Department of English
Writing the Journey: June 1999
"Autoethnographic Haunting: Charles Johnson's Oxherding Tale and the African American Travel Narrative"
Jessica Catherine Lieberman
English Department, University of Michigan
lieberma@umich.edu
Scholars of travel narrative, such as Mary Louise Pratt, remark on the crucial dialogic relationship between travel narrative and slave autobiography. Pratt argues that both literary forms appear in roughly the same era (1780s and 1790s) and draw upon traditions of survival literature which "furnished a `safe' context for staging alternate, relativizing, and taboo configurations of intercultural contact." These travel tales of survival were "safe" because they were told from the perspective of the re-integrated European, writing back in his comfortable home, secure in his colonial viewpoint. As Pratt notes briefly, the African-American literature which arose at that time followed in the practical vein of this safe tradition of transcultural experience.
The last decades of the eighteenth century marked the beginning of African American literature, as the first ex-slaves entered the circuits of European print culture, through a door opened up by the abolitionist movement. The first slave autobiographies, their publication often facilitated by dissident western intellectuals, were self-descriptions structured to a degree in line with western literary institutions and western conceptions of culture and of self, yet in direct opposition to official ideologies of colonialism and slavery (which, among other things, excluded African from western conceptions of culture and of self). In very elaborate ways, these early texts undertook not to reproduce but to engage western discourses of identity, community selfhood, and otherness. Their dynamics were transcultural, and presuppose relations of subordination and resistance. But why would these groundbreaking African American writers choose a genre of survivalist travel narratives -- a genre marked by a tradition of Eurocolonialism, slave holding, and abuse of Africans -- to inaugurate their voices in the scene of writing? What is it about travel that so lends itself to the cause of slave self-representation? And is the adoption of the travel form and metaphor in autoethnographic texts as content with western conceptions of the self as Pratt suggests?
To consider these questions, I turn not to the early texts of the emergent literature, but to Charles Johnson's modern day re-tooling of the slave narrative form. In his Oxherding Tale, Johnson confronts 20th Century philosophy, 18th Century picaresque novels, Buddhist parables and black folk myths and legends, in order to author an iconic African American travel narrative. The novel engages the western discourses of which Pratt speaks as well as the autoethnographic slave narratives and autobiographies that dialogued with them. At the same time, as a tale of black identity, the novel haunts the traditions invoked with experiences entirely its own. Providing another step in the dialectic, Johnson looks beyond the relations of subordination and resistance to tackle the innovative aspect of African American imagination and representation.
Specifically, my argument is that Johnson uses travel narrative to write African American identity out of textuality -- not to provide African Americans with a textual self consistent with that of their oppressors, but to enter the scene of writing while resisting its tyranny of subject formation. I show that this move is accomplished through the deployment of ghost characters throughout the protagonist's journey, ghosts who trouble the conventions of subjectivity and the master-slave dynamics which they incorporate.
Jessica Catherine Lieberman
University of Michigan,
English Department,
Ann Arbor, Michigan.
(734) 665-8929
lieberma@umich.edu
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