SOURCE: Hoem, Sheri I. “‘Shifting Spirits’: Ancestral Constructs in the Postmodern Writing of John Edgar Wideman.” African American Review 34, no. 2 (summer 2000): 249-62.

In the following essay, Hoem investigates the role of “ancestral constructs” in Wideman's “Damballah” and The Cattle Killing.

We are difference … our reason is the difference of discourses, our history the difference of times, our selves the difference of masks. That difference, far from being the forgotten and recoverable origin, is this dispersion that we are and make.

(Michel Foucault)

One of the hallmarks of discourses often differentiated by the term minority is that they evoke some form of ancestor as a means of negotiating the presence of the past. In fact, Toni Morrison has argued that a fundamental aspect of black literature is the “presence or absence of an ancestor.” According to Morrison, the ancestor functions as an elder who, rather than constituting a parental...