Abstract
Recent portrayals of the slavery era are dominated by two main trends: the genealogical novel and narratives that use fantastic and magical realist elements in order to represent history. Linda Beatrice Brown’s Crossing Over Jordan (1995), Connie Briscoe’s A Long Way from Home (1999), and Lalita Tademy’s Cane River (2001) all explore the lives of several generations of African American women of the same family dealing with issues of racism, sexual exploitation, miscegenation, and passing, which not only blur racial boundaries but also depict the complexities of African American history. In these multigenerational narratives, the mother-and-daughter relationship emerges as an essential conductor of history. In this sense, these are novels that continue the African American tradition established by the novels discussed in previous chapters, Jubilee, Corregidora, and Dessa Rose. J. California Cooper’s In Search of Satisfaction (1994) and The Wake of the Wind (1998) are also narratives told across generational lines in order to reconstruct African American history by drawing on family chronicles.
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Notes
Gayl Jones, interviewed by Charles H. Rowell, “An Interview with Gayl Jones,” Callaloo: A Journal of African American Arts and Letters 5:3, no. 16 (October 1982): 42.
Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Criticism in the Jungle,” in Black Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Methuen, 1984), 4.
See Toni Morrison, “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation,” in Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation, ed. Mari Evans (Garden City, NY: Anchor-Doubleday, 1984), 343.
P. Gabrielle Foreman, “Past-On Stories: History and the Magically Real, Morrison and Allende on Call,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 300.
Toni Morrison, interviewed by Gail Caldwell, “Author Toni Morrison Discusses Her Latest Novel Beloved” in Conversations with Toni Morrison, ed. Danille Taylor-Guthrie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), 242–43.
Edward P. Jones, “An Interview with Edward P. Jones,” in The Known World (New York: Amistad, 2004), 5.
Margaret Walker, Jubilee (New York: Bantam Books, 1967), 285.
Lois Parkinson Zamora, “Magical Romance/Magical Realism: Ghosts in U. S. and Latin American Fiction,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 500.
Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” in Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, ed. Angelyn Mitchell (London: Duke University Press, 1994), 396.
Wendy B. Faris, Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt Press, 2004), 14. In relation to the fact that the narrator or characters do not register surprise in relation to the narrated events, notice, for example, the matter of fact way in which Morrison opens the novel, or how Paul D perceives a ghostly presence as soon as he enters Sethe’s house and simply asks, “You got company?” To this question Sethe simply replies, “Off and on” (8) as if they were talking about real people.
Ibid., 7. In Ordinary Enchantments, Faris suggests five primary characteristics of the magical realistic text: “First, the text contains an ‘irreducible element’ of magic; second, the descriptions in magical realism detail a strong presence of the phenomenal world; third the reader may experience some unsettling doubts in the effort to reconcile two contradictory understandings of events; fourth, the narrative merges different realms; and, finally, magical realism disturbs received ideas about time, space, and identity.” See also Faris’s “She-herazade’s Children: Magical Realism and Postmodern Fiction,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995).
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (Oxford: Black-well, 1992), 207.
Claudia Tate, ed., Black Women Writers at Work (New York: Continuum, 1983), 125.
Geraldine Smith-Wright, “In Spite of the Klan: Ghosts in the Fiction of Black Women Writers,” in Haunting the House of Fiction: Feminist Perspectives on Ghosts Stories by American Women, ed. Lynette Carpenter and Wendy K. Kol-mar (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 145.
Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 81.
Toni Morrison, interviewed by Marsha Darling, “In the Realm of Responsibility: A Conversation with Toni Morrison,” Conversations with Toni Morrison, ed. Danielle Taylor-Guthrie (Jackson: University Press Mississippi, 1994), 249.
Theo L. D’haen, “Magical Realism and Postmodernism: Decentering Privileged Centers,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 195.
Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Frederick Douglass and the Language of the Self,” The Yale Review 70 (July 1981): 599.
Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 25.
See Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 47.
Zora Neale Hurston, “Black Death,” in The Complete Short Stories (New York: Harper Perennial, 1996), 202.
Valerie Smith, “‘Circling the Subject’: History and Narrative in Beloved,” in Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K. A. Appiah (New York: Amistad, 1993), 349.
Toni Morrison, interviewed by Elsie B. Washington, “Talk with Toni Morrison,” in. Conversations with Toni Morrison, ed. Danille Taylor-Guthrie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), 235.
Susan Willis, Specifying: Black Women Writing the American Experience (London: Routledge, 1990), 10–11.
See John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), 470–76.
Dawn Turner Trice, Only Twice I’ve Wished for Heaven (New York: Anchor Books, 1997), 20.
Gloria Naylor, Linden Hills (London: Minerva, 1992), 16–17.
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Phyllis Perry, Stigmata, 1998 (London: Piatkus, 1999), 57.
Alejo Carpenter, “On the Marvelous Real in America,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 86.
Alice Walker, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (London: Women’s Press, 1984), 239.
Sherley Anne Williams, “Telling the Teller: Memoir and Story,” in The Seductions of Biography, ed. Mary Rhiel and David Suchoff (New York: Routledge, 1996), 183.
Williams, Dessa Rose (London: Women’s Press, 1998), 154.
Examples of accounts of the Atlantic crossing of kidnapped slaves from Africa to the New World occur in Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow (London: Plume, 1983); Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage (London: Picador, 1991).
Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Echo of Lions (New York: William Morrow, 1989).
Sandra Jackson-Opoku’s The River Where Blood is Born (New York: Ballantine, 1997).
Alice Walker, “Everyday Use,” in The Complete Stories (London: Women’s Press, 1994), 53.
Floris Barnett Cash, “Kinship and Quilting: An Examination of an African-American Tradition,” Journal of Negro History 80, no. 1 (Winter 1995): 30.
Sharon F. Patton, African-American Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 189.
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Gayl Jones, Corregidora (London: Camden Press, 1988), 54.
Houston Baker Jr., Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 7.
Ntozake Shange, Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo (London: Minerva, 1996), 27.
Octavia E. Butler, Kindred (London: Women’s Press, 1995), 260.
Karla F. C. Holloway, Moorings & Metaphors: Figures of Culture and Gender in Black Women’s Literature (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 113.
James Joyce, Ulysses (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 42.
Tina McElroy Ansa, Baby of the Family (London: Spectre, 1996), 183.
Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (London: Picador, 1989), 239.
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© 2011 Ana Nunes
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Nunes, A. (2011). “Her Best Thing, Her Beautiful, Magical Best Thing”. In: African American Women Writers’ Historical Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118850_6
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