In Search Of Father’s History In Homewood Trilogy

John Edgar Wideman (1941-) is an American novelist, short story writer, nonfiction writer and critic. He is the first to win the international PEN/Faulkner Award twice, in1984for Sent for You Yesterday and in1990for Philadelphia Fire. Although Wideman’s public reception is humble alongside the shining stars like Morrison and Alice Walker, this prolific writer’s works recently have attracted more and more critics’ attention. Many scholars are enthusiastic about studying the nontraditional writing techniques and black-oriented themes in Wideman’s works. His Homewood Trilogy (1981-1983) which consists of Damballah, Hiding Place and Sent for You Yesterday is a meaningful book concerning about black family history. However, no one has ever focused on father’s history in this dazzling trilogy. This thesis focuses on the study of the father’s history in Homewood Trilogy from the perspective of Pierre Nora’s sites of memory.The thesis is divided into three chapters. Chapter1probes the absence of father figures both in the black family and black history, and the consequence of the loss of father in the black community. It is a universal phenomenon that a vast number of black children live in the fatherless family and community. And this fatherless situation makes them become a lost generation who wants to seek father’s footsteps. Chapter2probes how the book seeks the history of the father on the sites of memory. These sites of memory are place, oral stories and blues music. The place Homewood imprints father’s experience, the oral stories record father’s life and the blues spawns moments of reflection, which lead the characters to construct father’s history. Chapter3demonstrates the meaning of searching father’s history. Although the marginalized black experience has been ignored by and erased from the supremacist American history, black people can discover and construct the secondary history of their own by searching for father’s history on the sites of memory. And they reconstruct their history and reestablish their black identity.In conclusion of this research, it shows that the fatherless blacks of Homewood community successfully search for father’s history on three sites of memory. And what they seek deconstructs the white supremacist versions of American history and helps black people construct their own history.