Remembering the Past in Contemporary African American Fiction. By Keith Byerman. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. xii, 228 pp. Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8078-2980-3. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-5647-9.)

Extract

In his useful new survey of African American fiction written since 1980, Keith Byerman points out that for several decades before the 1980s, relatively few black writers attempted to write “historical” novels in which the characters engaged large (and small) social and political events of the past with any specificity. Yet in the last decades of the twentieth century, what might be considered the high point of postmodern art, and certainly of postmodern theorizing, black authors wrote many novels dealing with slavery, Reconstruction, the rise of Jim Crow, the world wars, the Great Depression, the civil rights movement, black power, and the era of deindustrialization and urban decline.

Byerman adeptly, for the most part, investigates this concern for history and the past in fiction by Raymond Andrews, David Bradley, Leon Forrest, Ernest Gaines, Charles Johnson, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, John Wideman, and Sherley Anne Williams. Much of his study examines the difficulty and the power (or lack of power) of storytelling in those works. He makes much use of trauma theory in taking up the problem of how one speaks of unspeakable past events, especially slavery as a sort of black holocaust, and what happens if one does not speak, repressing the trauma. As he notes, much of this engagement with the past, whether in a seemingly personal history or in an explicitly group experience, is done for two purposes. One might look at the past in order to learn lessons about how one might go forward, or one might return to a traumatic past in order to master the trauma to move on.