Black Cultural Mythology

Christel N. Temple's Black Cultural Mythology is a timely text, especially in an age when Black popular culture is permeated with attempts to construct, or reconstruct, Pan-African visions of Africana heritage and existence. It offers a thoroughly researched framework as well as “culturally organic” vocabulary for making sense of Afrodiasporic survivalist activity. Temple rejects what she terms as an “over-remembrance” of slavery, and, by extension, slave memory, as the point of departure for Africana “diaspora memorial and factually mythic discourses” (2). Rather, her intervention follows the evolution of such Africana activity “along a path defined by their own nonhegemonic, self-determined, and even self-defensive survivalist needs” (2). Here, Temple makes her most powerful intervention. In her remarkable study of what she terms a “sacred inheritance” among Afrodiasporic cultures, she theorizes a framework for “itemizing” and “stylizing” both cultural survivals and “memorialization practices that support the broad narrative of this survival in literature, art, history, and folk culture” through culturally relevant schema (xiii).Throughout the text, Temple describes and explains intellectual developments related to theorizing Africana mythology as “blooming” within or from an antecedent Africana idea or lineage. She pays homage to important figures in this intellectual lineage, some of whom are more predictable than others. For instance, in discussing intellectual and activist forerunners formative to Black cultural mythology, Temple highlights the work of Maria W. Stewart, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Larry Neal, Maulana Karenga, Amos N. Wilson, and Molefi Kete Asante. These figures are not always brought into conversation with each other with the aim of building on one another. The term “mining” appears frequently in Temple's text; it emphasizes how certain less obvious figures who are essential contributors to and characters in a long and profound legacy of Africana critical thought must be excavated and elevated. When discussing the diverse meanings of commemoration, Temple analyzes the commemorative methodologies that appear in the writings of civil rights advocate and federal judge A. Leon Higginbotham Jr. and in the work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin, Derrick Bell, and Gil Scott-Heron—again, figures not always brought into the same discursive field.Temple takes an equally sharp approach to examining how the U.S. nation has historically regulated Harriet Tubman's hero dynamic in tandem with its decision to place her image on the twenty-dollar bill. This is followed by analyses of Haiti as a geography, its revolution, and its revolutionary actors as the original diaspora-wide mythology of a revolutionary event. Black Cultural Mythology does more than lay out a cutting-edge theory of Africana cultural memory studies. In Temple's examination of a constellation of exemplars, she demonstrates how this theory works to bring out new understandings. For instance, she unpacks Richard Wright's writing for its antiheroics while illustrating how writers relate to their culture's myths. Similarly, looking at Malcolm X, Temple examines how mythology moves across the tensions between autobiography and biography.Temple critically and thoughtfully engages the work of notable cultural and literary theorists within and outside Africana studies. Her engagement with scholars like Saidiya Hartman, Salamishah Tillet, Ana Lucia Araujo, and Maurice Halbwachs, among others, emerges in a nonpolemical way that fosters intellectual exchange and growth rather than adversarial posturing. As she situates her own project variously alongside, as an extension of, or in clear distinction to a range of scholars and their ideas, she reveals the parameters of the field of cultural memory studies and the limitations it imposes on theorizing Afrodiasporic memory. This, too, reinforces her original premise for a development of Africana cultural memory studies as its own organic field: one that inherits intellectual and historical activity from an Africana past, builds on its own genealogy, and generates its own logics for contemporary analyses. Likewise, Temple categorically resists “immersing this study within contemporary paradigms of the field of cultural memory studies, which assumes and reflects core Americana and European orientations—mostly concerning the Jewish Holocaust, the nation-state, migration, trauma, war, personal narrative, lore, and slavery” (253).At its core, Black Cultural Mythology is a framework that recognizes the long-standing intellectual tradition of Africana cultural memory. It encourages a narrative of adaptation over disruption, loss, fragmentation, fracture, victimization, and social crisis (4). Temple's theoretical rendering also extends Africana memory beyond commemorative activities surrounding oppression, disruption, and trauma to what she understands to be a more “complete narrative” that includes forms of resistance, futurism, and survival (5). Indeed, it is an Africana studies methodology that brings to view how Afrodiasporic peoples—and especially African Americans—sought to begin again and the modes through which they engraved identities on new soil. Temple draws on Molefi K. Asante's reinterpretation of Africana chronology in the concept of “beginning again” alongside Maurice Halbwachs's meditation on how people “engrave their form in some way upon the soil” to enliven collective remembrances and reflections of the past within new spatial configurations.1 These terms are scattered throughout the text, and the reader is consistently reminded of their significance as Temple builds up to introduce Africana cultural memory studies as an organic, self-defined, agentic, and identifiable field of study.My engagement in this review is primarily with the conceptual significance of Temple's intervention. The text has two significant aims. First, it is a philosophical intervention concerned “particularly in modeling how the conceptual framework of Black cultural mythology is one of many approaches that can now be categorized as Africana cultural memory studies” (253). Second, Temple's interest lies in “imaginative rights” whereby the creative imagination of cultural mythology and cultural memory serve a critical purpose. In her estimation, this purpose is that of “transmitting possibilities for assessing and duplicating survival” (253). She concludes that Black cultural mythology ultimately paves the way for a “theoretical vision in a liberated distance away from the usual and customary Western approaches to myth and mythology” (255)

Mythology · Sociology · African studies and sociopolitical issues · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Classics · History · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies

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