Rereading Cain, Abel, and Martin Luther King Jr in Charles Johnson’s Dreamer

Charles Johnson sets his 1998 novel Dreamer during the Chicago Freedom Movement that Martin Luther King Jr led in 1966. Alongside his fictionalised King character, Johnson imagines a doppelganger, Chaym Smith. Johnson develops the story of Chaym and King by evoking the biblical story of Cain and Abel. The hatred, violence, and injustice that are inherent in the Bible story of the two brothers contrast sharply with the love, nonviolence, and justice that are paramount to the historical King’s theology, and the surprising juxtaposition forces readers to reappraise what they think they already know about both the biblical Cain and the historical King.

Introduction

The introduction explores the revival of slavery in contemporary culture, ranging over examples of trauma from literature, culture, and politics. It assesses the valence of analogy as an analytic for racial and comparative critique. It lays out the key features of the slave narrative (by Frederick Douglass, for example) and examines the principal concerns of the neo-slave narrative by writers like Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, and Charles Johnson. It then traces the shift from Atlantic to global as the slave narrative frames experiences of human rights violations across the Global South. Then, the introduction considers the uses of genre for thinking about race, showing how race and form have always been entangled.

The Satire of Black Post-Blackness

The fifth chapter argues that feeling “black post-black” is a disorienting situation that lends itself to satire. Crawford analyzes the ways in which satire has begun to define 21st century African American cultural productions as both blackness and whiteness are satirized. The satire of the Black Arts Movement is shown to be much more invested in satirizing whiteness as opposed to the 21st century post-black tendency to foreground the satirizing of blackness. In addition to the analysis of novels, drama, and poetry, this chapter also uncovers the role of satire in editorial cartoons included in Black World, one of the key journals of the Black Arts Movement. This chapter foregrounds the satire of Charles Johnson, Carlene Hatcher Polite, Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, Percival Everett, Paul Beatty, Mat Johnson, and others.

Precarious Passages

Precarious Passages investigates how one type of cultural production, fiction written in English, participates in the ongoing construction of black diasporic identity within the old Anglophone African diaspora in the Western world. Because the dispersed communities of the African diaspora are not united around any shared religion, secular culture in its various forms plays a major role in producing and reproducing the African diasporic imaginary—that is, in creating symbolic communities and in keeping alive the sense that there is something that can be called a black diasporic community and something that can be called a black diasporic identity, however nonprescriptively defined. Precarious Passages analyzes eleven novels of movement and migration written by eight contemporary novelists of African or African Caribbean descent (Charles Johnson, Lawrence Hill, Toni Morrison, George Lamming, Caryl Phillips, Andrea Levy, Cecil Foster, and Edwidge Danticat), reading these texts as cultural mediators of black diasporic memory and as active participants in the formation of black diasporic identity. In the process, Precarious Passages advances our understanding of current black Anglophone diasporic fiction by placing novels usually classified as “African American,” “black Canadian,” “black British,” or “postcolonial African Caribbean” in dialogue with each other. Works falling into these categories are traditionally read, interpreted, and anthologized separately, but Precarious Passages shows that the concept and empirical reality of the African diaspora facilitates an integrative approach to the black Atlantic literary imagination.