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This book focuses on John Edgar Wideman, whose contribution to African American literary scholarship, despite its tremendous growth, has been largely neglected in comparison to other writers. Keith Byerman, one of the editors of Critical Essays on John Edgar Wideman, has suggested that Wideman’s work does not “fit conventional notions of the African-American writer.” He added that the labels of “difficult” and “postmodernist” usually applied to Wideman’s writing have helped to push him to the margins of readership and scholarship alike. The Introduction further adds that the marketing of Wideman and his work over the years has also been challenging. Initially, publishers tried to sell him as a modernist and as a writer in the tradition of Faulkner. Later, even after numerous accolades and awards, he was characterized as the “angry” writer, with an image that screamed “stay away.”

The modern legacy of print literacy has come under fire in the postmodern era because of its presumed irrelevance to new social conditions and constituencies. The more powerful sway of electronic technologies has sparked a crisis for writers of print literature, which seems at best to occupy a residual space within the postmodern cultural domain. The postmodern attack on print culture is symptomatic of a wider disenchantment with the career of modern humanism, in which print literacy has been thoroughly implicated. Nowhere has the humanist legacy been interrogated as sharply or deeply as in African–American literature, which has long been demonstrating that the dehumanization of African–Americans was essential to the definition of universal humanity in print modernism. Yet the archive of African–American literature is never consulted in postmodern debates on modern humanism and print culture. This chapter focuses on literary texts—Philadelphia Fire (1985) by John Edgar Wideman and Parable of the Sower (1993) by Octavia Butler, along with Sapphire's PUSH—that continue to be profoundly invested in the modern idea of print literacy as a vehicle of social critique and advancement.

Accounts of postmodern urbanism often posit a sharp break between the visual regimes of modern and postmodern cities, celebrating the cultural heterogeneity and spatial fluidity of contemporary cities against the rigidly hierarchical structure of their modern variants. This chapter qualifies such claims of rupture, arguing that the postmodern city reinforces the spatial divisions as well as the mechanisms of visual surveillance associated with the modern city. The visual semiotics of postmodern urban space look far less free-floating when viewed through the lens of race. John Edgar Wideman and Toni Morrison expose the contradictory presence of black bodies in modern and postmodern visual media—as objects of desire and fear, objects that are both fetishized as tokens of sexual presence and policed in order to secure normative notions of urban community.

This chapter reads John Edgar Wideman’s Fanon as a novel whose ostensible failure to give voice to the historical Frantz Fanon generates experimental narrative modes for representing the human personality as a literary and legal category. The novel disrupts narrative genres of personal development that define the normative subject of human rights and civil law by subjecting them to processes of fracture and incorporation adapted from Romare Bearden’s collage aesthetics. Using narrative collage, the novel reworks the historical Fanon’s metaphor of the mask as a distortion of psychological development. The chapter argues that the novel refashions the person as itself a mask, questioning both contemporary rights discourse and the potential for anti-colonial, anti-racist revolution. Masks of personhood salvage the revolutionary personality, amplifying a decolonial voice in a world defined by ongoing violence done to those caught within the legal framework of personhood, with its promise of human rights.

This chapter spells out what exactly it means to speak of a postmodern moment in African–American studies. Selectively examining key texts from various disciplines, it sketches the lineaments of a widely registered crisis in the idea of black community and specifies the problems of racial representation sparked by this crisis. To distinguish postmodern from modern projects of racial representation, it looks closely at exemplary efforts to forge new forms of community suited to the changed realities of the post-Civil Rights period. These entail a shift from uplift to populist and from print to vernacular paradigms of black intellectual work. It is argued that even as they stress their critical distance from previous models of black community, postmodern cultural critics find it difficult to legitimize their own claims to racial representation without reanimating the cultural politics of 1960s black nationalism. In the domain of print literature, antirealism and textual self-reflection are generally identified as the unique elements of postmodern black fiction and said to disable essentialist constructs of black culture and community. Such assumptions are disputed through a comparative analysis of Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo and John Edgar Wideman's Reuben. In their common effort to incarnate the black urban writer in the image of Thoth, Egyptian god of writing, these novels explicitly engage the difficulties of resolving postmodern problems of racial representation through the medium of print literature.

Drawing from John Edgar Wideman’s Fanon, the epilogue reflects on how contemporary literature and art perform the work of salvaging the person from its legal histories. It examines the unlawful enemy combatant as stateless person in the post-2001 war on terror along with two political movements that share little except the belief that legal personhood ensures legal protection—the Nonhuman Rights Project, which supports legal personhood for nonhuman animals, and the anti-abortion Personhood USA, which aims to make human fetuses and fertilized eggs legal persons. The epilogue examines the rhetoric of democratic citizenship, slavery, and abolition central to these arguments for expanding personhood. It considers the aftereffects of legal racial slavery in black life and across categories of race, labor, empire, and nation, even as the legal abolition of racial slavery becomes a pervasive metaphor for moral victory and the master precedent for extending the boundaries of legal personhood.