Like the grandfather in Ellison's "Battle Royal," Morrison's ancestor strives to undermine the system, and offer alternative wisdom" in an effort to sustain succeeding generations ("City Limits" 39-40). yearning" for village life and thus serves in the capacity of a sage who is the "advising, benevolent, protective, wise Black ancestor." The wise ancestor "values racial connection" and "racial memory over individual fulfillment," yet at the same time the "true" ancestor, according to Morrison, is "frequently a social or secret outlaw" in the hostile environment of the enemy-and in the case of black literature in America, the enemy is the continued presence of the past, oppressive white culture. The ancestor figure in black literature here functions as "the matrix of. In another critical essay from the early 1980s, Morrison situates her idea of the ancestor in the African village, where the clan provided a collective experience of community and protection. 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 figure, is a kind of "timeless" entity that provides a certain "continuum in Black or African-American art." The presence of the ancestor can be seen in the work of writers such as Ralph Ellison and Toni Cade Bambara, but Morrison also notes that the absence of the ancestor in works by writers like Richard Wright and James Baldwin results in an element of "destruction and disarray in the work itself" ("Rootedness" 343). 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.
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That difference, far from being the forgotten and recoverable origin, is this dispersion that we are and make. We are difference.our reason is the difference of discourses, our history the difference of times, our selves the difference of masks.
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APA style: 'Shifting Spirits': Ancestral Constructs in the Postmodern Writing of John Edgar Wideman.'Shifting Spirits': Ancestral Constructs in the Postmodern Writing of John Edgar Wideman." Retrieved from
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MLA style: "'Shifting Spirits': Ancestral Constructs in the Postmodern Writing of John Edgar Wideman." The Free Library.