Robert B. Stepto's A Home Elsewhere
Bradley, David
Misreading Obama DAVID BRADLEY A Home Elsewhere: Reading African American Classics in the Age of Obama by Robert B. Stepto Harvard University Press, 2010, 179 pp., $22.95 The nomination,...
...The Stepto/Gates theory, as I may misunderstand it, defines Afro-American literature not only by the continuity of tropes, but by their variation...
...Ordinarily the inclusion of older essays does no harm...
...She repeated, with a softer tone in her voice: "You sit down now, and rise with the others...
...However, in his outline of subjects that unify his lectures, one sees not pioneering, but projection...
...age old themes in African American literature...
...David Bradley is the author of South Street and The Chaneysville Incident...
...I rose with the others...
...But by now it is clear Stepto is unconcerned with such actualities...
...Stepto doesn't see it...
...You've got a pretty impressive father...
...he existed in stories so "seamless, burnished smooth, from repeated use" that Obama could not trust them...
...I was taken aback, even astonished...
...Even academics, now, admired it...
...Obama became a celebrity, Dreams a celebrity bio...
...he was raised by a multicultural village...
...One wonders how much of this material he actually thought, or even rethought, in the Age of Obama...
...Stanford Professor Arnold Rampersad said Dreams was "Titerary....full of clever tricks...
...Well, no, it's not...
...The ruddy-faced boy who had asked about cannibalism said, "Your dad is pretty cool...
...But Audacity itself was a product of a projection: that Barack Obama was a Literary Figure...
...In Dreams, the awareness is not racial, but cultural, and, in the second instance, the experience is affirmative...
...But the book changed in the writing, becoming Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, a memoir of his coming-of-age as the son of a white American mother and a black African father, with an Indonesian stepfather and European-heritage grandparents from the Midwest...
...And no, he did not have to invent black manhood...
...ask Ted Sorenson...
...It is surprising that he associates it with the classics of what is, now, African American Literature...
...Obama himself foretold this, in his second book, The Audacity of Hope...
...The story of Mr...
...To many, it was the fulfillment of Biblical prophesies, but some found the text in Isaiah, others in 1 Corinthians, still others in the Book of Revelation...
...The teacher invites the father to address the class...
...But Dreams seemed proof he had been that kind of writer, once...
...The teacher looked at me and, calling my name, said: "You sit down for the present, and rise with the others...
...And he told us of Kenya's struggle to be free...
...But that text has its own integrity...
...As we have seen," he writes, "Barack Obama speaks for many black male protagonists of any era...
...Troubling also is that Stepto's first lecture, "Frederick Douglass, Barack Obama, and the Search for Patrimony," abandons the juxtaposition that originally inspired him, substituting for The Narrative Douglass's second book, My Bondage and My Freedom...
...it converted the mother that bore me, into a myth...
...In the second lecture, "W.E.B...
...Still, the lecture proves provocative when Stepto, using material from My Bondage not mentioned in The Narrative, comments on recent events: We know from recent election history, people do try to impose their own scripts on black leaders, including for how they might become the leaders they don't plan to be...
...Ramona Edelin, who, in 1988, convinced Jesse Jackson and Johnson Publications that to replace the "black" in "black American" with "African" would "change our lot in the nation and around the world...
...Stepto locates that significance in Morrison's constructed folktale of the slave Solomon, who escaped by flying home to Africa, leaving a wife and children behind...
...True...
...Had Stepto been attentive to this variation, he might have pointed the way to a more complex understanding—or, at least, suggested that his "Age of Obama" really is a different literary era...
...a much more complex understanding of the difference between color and ethnic identity will be upon us...
...But the other children are derisive, some hooting like monkeys, one asking if Obama's father "ate people...
...Obama, Stepto writes, "knows all about Africans flying off to Africa, leaving children who must try and find family and home in new arrangements...
...In Douglass' own words," writes Stepto, "whereas his father was a 'mystery,' his mother was a 'myth.'" But this constricts Douglass's intent to fit Obama's experience...
...The audiobook, read by Obama, would win a Grammy...
...It is not surprising that Stepto finds Dreams "a marvel...
...In Dreams the schoolhouse trope emerges in two scenes...
...Reconstructed, the passage reads as follows: In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys' and girls' heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards—ten cents a package—and exchange...
...I did not quite understand her, and questioned: "Ma'am...
...In the third lecture, "Toni Morrison, Barack Obama, and Difference," Stepto considers Song of Solomon, which—after he received Morrison's endorsement—Obama identified as one of the books "significant" to him...
...Stepto finds the prototype in a passage from W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk, which he deconstructs to destruction...
...A paperback would sell 500,000 copies in two years...
...or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil...
...He spoke of the wild animals that still roamed the plains, the tribes that still required a young boy to kill a lion to prove his manhood...
...that involved being attentive to how we read African American literature...
...Obama's life as an author tells as much about him as some of the stories he has recounted in his books," observed Janny Scott in the New York Times...
