Journal Article

\Playing father son and holocaust\: The Imagination of Totalitarian Oppression in the Works of John Edgar Wideman

Severs, Jeffrey

2016

Overview

Images of totalitarian domination and associated political techniques are central to John Edgar Wideman’s fiction and its understanding of history and African American suffering. This article illuminates the bases and consequences of Wideman’s artistic drive to gather together many of the worst atrocities of the past several centuries, from the Middle Passage to the Holocaust and to dramatize through them the conditions of the contemporary US and other locales. From the 1970s to the 2000s, in The Lynchers (1973), “Valaida” (1989), “Hostages” (1989), Philadelphia Fire (1990), “Who Invented the Jump Shot” (2005), and other works, Wideman creates images of concentration camps, Nazi genocide, and tentative alliances between Jews and African Americans. Through such daring motifs Wideman constructs a transhistorical and transnational community of sufferers. Wideman also aggressively identifies his artistic imagination itself with the purgative power of spectacular violence, instilling in readers’ a nearly constant sense that Wideman’s power of literary redress grows in tandem with the pervading destructiveness it counters.

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Subject: African American literature / African American studies / African Americans / Concentration camps / Diaspora / Fiction / Holocaust / Hostages / Jewish peoples / Literature / Logic / Lynchings / Politics / Sons / Totalitarianism / Wideman, John Edgar / Writers