| In the twentieth century African American expressive tradition, there is a notable reclamation of the South as a paradoxical site of ancestry, heritage and history. This dissertation theorizes that Jean Toomer's rendering of the South, in Cane, as a complicated terrain of dis/inheritance for African Americans inaugurates a pastoral discourse that continues to influence the field of African American letters, exemplified in the fiction of Gloria Naylor, Ernest Gaines and Toni Morrison. To this end, Cane is conceived as the primary imaginative and critical work in this study. In conceptualizing the myriad ways in which these authors are in dialogue with Cane, signifying is the primary critical framework employed. The African American pastoral offers an interpretive model that enables a vernacular-based reading of Naylor's, Gaines' and Morrison's narratives.;Following the trajectory of Cane's tripartite design of South--North--return South, this paper provides a spatial and cultural analytical framework. Specific emphasis is placed on the tropings of the South as a site of death. Necrogeography is a paradigmatic sign-system in the southern terrain, for it reveals a hegemonic history of slavery, racism and displacement. Identified as an overarching symbol of the African American pastoral, the (unmarked) graveyard (which the South, in its entirety, can be read as embodying) is a trace structure that mediates the conditions of absence and presence. More than a physical representation of place, the graveyard symbolizes unacknowledged histories buried in the southern terrain. Thus this landscape is a sacred ground through which the ancestors are accessed. As a space of cultural continuity the southern graveyards are, in the end, life affirming. Resituating the graveyard as physical and symbolic space, these pastoral writers return in their literary imaginations to the Toomerian South. This vision of the South as a haunting, yet sustaining, ancestral ground has liberating potential for the characters. Thus Morrison's oxymoron in Beloved of creating a story that forces a remembrance only to warn on the final pages of the dangers of remembrance ("This is not a story to pass on") is not disingenuous, for this is precisely the tension that infuses the pastoral. |
