Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- PART ONE HISTORY, CITIZENSHIP, AND THE AMERICAN WAY
- PART TWO DECOMPOSING UNITIES, DECONSTRUCTING NATIONAL NARRATIVES
- 5 Reportage as Redemption
- 6 Kinship as History
- 7 Nation-ness as Consciousness
- 8 History as Storytelling
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
7 - Nation-ness as Consciousness
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- PART ONE HISTORY, CITIZENSHIP, AND THE AMERICAN WAY
- PART TWO DECOMPOSING UNITIES, DECONSTRUCTING NATIONAL NARRATIVES
- 5 Reportage as Redemption
- 6 Kinship as History
- 7 Nation-ness as Consciousness
- 8 History as Storytelling
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Summary
‘Revolution’ said Mr Adams ‘took place in the
minds of the people
in the fifteen years before Lexington’
– Ezra Pound, Canto 50 (1937)I have given you a motive
to run down a flag.
– Jay Wright, Dimensions of History (1976a: 23)“Nobody can change the past,” says my mother.
“Which is why revolutions exist,” I reply.
– Alice Walker, “Beyond the Peacock: The Reconstruction of Flannery O'Connor” (1975a: 58)In 1974 Alice Walker journeyed with her mother to rural Georgia to visit her deserted childhood home just down the “Eatonville-to-Milledgeville road,” the axis of her aesthetic ancestors, Zora Neale Hurston and Flannery O'Connor (1975a: 42). This return occasioned more than a consideration of her fellow southern writers: It prompted daughter and mother to contemplate the character and quality of the old and new South, its ways of abidance or revolt. With some impatience, Walker's mother seeks a rationale for this return:
“When you make these trips back south,” says my mother … “just what is it exactly that you're looking for?”
“A wholeness,” I reply.
“You look whole enough to me,” she says.
“No,” I answer, “because everything around me is split up, deliberately split up. History split up, literature split up, and people are split up too. It makes people do ignorant things.”
(1975a: 48)The wholeness that Walker aspires to, one of a binding community and an indigenous voice, would be realized in the beatific closing of her epistolary novel, The Color Purple (1982); the “split” worlds of history, literature, and people would structure her bicentennial novel, Meridian.
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- Information
- Writing America BlackRace Rhetoric and the Public Sphere, pp. 165 - 186Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998