fiction and the Task of Interpretation, Aida Levy-Hussen focuses on contemporary fictions depicting slavery to participate in the critical debate around the significance of "historical return" (3–4), which centers on the value and power of the past to shape present-day cultural and political agency. Rather than taking a unilateral position, Levy-Hussen shifts the focus to the implicit desires driving the questions about the past's relevance and presents new possibilities to address what she identifies as an "[i]ncreasingly obdurate critical impasse in black literary studies" (16).

While acknowledging the long-standing reluctance to apply psychoanalytic theories to African American texts, Levy-Hussen makes a case for their careful, critical use and shapes several chapters around the "psychoanalytic idioms [of] trauma, masochism, and depression" (7), connecting her project most notably to Christina Sharpe's Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (2009) and Darieck Scott's Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination (2010) as recent works on desire, fantasy, and queer theory in African American literary criticism. She is careful to note that her "use of this theoretical paradigm is critical, non-exclusive, and often disloyal" (8), signaling her project's resistance to the universalizing, apolitical origins of psychoanalysis.

The first chapter, "Against Prohibitive Reading (On Trauma)," examines the tension between the promise and reality of neo-slave narratives as reparative, providing a "therapeutic reading," which "speaks to the desire to make sense of an unredeemed past and its painful legacy and to locate agency and a capacity for social change in the act of reading" (4). Levy-Hussen identifies the rejection of these claims as "prohibitive reading" that finds "fictions of historical return … dangerous and to be avoided" (5). Rather than taking a specific stance in this debate, Levy-Hussen chooses instead to look at the way therapeutic reading "operates as a literary figure: inviting decoding, engendering a diverse range of direct and indirect psycho-affective responses, and accommodating a variety of competing interpretations" (6).

By focusing on texts that include "proxy readers, quests for origins, overt or ironic eschewals of history, [and] historian-protagonists," How to Read African American Literature makes more transparent the way desire shapes the process to know a marginalized, previously inaccessible history and to signify a relationship to the slave past. For example, the analysis of Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), a text at the center of memory politics, includes trauma theory's troubling of historiography and Denver's role as existing in the paradox of a compelling past she cannot access. The character of Denver represents the tension between prohibitive and therapeutic readings. When read in relation to David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident (1981) and Morrison's Jazz (1992), Beloved contributes to a meta-analytical engagement with competing representations of historical evidence and accessibility, of "periodization" and "traumatic time" (29). The efforts to record and reclaim the past appear partial and compensatory, but the absences, once acknowledged, hold value in what they reveal about present desire to claim and know this past.

Beginning by recognizing that slave narrative fictions reveal the inherent connection between "the desire for liberation" and "the desire for the reenactment of punishment and pain" (53), the second chapter "re-imagine[s] masochism as a restorative practice" (55), a project that would counter self-censoring "respectability" politics and encourage more nuanced, expansive consideration of African American sexual politics. Sharpe's scholarship supports Levy-Hussen here as representing "politicized theories of masochistic fantasy and desire," work which Hussen suggests offers "the only form of historical engagement that contains such a radically reparative promise" (58). In a provocative reading of Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979) and Gayl Jones's Corregidora (1975), Levy-Hussen contrasts the risks and limits represented...