TY - JOUR
AU - Okereke-Beshel,, Uchechi
AB - Stephanie Li’s Pan-African American Literature: Signifyin(g) Immigrants in the Twenty-First Century is a timely reading of how African immigrant writers engage with an African American literary tradition that reflects on race and identity in America. Extending Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s groundbreaking work on the signs and uses of the African American vernacular in The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism (1988), Li explores how contemporary African immigrant writers question and complicate ideas of Blackness and solidarity using the same tropes that have defined the African American literary canon: the talking book, invisibility, the ancestor, rememory, and signifyin(g). In an era characterized by tensions between immigrant blacks and blacks born in the United States, Li’s book links African immigrant writers to the broader African American literary community, generating a “literary legacy that unites texts of the wide African American diaspora” (12). Notably, in generating this legacy, the book actively effects a pan-African American restructuring of black collective identity. Divided into five chapters, the study moves easily between nineteenth-century slave narratives and contemporary narratives of immigration and black activism in a variety of American communities. Each chapter carefully examines immigrant narratives by “New Diaspora” African writers published in the last two decades. Chapter 1 is a rich and complex overview of how the narratives of former African child soldiers contribute to understanding the history of pan-African American literature in America. Li argues that the twenty-first century of the African novel in America begins with autobiographical narratives of war and displacement that signify on antebellum slave narratives such as Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845) and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). Countering Achille Mbembe’s comment that there is “no African memory of slavery” (qtd. in Li 56), Li’s analysis of the rhetorical strategies of war memoirs suggests otherwise. Dave Eggers’s and Valentino Achak Deng’s What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng (2006), Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (2007), and the artist Emmanuel Jal’s War Child: A Child Soldier’s Story (2009) all draw on codes of narrating atrocities and childhood innocence that appeal to and rely on the intervention of American audiences for change and redemption, much like antebellum slave narratives “inspire political action among curious if disengaged readers” (31). Chapter 2 is a refreshing demonstration of how Teju Cole’s Open City (2011) plays up racial disidentification even as the black protagonist, Julius, remains interpelleted in the African American experience psychologically and physically. Li describes the protagonist as a rootless “figure of postcolonial alterity” without the “history and community tied to American blackness” (57). However, Julius is deeply aware of, and haunted by, this history as his uncanny visions of centuries-old violence enacted on black and brown bodies ensure his witness. Notably, Julius defines himself by his intellectual and reading habits and favors European authors whom he reads aloud to himself. As Li shows, reading aloud—also known as the “talking book” (68)—is a distinct trope in the African American literary canon. Chapter 3 discusses how the novels of Dinaw Mengestu brilliantly reverse the theme of invisibility as it is portrayed in traditional African American racial discourses. Li notes that Mengestu’s protagonists in The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2007), How to Read the Air (2010), and All Our Names (2014) are differently traumatized African immigrants (or, in the case of Jonas Woldermariam in How to Read the Air, the son of Ethiopian immigrants). All Mengestu’s main characters are sons with absent fathers who use invisibility to challenge the expectations of family, lovers, and society. Unlike Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), in which Blackness renders the unnamed protagonist unseen, imperceptible in a racist society, and therefore vulnerable, Mengestu’s characters seek out Blackness and the invisibility it offers to shield themselves and negotiate a self-determined future. Chapter 4 is a brief reading of two selections from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s short story collection The Thing Around Your Neck (2009) and a comprehensive analysis of her novel Americanah (2013). Drawing on Toni Morrison’s concept of the ancestor as the origin of black history, community, and legacy, Li uses Adichie’s work to explore how African immigrants and African Americans negotiate various interpretations of Blackness in defining identity. For Li, Adichie reimagines the foundational figure of the ancestor along the lines of class and gender, thus speaking to a patriarchal legacy rather than a racial one. Therefore, the ancestor in Adichie’s fiction is not as influential for African immigrant characters who must reinvent themselves as they begin to understand that being black is an obstacle in the American racial landscape. In this way, Adichie counters Morrison’s representations of the ancestor as the source of hope and triumph that African Americans rely on in deploying Blackness as the primary signifier of identity. Li’s book begins and ends with memoirs. Chapter 5 is an analysis of former President Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995). In a fitting conclusion to the study, Li explores how Obama is able to create a workable black identity for himself as the son of an absent Kenyan father and a white Kansan mother by becoming his own ancestor. Li notes that Obama’s background is quite different from that of the protagonists in the other novels as he is “indisputably American” (135). However, how “he embraces and is embraced by the African American community” is key to the development of a pan-African American solidarity. In contrast to the ideas of American Blackness that derive from an “ancestral history of antebellum slavery,” Li uses her reading of Obama to point to the necessity of an American Blackness generated and shaped by “shared experiences of racialized struggle and a powerful commitment to build a better world” (135). Pan-African American Literature successfully accounts for the ways that African immigrant writers and their characters come to understand their lives in America’s racial landscape. However, while the influence of family and nation is clear in some of the chapters and does shape how the narrators approach their stories (for example, chapter 1, where the ex-child soldiers are seeking redemption in their storytelling), chapter 4 on Adichie’s Americanah is a bit lacking in this respect. Li could have further probed how Ifemelu’s background and goals for being in America affect her approach to African American culture and the racial discourses that deeply influence love and life. Despite this minor gap, Li’s critical study of African diaspora narratives remains a remarkable theoretical and literary analysis that contributes to the fields of African diaspora studies, African American studies, cultural studies, and postcolonial studies. © MELUS: The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Pan-African American Literature: Signifyin(g) Immigrants in the Twenty-First Century. Stephanie Li
JO - MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States
DO - 10.1093/melus/mlz062
DA - 2020-03-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/pan-african-american-literature-signifyin-g-immigrants-in-the-twenty-FCnTgeZHoT
SP - 210
VL - 45
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -