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Facing Tradition: Revisionary Scenes in African American Literature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Kimberly W. Benston
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Abstract

African American literary theory's quest for a distinctly black criticism implies the task of determining the contours and character of African American literary tradition. This task is, in fact, at once external and internal to that tradition, which arises in the very act of questioning its own possibility. African American literature deploys a topos for this simultaneous theorizing and enactment of tradition: the scenario of facing, wherein a protagonist experiences a pivotal moment of self-discovery by catching his or her reflection in the visage of an other (father, mother, master, etc.). Examples from Frederick Douglass to Alice Walker demonstrate the rhetorical and thematic nuances by which African American literature's facing motif establishes black tradition as a variegated scene of vision and revision.

Type
Special Topic: African and African American Literature
Information
PMLA , Volume 105 , Issue 1: Special Millennium issue , January 1990 , pp. 98 - 109
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1990

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