...Though admitting that "features" of Dreams' schoolhouse episode "border on the unique," he insists "the episode as a whole is something of a twice-told tale, an age-old rite of passage...
...There was little to foreshadow this in the history of his first book, which began as a formula: "promotable" author ("First Black Elected to Head Harvard's Law Review," as the New York Times headlined it), "salable" tale, a handy media "hook...
...Stepto prefers the term "episode," delineating the "school-house episode.a formative first scene of racial self-awareness.a moment when race is imposed...
...Stepto avoids the question...
...But by that very token, Stepto seems situated to lead the way to a "more complex understanding...
...In this he saw a project...
...how black boys invent black manhood, often with no examples or models before them...
...Du Bois Institute, now published by the Harvard University Press, in A Home Elsewhere: Reading African American Classics in the Age of Obama...
...Eldridge came up to me...
...The sales were underwhelming...
...A decade later, Henry Louis Gates called this the "discrete black difference" in Afro-American literature...
...Stepto's projections lead one to question his commitment to his own idea...
...His problem was that nobody else in the village was—as was he—a black American...
...Stepto has isolated a trope that connects Dreams with classic texts, but there are intriguing variations...
...Stepto seems to have made the substitution because My Bondage focuses on the idea of family more than does The Narrative...
...Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others...
...If so, theories articulated long ago require if not revision, then new application...
...Meanwhile, Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, whose most famous novels are based on the history of slavery, endorsed Obama—in political terms...
...The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card—refused it peremptorily, with a glance...
...On the eve of the election, Robert Burns Stepto, professor of English, African American Studies, and American Studies at Yale, was writing an Introduction for a new edition of The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself, but "couldn't help thinking about Douglass' Narrative and Obama's Dreams From My Father being first books, books that were black male bildungsromans, books that were unto themselves part of each man's effort to create a self and identity...
...He did not raise himself...
...I serve," he wrote, "as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views...
...The term trope, in the context of artistic prose, denotes a passage that combines situation, action, and language in a distinctive configuration that can be detected, despite some variation, in a number of texts...
...The Douglass of My Bondage was a famous political orator, the author of a best-selling, critically praised book— a Literary Figure, like the Obama of The Audacity of Hope...
...The project was realized in three lectures delivered at Harvard's W.E.B...
...His keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention invigorated generic rhetoric with his ungeneric story...
...Obama's proposal for a treatise on race relations drew a six-figure advance...
...Obama "spent the rest of the day in a daze...
...And no, he doesn't...
...One takes place on Obama's first day at an exclusive prep school...
...After being elected The Only Black Senator, he fired his agent and signed a three-book, $1.9 million deal...
...Dubois, Barack Obama, and the Search for Race: School House Blues," Stepto applies the theory, expressed in his 1991 From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative, that "Afro-American" prose tradition is a process of call-and-response, with later texts responding, through reiterations and variations of form and content, to earlier texts...
...Though claiming to be enthusiastic about Obama's newness, Stepto ignores variations from the standard tropes, and distorts the text to support reiterations of the same ole, same ole...
...Obama anticipates mortification: I held my head stiffly, trying to focus on a vacant point on the blackboard behind him...
...But the business of his life changed Dreams...
...No, we haven't...
...But Stepto's Introduction to Part Two does no more than suggest that Obama would approve this message...
...Authorship, in politics, is a fluid concept...
...tis best that you not seem too learned...
...To some, it was an international relations marketing coup "redefining the American 'brand...
...Give us the facts, we will take care of the philosophy...
...Scott's article, "The Story of Obama, Written by Obama," was one of a number of political pieces that treated Obama as a Literary Figure...
...He rethought nothing of the four additional essays, written between 1985 and 2006, that appear in Part Two of A Home Elsewhere...
...His next book would be a more collaborative effort...
...knowing, and actually being stunned by the fact, that an African American writer is our president...
...But Dreams focuses on the idea of father, and Douglass, in My Bondage, gives father no space: "I say nothing of father, for he is shrouded in a mystery I have never been able to penetrate...
...Some embellished their thoughts with literary allusions—Tolstoy, Woolf, Whitman—that normally would have been blue-penciled...
...Crouch's point was cultural and accurate...
...Stanley Crouch, jazz critic, proclaimed there was "confusion" due to "naive ideas coming out of Pan-Africanism...
...Others detailed Obama's writing process, emphasizing that "man alone in a room" image—one discovered Obama writing in a men's room...
...how many had been enslaved only because of the color of their skin just as they had in America..When he finished, Miss Hefty was positively beaming...
...And saying doesn't make it so...
...The question is, is the slave heritage an essential of black, or Afro-American or African American Literature...
...He was.describing the deep gash in the earth where mankind had first appeared...
...It had made my brothers and sisters strangers to me...
...But A Home Elsewhere was dedicated to the proposition that the advent of Obama signified...
