Crimes of Racial and Generic Mixing in John A. Williams’s Clifford’s Blues ”

Bibliographic Data

ID12794091
AuthorsHeidi Elisabeth Bollinger (corresponding author)
Year2014
Volume44
Issue2
Pages267-303
Publication date2014-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Narrative Theory (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1548-9248 • E-ISSN: 1549-0815
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/jnt.2014.0009
OpenAlexW1975319005
LanguageEN
References cited17

“Crimes of Racial and Generic Mixing in John A. Williams’s Clifford’s Blues”1 Heidi Elisabeth Bollinger (bio) As systems of classification, both genre and race lend themselves to policing activities. The establishment of generic boundaries, like the legal codification of racial difference, inevitably creates anxiety about the threat of transgression. As Jacques Derrida’s seminal essay “The Law of Genre” slyly reveals, “one must not cross a line of demarcation, one must not risk impurity, anomaly, or monstrosity” (53). Ultimately Derrida argues that the segregation logic of genre is unsound, and concludes that “a law of impurity or a principle of contamination” defines genre (53). In this, Derrida’s law of genre resembles the formula for “Optic White” paint in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: “the purest white that can be found” created by incorporating ten drops of “dead black” liquid (202). Genre theory is rife with metaphors of purity and contamination, incarceration, and racial segregation. In The Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye comments, “the forms of prose fiction are mixed, like racial strains in human beings” (305). John Frow describes genre as “a law against miscegenation” (1627). Bruce Robbins characterizes genre as a “conservative regime” and “agent of social domination” (1646). Likewise, Stephen Owen describes the mapping of generic boundaries as “remarkably close to legislation or border control” (1389). The “notion of genre purity in literary criticism,” Hayden White argues, “serves much the same function as the notion of species purity in racist notions of humanity and history” (599). On the [End Page 267] other hand, Samuel R. Delany simply dismisses racial and generic purity as fallacy: “worrying about the purity of the genres on any level is even more futile than worrying about the purity of the races. Real understanding of the range and richness of codes, with their attendant recursions, revisions, and redundancies, makes absolute differentiation simply a non-problem” (142). Yet anxiety persists. As Robbins notes aptly, “when genre is discussed, the metaphor of the police is everywhere” (1646). Even if we dismiss policing metaphors as mere rhetoric, their frequent deployment by genre theorists is striking given that textual hybridity is a defining trait of contemporary literature. The concept of genre as a policing institution is particularly suggestive in relation to African American literature and Holocaust literature, which are narrated by individuals and groups punished for their “impurity” and even “monstrosity” according repressive social institutions. To what ends have writers in these literary traditions transgressed genre boundaries, and how might genre-mixing function as a critique of racial policing? In this essay, I will argue that John A. Williams’s black postmodern Holocaust novel Clifford’s Blues (1999) exemplifies the transgressive and transcendent possibilities of generic hybridity in response to the policing of racial identity. Over the course of his career, Williams published in a variety of genres, including the novel, poetry, biography, reportage, travelogue, literary criticism, and even pop-song lyrics and opera libretto. As his son, author Dennis Williams, has written, his “wide-ranging interests have always eluded easy categorization” (37). However, Williams’s investment in historical counter-narratives and what could be called “conspiracy theories” is evident throughout his literary career, particularly in his novels The Man Who Cried I Am (1967), Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light (1969), Captain Blackman (1972), and !Clicksong (1982), as well as his nonfiction work The King God Didn’t Save (1970). His early novels “reflect Williams’s apocalyptic vision of black revolutionary impulses and reactionary white conspiracies in the late 1960s and earlier 1970s,” James De Johngh rightly asserts (282). But it is fair to say that Williams has been “persistently preoccupied with the task of historical witness” throughout his career, as Matthew Calihman has remarked (140). Williams is best known as a participant in the Black Arts Movement, and his most widely acclaimed work remains The Man Who Cried I Am (1967), which forms with Clifford’s Blues a book-end of his writing career. [End Page 268] The Man imagines the future possibility of genocide waged against black Americans, while Clifford’s Blues, inspired by the historical fact of black prisoners in Dachau, imagines the perspective of one black American man swept

Art · Art history · Blues · Criticism · Humanity · Literature · Political science · Racism · Theology · White (mutation · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

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