Afrocentrism and Literature (original) (raw)

2009

Abstract

This paper discusses the production of critical discourses in the United States which analyze the figure of the black American writer John Edgar Wideman through the lens of theoretical categories of Afrocentrism. The article shows that these discourses actually produce what they aim to describe, that is an “afrocentered” or simply an “African American” writer. However, these literary critics fail to figure out the complexity of a writer which precisely questions afrocentric categories. Moreover, such discourses ignore that Wideman’s social trajectory and literary recognition highlight processes of cultural legitimization and of the construction of the autonomy of the literary field.

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