A Study On Family Narratives In Contemporary African American Novels

The late 1960s and early 1970s witnessed the “turn” in historiography,the emergence of “posts” trend in social and literary theories,as well as the rise of identity politics.The concomitant influence of these movements has given rise in African American literature to a penchant for engagement in the construction of American national history and the reconstruction of the African American past.Among the so-called“neo-slave narratives” that attempt at the revision of the past,the family narrative is a subgenre whose texts remain largely ignored,albeit essential.Based on a close reading of the genre’s eleven quintessential texts ranging from Corregidora(1975),Roots(1976)to Stigmata(1998)and Cane River(2001),the present thesis seeks to map out the genre’s essential features by exploring,aside from its defining narrative modes,how texts of African American family narratives tackle the thorny issues of representation of history,the interaction between history and memory,the counter-discursive representation of African American families,in particular the historical role of black women in the survival of African American families.As a subgenre,the African American family narrative seems to share the general features of global family narratives in terms of its thematic concerns,temporal duration,plot construction as well as narrative modes.However,as a “site of memory” actively engaged in the reconstruction of African American history,the African American family narrative is characterized by:1)a persistent concern with the representation of African American history by evoking a past that is either forgotten or distorted by official history,a past that can be traced across generations.However,the texts under discussion indicate that they differ in how history is to be interpreted and represented.Alex Haley’s Roots revives a distant African ancestor in a nearly linear and realistic manner,in an effort to invest the African American community with a source and beginning full of racial pride,thereby rebuilding the bond between Africa and America that was cut off by slavery.Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon reverses the Post-Civil War African Americans’ pattern of south-north migration to escape poverty and racism by sending his protagonist to start from the north,and his journey to the south turns out to be a mixed quest for the discovery of his ancestors,his family past and ultimately,for the whole racial history.Morrison thus explores the possibility of seeking identity and meaning in the history and culture of African American ancestors.Leon Forrest’s “Forrest County” Trilogy,in a unique form of “reinvention”,examines the intricate interaction between family,national memory,and individual survival.2)a conscious attempt at exploring how texts function as a “site of memory” in the matter of the construction of history.Novels of the African American family narrative tend to restore the remembrance of a racial group by evoking a shared heritage of memory,and they emphatically tap into the continuous influence of past memory on the new generation within the family,but the way they recall the past differs.Gayl Jones’ Corregidora involves the oral memory of four generations of women in a family,revealing the historical trauma of slavery and the burden of its “postmemory”;Phyllis Alesia Perry’s Stigmata visualizes memory with magic realism,dramatizing the difficulty of articulating the cruelty and trauma involved in the “unspeakable” past memory;David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident underscores the importance of fusing intuitive and imagination to restore the missing African American history in the national official historical records.The ultimate concerns of these novels,in short,are with how to face the memory of ancestors and how to integrate these memories into the buildi ng of ethics and the construction of identity of the protagonists of the new generation.3)a will to produce counter-narratives of the cultural representation of African American families,in particular of the representation of black females.The move is motivated not only by the mainstream political discourse in the 1960s and 1970s that attacked black families and stigmatized black mothers,but also by the ideology of“nuclear family”,which suppressed and disciplined black women as mothers,wives,and daughters.Contemporary black family narratives underscore the essential role of maternal ties and bonds,and through diversified narrative strategies,especially retelling black women’s stories,these texts seek to recover the historically marginalized black women,and by re-imagining the different plights and difficulties they faced,acknowledge and remember their sacrifices and contributions in history.4)a strand of narrative features characteristic of the genre.We can discern two defining narrative modes of African American family narrative.One is the “ascending”family narrative,which adopts the traditional realistic approach and takes the characters as the main axis,in the order of generations,to narrate the family history,representing the process of a family rise from slavery to freedom,and then to class promotion.The other is the “retrospective” family narrative that centers on the perspective of a contemporary protagonist.This mode usually adopts various strands of modernist narrative strategies to present family stories by retroactively tracing the family history to a distant past.In addition to a set of relatively perceivable fixed patterns in the two narrative modes,these two types of family narratives also have their own characteristics in narrative perspective,voice,and spatial-temporal arrangement.The two artistic modes of African American family narrative originate from two opposing narrative positions and motivations among different creative contemporary African American writers,and they reflect diverse conceptualization of literary representations and different conscientiousness of ethnic responsibilities.