...Barack Obama, Literary Figure, is no longer the writer, or the man, who created the text entitled Dreams From My Father...
...Publisher's Weekly called it a "poignant, probing memoir of an unusual life," but the New York Times Book Review sniffed that "without much experience as a writer, Barack Obama has bravely tackled the complexities of his remarkable upbringing...
...And voters seemed to like the idea that the man surrounded by adoring crowds had once been a man alone in a room, trying to get human feelings right...
...Black writers, said Gates, "read each other's texts and seize upon topoi and tropes to revise their own texts" creating "formal lines of continuity between the texts...
...The Douglass of The Narrative was, like the Obama of Dreams, young, brilliant, but of subordinate status...
...At the time of his death," he wrote in Dreams, "my father remained a myth to me...
...to others, it was the actualization of J. Edgar Hoover's creeping-philosophical-communist Nightmare...
...Some associated Dreams with James Frey's controversial memoir, A Million Little Pieces...
...That does suggest need for a re-examination, not of the classics or of Dreams, but of reviews that found The Audacity of Hope too didactic and academic...
...This is both facile and inaccurate—Obama's father flew off to Harvard...
...This void could have given rise to an interesting synoptic reading...
...Obama's father was not a mystery...
...The second scene takes place during Obama's father's visit to Hawaii, the only time father and son actually meet...
...we'll see...
...As for President Obama...
...Money does not a Literary Figure make, nor does celebrity...
...But her endorsement was taken as a heritage transfusion, one Literary Figure to another...
...Obama, he wrote, "does not share a heritage with the majority of black Americans, who are descendants of plantation slaves," and "if Obama makes it all the way...
...Douglass's own words, reconstructed, focus on experience and motivation Obama simply doesn't have...
...His blackness is neither secret nor shameful, and his Africanness is treated with respect by his teacher, who has lived in Kenya...
...Crouch referred to the neo-Pan-Africanist notions of Dr...
...He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Oregon...
...I sat down dazed...
...Stepto finds this trope reiterated in James Weldon Johnson's novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, the protagonist of which is so light-skinned he has never realized he is not white...
...It does not mean what someone chooses it to mean...
...Misreading Obama DAVID BRADLEY A Home Elsewhere: Reading African American Classics in the Age of Obama by Robert B. Stepto Harvard University Press, 2010, 179 pp., $22.95 The nomination, election, and inauguration of Barack Obama signified a multiplicity of things to a multitude of people...
...He had been speaking for some time before I could finally bring myself back to the moment...
...Obama was a politician, not a writer—at least not the kind of writer romanticized by John K. Hutchens: "a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right...
...it shrouded my father in mystery, and left me without an intelligible beginning in the world...
...But these themes, Stepto adds, "have a special poignancy and importance at the moment because our new, young, African American president has lived through these situations and circumstances...
...There is not, beneath the sky, an enemy to filial affection so destructive as slavery...
...Obama found his own text in 1 Chronicles 29:15: "For we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were all our fathers," and made it the epigraph...
...Many featured parenthetical insertions attesting that Obama had written Dreams or his speeches "himself...
...In Dreams, Obama wrote, "I can't even hold my experience up as being somehow representative of the black American experience...
...his family was reconstructed by his mother's divorce and remarriage...
...That Stepto's premises ignore essentials of the text is troubling...
...But, One day near the end of my second term at school the principal came into our room and, after talking to the teacher, for some reason said: "I wish all of the white scholars to stand for a moment...
...In youth he was "living out a caricature of black male adolescence...
...Obama later wrote, and "after a few months, I went on with the business of my life, certain that my career as an author would be short-lived...
...No, he hasn't...
...Deal with it: it is what it says...
...to others, it was Viagra for the old Kennedy/Camelot vigor...
...What that text describes is a set of experiences that some may find representative and others may find unique...
...Unfortunately, Stepto's critical approach involves decon-struction, which—speaking generically— involves breaking a text down into elemental parts and explicating each exhaustively...
...Tell your story...
...Harvard University Press routinely requests such augmentations to published lectures...
...Talking points are included with advice about appearance, comportment, articulateness, and anger management..In the case of Douglass, after he had been on the circuit for three months and was beginning to chafe at telling the same personal story again and again, the advice from the abolitionists was...
...To some, it was the realization of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s not-by-the-color-of-their-skin-but-by-the-content-of-their-character Dream...
...Indeed it would be fun to see how the theory Stepto advanced in his 1985 essay "Distrust of the Reader in Afro-American Narratives" would illumine the strategy of Obama's speeches...
...Stepto's past work has assumed that the slave heritage was central to the black or African American literary tradition...
...Political pieces that focused on Obama as Literary Figure, contrary to journalistic norms, focused not on the current, issue-oriented Audacity of Hope, but on the once-forgotten memoir...
...I will return," he writes, "to several subjects: how protagonists raise themselves, often without one of both parents...
...it was taken as political and race-traitorous...
Vol. 57 • October 2010 • No. 4
