Imagining the past: African-American servitude and the historical novel.

Abstract

Robert Penn Warren in <italic>Band of Angels</italic> (1955), E. L. Doctorow in Ragtime (1975) and Charles Johnson in <italic>Middle Passage</italic> (1990) use history as a meditation on social realties of the past, and reconstruct the past for reasons peculiar to the exigencies of their particular sensibilities and world view. Through the representation of African-American servants and servitude they imagine sociopolitical or cultural values and ideologies of the historical moment, and correspondingly reveal their own. These fictive constructs---servant and servitude---are the products of authorial wish-fulfillment, and effectively elucidate, perpetuate, challenge or ratify a discernible system of complex beliefs. It is the <italic>idea</italic> of blacks in a position of servitude, whether slavery or service for hire, and what this means as status, as identity and as a social function, and the issues which govern these notions which unites these texts. All three authors deal significantly with the idea of servitude as <italic>the</italic> perceived context for African-Americans, and what this means to national and individual consciousness, particularly where a nation coming of age is concerned. All three foreground black servitude as a way to think about sociohistorical and cultural issues, invoke black servitude in the past to confront the present, and disclose the ways in which the idea of black servitude has driven and continues to drive the social contract. Questions I have explored through a close textual analysis are: In what ways does the representation of African-American servants and servitude disclose or invert cultural or historical information? What are some of the factors/elements employed by the author which fashion the African-American servant and/or servitude as reliable or unreliable purveyors of customs and values? In what ways does the representation define, critique, mythologize or revise American culture and/or history? What does it mean to be American? Who is a <italic>real</italic>, an <italic>authentic</italic>, the <italic>best</italic> American? In what ways does the representation of African-American servitude have relevance for current social and political concerns for the author?