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Critics have found in Charles Johnson's Middle Passage a variety of themes and allusions. For Madelyn Jablon, Johnson's text is about writing an African and American self; for S. X. Goudie, it is a deconstruction of the racist and colonialist world view which marks us as either the enslaver or the enslaved; for Ashraf Rushdy ("Properties of Desire") it is a philosophical exploration, indebted to the early Karl Marx, of the slave's struggle to create an identity and subvert, through theft, love, and writing, the capitalism which commodified him. For Celestin Walby, it is a rewriting of ancient African and Egyptian myths and rituals expressing "a condition of fragmentation and a desire for unity" that can only be achieved through self-sacrifice, a solution as old as the original myths and rituals, "transcending race and time" (668). For Molly Abel Travis, this very transcendence of race and time marks the novel as one whose time has not yet come, an argument I strongly contest. To my mind, what makes the novel most significant, and eminently teachable, is the fact that it is an accessible and important example of what Linda Hutcheon calls "historiographic metafiction." Despite its peppering of philosophical and religious allusions, words that don't exist in any dictionary, and complex metaphysical arguments, students find Middle Passage "easy" and enjoyable; teaching this novel with some of its intertexts, such as Melville's Moby-Dick and "Benito Cereno" and Douglass's Narrative, can be a richly rewarding experience.
Historiographic metafiction is a term Hutcheon uses to define the postmodern novel, especially those novels set in the past which are "at once popular bestsellers and objects of intense academic study" (Poetics 20). Novels such as The French Lieutenant's Woman and Ragtime are best-sellers because they use the plot structures and characterization techniques of popular fiction, yet interesting to analyze and teach because they use parody and irony to challenge those very techniques from within the text. This type of postmodern fiction is marked by a concern with "whose truth gets told" in historical and fictional narratives (Hutcheon, Poetics 4, 123) since, in the words of Hayden White, "every representation of the past has specifiable ideological implications" (Tropics of Discourse, qtd. Hutcheon, Poetics 120). Johnson asks readers to re-vision the narrative histories...