Legba's Crossing
Legba's Crossing: Narratology in the African Atlantic
Heather Russell
Copyright Date: 2009
Published by: University of Georgia Press
Pages: 216
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt46nbbr
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Legba's Crossing
Book Description:

In Haiti, Papa Legba is the spirit whose permission must be sought to communicate with the spirit world. He stands at and for the crossroads of language, interpretation, and form and is considered to be like the voice of a god. In Legba's Crossing, Heather Russell examines how writers from the United States and the anglophone Caribbean challenge conventional Western narratives through innovative use, disruption, and reconfiguration of form. Russell's in-depth analysis of the work of James Weldon Johnson, Audre Lorde, Michelle Cliff, Earl Lovelace, and John Edgar Wideman is framed in light of the West African aesthetic principle of àshe, a quality ascribed to art that transcends the prescribed boundaries of form. Àshe is linked to the characteristics of improvisation and flexibility that are central to jazz and other art forms. Russell argues that African Atlantic writers self-consciously and self-reflexively manipulate dominant forms that prescribe a certain trajectory of, for example, enlightenment, civilization, or progress. She connects this seemingly postmodern meta-analysis to much older West African philosophy and its African Atlantic iterations, which she calls "the Legba Principle."

eISBN: 978-0-8203-3610-7
Subjects: Sociology, Language & Literature
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  1. Front Matter
    Front Matter (pp. i-vi)
  2. Table of Contents
    Table of Contents (pp. vii-viii)
  3. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
    ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (pp. ix-xiv)
  4. Introduction: Critical Paradigms in Race, Nation, and Narratology
    Introduction: Critical Paradigms in Race, Nation, and Narratology (pp. 1-26)

    The noted literary scholar Fredric Jameson has argued that “the production of aesthetic or narrative form is to be seen as an ideological act in its own right” (79).¹ Literary analysts, Jameson notwithstanding, often regard stylistic or formal elements as mere functional extensions of an aesthetic or narrative text’s thematic concerns. In criticism of the literatures of the African diaspora, privileging theme, content, and meaning over in-depth formal analysis has too frequently textured academic inquiry. The eminent scholar of African American autobiography William Andrews thus justly observes that expressive cultural critics have devoted far “too little attention to the social,...

  5. Part One. Interruptions
    • 1 Race, Citizenship, and Form: James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
      1 Race, Citizenship, and Form: James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (pp. 29-58)

      James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) is a tricky African Atlantic text. Literary scholars have frequently queried The Autobiography’s historiography, didactic style, external literary influences, use of irony, and particularly Johnson’s representation of his first-person narrator. The narrative has been called “disruptive,” a “textual changeling,” “taxonomically slippery.”¹ Such appellatives that gesture toward The Autobiography’s generic unpredictability are, to a great extent, attributable to its standing arguably as one of the earliest and most notable fictional texts written by an African American that deliberately masks itself. Initially published anonymously, Johnson’s book was not the first fictional autobiography...

    • 2 The Poetics of Biomythography: The Work of Audre Lorde
      2 The Poetics of Biomythography: The Work of Audre Lorde (pp. 59-78)

      In Zami, A New Spelling of My Name (1982), Audre Lorde’s self-authorizing acts purposely and self-consciously signify on Western paradigms governing autobiographical production and the process of narrating self-individuation. On first encounter, Zami seems to be Lorde’s autobiography: it appears to be a conventional story of the author’s life. We meet a black child living in America, born of Grenadian parents, and grappling with issues of race, gender, sexuality, and class as these frame the narrator’s progress toward self-awareness and self-actualization. And yet, Audre Lorde’s subtitle, “a biomythography,” forces us to conceive her project in other than traditional autobiographical frames....

  6. Part Two. Disruptions
    • 3 Race, Nation, and the Imagination: Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven
      3 Race, Nation, and the Imagination: Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven (pp. 81-107)

      Best noted for her powerfully evocative prose-poetic form that captures in stark, visceral terms the socioeconomic, political, historical, and cultural challenges that frame contemporary Jamaica, Michelle Cliff’s work, like Johnson’s and Lorde’s, wrestles with the limitations and the possibilities of narrative form, historiography, African Atlantic subjectivity, and the creative imagination. The imagination is the site within which textured alternatives to familiar and reductive narratives of African Atlantic subjectivity are crafted. At the same time, African Atlantic subject formation and its literary representation are shaped by material realities. In Cliff’s case, such material concerns are inextricably tied to the trauma of...

    • 4 Jazz Imaginings of the Nation-State: Earl Lovelace’s Salt
      4 Jazz Imaginings of the Nation-State: Earl Lovelace’s Salt (pp. 108-138)

      Populations living within real borders and boundaries of their respective nation-states constitute a body politic who must daily deal with politico-economic challenges of development and the realities of unemployment, underemployment, poverty, and violence, as well as the creation of jobs, fair and accessible housing, healthcare, political strategy, economic growth, and aesthetic and cultural development. Practical problems and necessities of everyday life are frequently and often remain amenable to the protocols of “nation.”

      It is indeed the case that there are many African Atlantic peoples for whom the nation continues to be relevant, efficacious, and vital to the construction of societies...

  7. Part Three. Eruptions
    • 5 Dis-ease, De-formity, and Diaspora: John Edgar Wideman’s The Cattle Killing
      5 Dis-ease, De-formity, and Diaspora: John Edgar Wideman’s The Cattle Killing (pp. 141-164)

      In his introduction to The Best American Short Stories 1996, noted African American author John Edgar Wideman identifies the “special subversive, radically democratic role” that fiction can play not only in terms of transforming readers’ ways of seeing the world, but, even more powerfully, in tangibly altering readers’ ways of being in the world. In Wideman’s own radically democratic, subversive works, narrators, voices, stories, histories, myths, fantasies, imaginations, and readers are always woven together, ebbing, flowing, and spilling out onto each other’s textual bodies and into the body of texts. The rich discursive texture of Wideman’s narratological endeavors reflects African...

  8. Conclusion: Dialectics of Globalization, Development, and Discourse
    Conclusion: Dialectics of Globalization, Development, and Discourse (pp. 165-172)

    In the previous five chapters, I have examined structures of narration informed by African diasporic hermeneutics. These interpretive modes provide models that imagine and work through the dialectics of race, nation, and/or national belonging and textual representation. James Weldon Johnson’s struggle to articulate African American subjectivity in the face of Jim Crow segregation, rampant antiblack violence, and systemic thwarting of blacks’ citizenship rights mandated that he cross the boundaries of genre, breaking free from the discursive and epistemological expectations of conventional form. Audre Lorde’s Zami attempts to write an autobiographical African Atlantic self unfettered by conventions of autobiography; the narrative...

  9. NOTES
    NOTES (pp. 173-184)
  10. WORKS CITED
    WORKS CITED (pp. 185-190)
  11. INDEX
    INDEX (pp. 191-202)
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