Progressive turns to the past: A new medium for African American and Chicano modern identity formation (Ana Castillo, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Gloria Naylor, Paule Marshall, Barbados)

This study focuses on African American and Chicano texts that foreground the past as a powerful means to enrich potential modes of modern identity. I argue that the protagonists in these texts extract cultural elements and practices from the past, and refigure and incorporate them in modern delineations of the self. Looking at four primary texts through a critical lens grounded in Raymond Williams' delineation of culture in Marxism and Literature , the following areas were specifically examined: the initial environments and conditions of the characters, the elements that stimulate a turn to the past, the different paths that characters follow in an attempt to mine cultural elements and the diverse results of these attempts. This analysis of Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow, Gloria Naylor's Mama Day, Oscar Zeta Acosta's The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, and Ana Castillo's So Far From God demonstrates the potential of a balanced and reconstituted double consciousness, the validity of syncretism, and the need for continuing retention and reframing of earlier cultural elements and practices as a resource for modern identity formation. Finally, this project speaks about the ways in which cultures come together, and how both subordinate and dominant cultures attempt to resolve intricate questions about retention, assimilation, syncretism, loss and growth.