Timothy J. Cox
Postmodern Tales of Slavery in the Americas: From Alejo Carpentier to Charles Johnson
New York: Garland, 2001. Pp. 151. $60.00

Reviewed by Doris Kadish

A comparative perspective is a welcome addition to current slavery studies. Timothy Cox supplies that perspective by comparing seven "new slavery novels" in English, French, and Spanish by novelists from Colombia (Manuel Zapata Olivella), Cuba (Alejo Carpentier, Miguel Barnet), Guadeloupe (Maryse Condé, André and Simone Schwarz-Bart), and the United States (Charles Johnson, Toni Morrison). Readers interested in these authors or in the subject of slavery generally will find a wealth of information and original analyses in Cox's book.

The first chapter seeks to identify an aesthetics of African American postmodernism. Cox dwells on such issues as Foucault's conception of how countermemory serves to affirm new practices of representing the past; Deleuze and Guattari's explanation of how minority groups resist the culture and language of the dominant group; and Glissant's analysis of how relationships among separated peoples are constituted. He also discusses Bhabha, Gilroy, Nora, Lionnet, and others who grapple with issues of diaspora, difference, and recovered communities. Common to these thinkers is a movement away from the concept of national identity and toward forms of cultural blending and negotiation in which the act of remembering the past under slavery makes it possible to elaborate a cultural identity in the present.

Chapter 2 focuses on the problem of writing history and the use of irony as a key literary feature of the new slavery novels. Cox considers Schwarz-Bart's La mulâtresse Solitude, Condé's Moi, Tituba, sorcière...noire de Salem, and Carpentier's El reino de este mundo, arguing that these three works display an ironic perspective that distances them both from history (official accounts) and myth (the people's version). The strategies used in these novels include fictionalizing and playing with history, using minority perspectives to show the illogic of logocentric systems, and exposing the fallibility of their own texts. For Cox, such strategies are part of a postmodern project of representing the perspective of a minority group while at the same time deconstructing the supposed "truth" of that group's collective history.

Chapter 3 looks at the treatment of the middle passage in Solitude and Tituba as well as Changó, el gran putas by Zapata Olivella and Middle Passage by Johnson. According to Cox, these authors refrain from dealing with their subject in a sentimental or angry way; instead they shift their focus to the effort by those who survived or remember the middle passage to give meaning to it: for example Solitude and Tituba, the products of their mothers' rape by white sailors. Cox observes that all of these writers reject the notion that the authenticity of cultural life in Africa survived the middle passage. Thus Zapata Olivella depicts the impure nature of the Yoruba deity Changó in the diaspora and Johnson looks to the middle passage in a parodic mode that foregrounds the demise of the African spirit and challenges the Afrocentrism of black readers today.

Chapter 4 analyzes the "oscillation between running away from and revisiting the characters' slavery past and identity" (107) in Barnet's Biografía de un cimarrón and Morrison's Beloved. In Barnet's work, the former slave Esteban Montejo is free after emancipation to join society but still clings to his past freedom as a runaway; and Barnet, the white ethnographer who serves as author-editor of Montejo's story, oscillates between criticism of capitalism and Cuban communism under Castro. In the case of Beloved, Cox studies how the characters oscillate back and forth between slavery and freedom, "a collective emotional disorder where no one rests until the past is brought to account for itself and subdued" (119).

The conclusion emphasizes the seven novels' common deconstruction of received schemes of knowledge through the use of irony. Cox ends by taking the position that it is time to abandon the term "race," a position for which he finds support in all of the works he has examined. He argues that despite the continued existence of racism that these novels highlight they share the view that to presuppose the predetermined, "natural" existence of racial differences is to perpetuate the very problems that their works strive to ameliorate.