Strictures on structures: the prospects for a structuralist poetics of African fiction

Abstract

All of Afro-American literature may be seen as one vast genealogical poem that attempts to restore continuity to the discontinuities imposed by the history of black presence in America. This chapter explores the challenges and opportunities latent in Afro-American naming process which several major figures of black writing and, in particular, Ralph Ellison and Jay Wright have made manifest. The practice of naming in Afro-American literature reflects similar tensions and, as Ellison's and Wright's art exemplify, works manifold variations on the established tropes of 'the calling process'. The Afro-American writer has struggled with the American insistence on misprising the whitening of experience as a fulfillment of self while assigning all experience of blackness to nameless being. In contrast to Amiri Baraka's shattering of nomination - a strategy betraying an aversion to traditional voices - is Michael Harper's development of the Afro-American praise poem, a vehicle for preserving the spiritual legacy of his forebears by repeating and interpreting their 'good names'.

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