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Black Metafiction: Self-Consciousness in African American Literature Madelyn Jablon. Black Metafiction: Self-Consciousness in African American Literature. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1997. x + 209 pp.
It wasn't long ago that those of us who spent our professional lives writing about the experiences and representations of people of color, women, and working people were troubled, a few scandalized, by some of the antihumanist claims of postmodernity. The author seemed to be dying just as African American authors were being brought to renewed life; the subject became split, internally divided, eternally deferred, unintelligible, and essentially absent, just as women, workers, and otherwise colonized peoples were finding their voices and their subjectivities. For some, it appeared that the ontological claims of modernity (death and absence) and the epistemological pronouncements of postmodernism (deferral and aporia) were yet another means of ensuring that those wounded by the material realities of history would continue to be misserved by the intellectual climate of the present. The "other" emerged to find the self absent; the ethnic author was born into a cemetery.
This history, for Madelyn Jablon, seems to be repeating itself from the other side. Anglo-European theorists are now claiming the end of postmodernity just as African American authors are beginning to get recognition for a long history of theories and practices of self-conscious artistic representation. Just as African American authors otherwise as diverse in subject matter and...