Reclamation in Walker's Jubilee: The Context of Development of the Historical Novel

Walker's Jubilee is an important marker in the effective development of African-American counter-narratives. Walker indeed appropriates feature traditions in the narratives of the enslaved, which she reshapes to create a new mode of representation that will only come to predominate in the sixties. Walker's text anticipates most of the practices embedded in the new body of African-American studies and novels on enslavement published after the sixties, which like her work pays attention to the agency and self-representations of the enslaved; privileges description of their community-and culture-building energies; exhibits forms of resistance; and interrogates the myths and stereotypes disseminated in Anglo-American representations. Walker's approach to history has inspired filial African-American contemporary writers. Indeed, as Pettis conjectures, historical fiction structured in the same manner as Jubilee is also a vital precursor to complex ... approaches to Afro-American history such as David Bradley's Chanesysville Incident, John A. Williams' Captain Blackman, and Ishmael Reed's parody of the genre, Flight to Canada (12). Walker's text, as several critics have pointed out, may well have been the impetus for revisions of the history of chattel enslavement from the Black woman's perspective such as Ernest G. Gaines' Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), Sherley Anne Williams' Dessa Rose (1986), and Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987). (i) author's confirmation that enslavement did not destroy the spirit of her heroine is her legacy to female protagonists of fiction that follows such as Miss James Pittman, Dessa Rose, and Sethe. Most scholarship on Jubilee traces back the text's inception to the sixties. Indeed, critics such as Ashraf H. A Rushdy, in The Neo-Slave Narrative; Joyce Pettis in Margaret Walker: Black Women Writer of the South; and Angelyn Mitchell in her introduction to Freedom to Remember: Narrative, Slavery, and Gender in Contemporary Black Women's Fictions--suggest that the novel's development parallels the sixties. This article argues that in accounting for the revisionist undertaking which Jubilee represents, however, one should not only take into account the significant ideological base of the sixties, because Walker's text is a product of an earlier period during which the African-American movement of reclamation reached its peak: the thirties. Indeed, Walker started writing Jubilee in the fall of 1934, when she was in her senior year at Northeastern University in Illinois (Walker, How I Wrote 12), and she completed and published it thirty years later. Therefore, even though examination of the context of Jubilee's publication--the context of the Civil Rights and the erupting Black Power movements that gave impetus to a wave of neo-narratives of the enslaved--might help to understand the practices embedded in the text, it is necessary to examine the context of its beginnings as well. This is especially necessary since the author herself makes it clear, in an interview with Kay Bonnetti, that notwithstanding the fact that her novel was published in 1966, it bears influences of the thinking she acquired in the thirties (128). context in which Walker began writing Jubilee coincides with the Harlem Renaissance's late stage. This movement of cultural self-assertion saw its fullest development in the 1920s. However, it was still a powerful ideological construct in the 1930s. development of the Harlem Renaissance had taken place in a climate of protest against the African-Americans' economic and social conditions, of unprecedented development of race consciousness, and of pride in Negro cultural heritage--all ingredients necessary to the eventual birth of nationalism of the 1960s. Writers and theorists of this movement in particular affirmed pride in their Negro identity and celebrated their racial heritage in their works. …

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