Abstractionist Aesthetics by Phillip Brian Harper

Author:Phillip Brian Harper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2015-11-21T16:00:00+00:00

It is difficult to imagine what more could be reasonably demanded of African American art, and if Annotations meets the exigencies of that category especially well—as my sustained focus on it implies—this is only because it so rigorously epitomizes abstractionist principles that are also discernible in other instances of African American literature. Indeed, the self-reflexivity and mimetic problematization that Annotations manifests (via repetition and narrative disjuncture) are the very hallmarks of a literary postmodernism that encompasses the metafictionalism of Charles Johnson, Clarence Major, and Ishmael Reed; the magic-realist fabulation of Toni Morrison and Gayl Jones; the fractured diegesis of Carlene Hatcher Polite and Toni Cade Bambara; the exuberant satire of William Melvin Kelley, Fran Ross, Darius James, and Paul Beatty; the science-fictional speculation of Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany; and even the utopic fantasy of Alice Walker and Gloria Naylor themselves. After all, while The Color Purple ends with blissful reconciliation and extended-familial reunion, The Women of Brewster Place concludes with an equally unrealistic nested-dream sequence that heralds both the triumph of the titular characters and the demise of the ghetto that had threatened to subdue them. If these fairy-tale endings comprise just such a self-aware critique of realism as I am promoting, however, they do not by that token neutralize the realism that the novels otherwise so forcefully exemplify, largely through the resolute delineation of character that even the most unorthodox of the works alluded to earlier also forward, which, as we have seen, powerfully forestalls an abstractionist engagement. Annotations, on the other hand, constitutes an ideal case study for my purposes precisely because its maximally stringent abstractionism forces us to reckon with it in kind, potentially making us more sensitive to the less conspicuous abstractionism that characterizes superficially conventional works (or works—such as W. E. B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk and Jean Toomer’s Cane—whose formal unconventionality has been rendered inconspicuous through long-standing reading practices that recruit the texts to realist significance).101 This is to say not only that highly abstractionist African American literature can register trenchant social critique but also that it can train us in reading protocols that differ productively from current realist norms. It can only do that, however, if it is recognized as African American literature in the first place—a tall order given its extreme marginalization within the prevailing realist hegemony. Thus our objective must be both to reassert literature as a prime focus of African Americanist commentary and also to reconceive literature as a much more capacious category than African Americanist discourse has typically allowed. That domain right now affords scant leeway for the attenuated characterization, referential indeterminacy, and rhetorical repetition that typifies Annotations—or Mackey’s own continuous novel or Claudia Rankine’s intergeneric texts or the no-doubt-numerous works that have flown under the realism-attuned radar; and yet those very features are the ones from which we might benefit most, as they demonstrate not only that realism is likely overrated but that the real itself should be vigorously countered, in the interest of a future that is better than the present.

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