Afrocentricity

"The Beginning of Homewood" and the volume of short stories of which it is a part, Damballah, belongs to the stage of Wideman's career when he began to write from an Afrocentric perspective. After the eight year hiatus following the publication of the novel The Lynchers, Wideman moved his family back East and shifted his literary interest to stories more connected to his own life and to African-American culture and history.

Critic Doreatha Drummond Mbalia explains that this process is necessarily incremental. Wideman's literary education, Mbalia explains, was Eurocentric. That is, he was taught to view the world from a European, or white, point of view and came to internalized European standards and values for art and literature. Thus, when he began his career as a writer, he emulated white writers like William Faulkner and James Joyce. According to Mbalia, Wideman, like so many African-American authors, needed to...