'Home - or a hole in the ground'? : spaces of possibility in African American literature.

This thesis argues for a unique relationship between African
American literature and liminal space, predicated on the historical facts of
North American slavery. While recent critics of African American literature
have argued for the importance of historical and civic space in shaping
racialised discourse, the· role of liminal space has not been well examined.
This thesis examines texts by three African American writers - Harriet
Jacobs, Ralph Ellison and John Edgar Wideman - and one Canadian
Caribbean author, Nalo Hopkinson, to argue that their literary
representations of liminality perform two functions: firstly, symbolising the
experience of slavery and its attendant experiences of incarceration; and
secondly, problematising mainstream categories of race and identity. By
investigating the narrative construction of these liminal spaces, this thesis
will extend the categories of 'African American' and the 'novel' in two
important directions: towards the future and into the 'black Atlantic'.
The following five chapters will address how the symbolic use of
narrative liminality enables black writers to resist or appropriate the
cultural and ideological structures imposed by white Europeans in the New
World and also those structures later developed within a rapidly
urbanising society. Firstly, Harriet Jacobs's slave narrative addresses the
restrictive architecture of slavery and domesticity and, through Linda
Brent's attic hideaway, Jacobs expresses a ·concern with endurance and
female authority. The Ralph Ellison chapter examines the shifting nature
of liminality and subjectivity in the post-slavery migration environment;
Invisible Man's cellar engages with racialised tropes of deterrito'rialisation
and desire. John Edgar Wideman addresses ideas of race and artistic
responsibility in his treatment of a contemporary suburban bombsite,
assessing the difficulty of achieving spaces of possibility in the face of
racialised urban decay. Jhe concluding chapter uses Nalo Hopkinson's
speculative fiction to challenge the essentialist construction of an African
American liminal aesthetic by enacting its subversive qualities across the
geographical boundaries of the black Atlantic. Hopkinson's projection of a
racialised underground onto the new spaces of technology also disturbs
traditional models of genre and discourse.