Paule Marshall and Black Post-Blackness

• In Event: Black Lives and the Legacies of US Imperialism

Abstract

For fifty years, from 1959 to 2009, Paule Marshall’s fiction was characterized by its transnational perspective. Marshall said explicitly that her 1969 novel The Chosen Place, The Timeless People was concerned with the larger issue of exposing “the horrendous colonialism we have all undergone” and that she wanted to imagine black people struggling against that domination and control. This paper focuses on the price Marshall paid as an artist for this unapologetically transnational focus. When college students in the 1990s questioned Marshall's presence at an African American student gathering, Toni Cade Bambara had to intervene and explain that Marshall was a writer of the entire diaspora. Marshall got in trouble with the Black Arts Movement spokespeople (Larry Neal, Nikki Giovanni, and Jean Carey Bond) in the 1970s because of what they considered her "foreignness": the geographical setting in the Caribbean consigned the novel and this Brooklyn-born author to the realm of the foreign and exotic. Marshall was warned that her work would not sell unless she set it in the U.S. Not confined by a U.S. black national identity, Marshall was seen as insufficiently black.
Contrary to the claims that there was no definitive “Black Arts Novel,” The Chosen Place, The Timeless People was the most impressive Black Arts novel of the 1970s. Marshall's forward-looking work would only begin to be legible in the post–black nationalist aesthetics of the 21st century, referred to by cultural critic Margo Crawford as “Black Post-Blackness,” which allowed a more expansive understanding of Black Arts culture. Paule Marshall used her vision to explore, experiment with, and transform the blackness of the Black Arts Movement—pushing it into a more transnational, queerer, woman-centered place.

Author

• Mary-Helen Washington, University of Maryland-College Park