Dennis Looney,
Freedom Readers: The African
American Reception of Dante Alighieri and the Divine Comedy. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press
Reviewed by Ronald Herzman (herzman@geneseo.edu)
Dennis Looney's Freedom
Readers: The African American Reception of Dante Alighieri and the Divine
Comedy convincingly and importantly argues that Dante's critical fortunes in
the United States are entangled more closely to the history of the country's
black and white citizens that we have ever imagined. Freedom
Readers examines how "African Americans have read, interpreted, and
responded to Dante and his work over the last two centuries..."(p.
2). It would be an important book if only for the new material that the
author has discovered and brought together that links Dante to traditions of
African American literature and culture.
But it is also an important book for understanding issues connected to
the reception of Dante more generally. To provide the context that fits Dante
with the African American tradition, Looney presents an enormous amount of
information about the way that the Divine Comedy has been understood and
interpreted throughout its long afterlife.
The connection goes something like this: Dante was a hero, indeed in many ways the poster
child, for the architects of the Italian Risorgimento. There was a great deal of cross-fertilization
between that set of intellectuals and many of the leading American
abolitionists, with the result that Dante also became something of a poster
child for abolition. As Looney carefully
and memorably phrases it: "... this
dependence on Dante to make sense of perceived injustice and to effect a change
in politics to which one is opposed, underlies the play on words in the book's
title, Freedom Readers" (p.
2). And again: "They all turn to Dante for help in
interpreting their paradoxical experience as citizens of the United States of
America whose ancestors were likely to have arrived on a slave ship" (p. 3). Although the main lines of the story are clear,
there are complex ramifications, and Looney has done an excellent job of
gathering and distilling an enormous amount of source material.
After an introductory methodological chapter, rich in its
implications and inferences, the study moves through two centuries of African
American culture and literature's encounter with Dante. The chapter titles suggest that more is at
issue than chronology, however. Each
chapter highlights a different kind of encounter between African American
Culture and Dante as well as an analysis of the most interesting texts by the
African American authors who engage him.
"Colored Dante" covers the nineteenth century and highlights
Henrietta Cordelia Ray, whose fifty-two line poem "Dante" (1885)
shows a "deep understanding of Dante's life and poetry as well as a strong
emotional and intellectual response to the man and his work" (p. 56). "Negro Dante" moves from 1900 to
1950, and covers such canonical and important writers as W.E.B. DuBois, Richard
Wright, and Ralph Ellison, and less canonical but perhaps more interestingly
Spencer Williams, an African American filmmaker better known for his role as
Andy in the controversial TV sitcom Amos
'n' Andy. In his film Go Down, Death! (1944), Williams
intersperses clips from the 1911 Italian silent film of the Inferno into his work. As Looney has it, "...the quality of the
final product does not detract from the deliberate, intelligent reading of
Dante behind Williams's allusive adaptation of the cinematic Inferno, from whose fifty or so scenes
he chooses six that suit the allegorical purposes of Go Down, Death!" (p. 77).
In a book full of surprises, this might be the biggest.
Chapter 3. "Black Dante," covers the period from
the late 50's through the mid-70's. In
it, Looney presents his most elaborate and extended analysis of a single text,
Amiri Baraka / LeRoi Jones' The System of
Dante's Hell (1965). Looney makes
the claim that his is the first attempt to actually sort out the allusions to
Dante in this autobiographical novel in a systematic way (p. 106). Looney's
analysis shows the extent to which Baraka (pictured) was using, maybe even abusing, Dante
for his own paradoxical purposes. One of the important themes that Looney
foregrounds throughout Freedom Readers
is the relationship between high culture Dante and popular Dante: the Dante of the footnotes and the Dante of
street singers. The African American
appropriation of Dante provides Looney with a very clear lens to look at this
theme, with The System of Dante's Hell
providing the most extended test case of someone whose agenda is to reject the
very notion of a high-culture Dante as simply not relevant to his own
enterprise. The System of Dante's Hell is not really about Dante, even though
there are more explicit references to the Comedy in this work than in any of
the others that Looney analyzes. Nevertheless, Dante as constructed in The System "enables Baraka to
understand better his own experience of hell on earth..."(p. 107). Baraka appropriates for his own purposes a
Dante that does and that does not in some recognizable way actually exist. It does in that System refers to Dante's categories in very explicit ways. It does not in that they become starting
points for rearrangement, rejection, and reinterpretation of the text. It does not in that as often as Baraka refers
to the text of Dante, he more often refers to the scaffolding that the Sinclair
edition provides for naming categories and mapping out the terrain. It could be
argued that the system that Baraka appropriates belongs more to Sinclair the
editor than to Dante himself. Rather than digging into Dante, he holds on to
what Dante provides him by way of a system.
Baraka is using one of the icons of European high culture to measure the
growing distance between himself and European literature. There is an obvious paradox here, in that the
very process of separating himself from Dante and from European culture more
generally can only be done with Dante's help, even if the Dante that Baraka
appropriates is sort of a stick-figure Dante, useful to play off but without
any, one might also say in deliberate defiance of any, attempt to see what the
real Dante might have been getting at.
To concede more to Dante would have been to defeat Baraka's purpose in
his use-cum-rejection of the Commedia. Looney is sensitive to all of the
complexities this position entails, and more than respectful of Baraka's
enterprise, and perhaps that explains why The
System of Dante's Hell receives such detailed analysis in Freedom Readers.
In chapter 4, "African American Dante," Looney
examines Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills and
Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. Linden Hills is an interesting
counterweight to Baraka because its juxtaposition of European and American
cultural values depends on a much more nuanced appreciation of Dante and a much
more thorough appropriation of him in her novel. Looney calls Naylor "the most
educated" of the writers he considers in his work (p. 158), and the one
most steeped in the tradition of black literary culture. Looney gives a persuasive account of the way
she utilizes Dante and in the process he provides a key to the major contours
of Freedom Readers as a whole. He
sees Naylor as someone "who learned Dante in school, but whose experiences
out of the academy put her in touch with that other version of Dante that has
its origins in the abolitionists' practical reading of the medieval poet and
politician. Her imitation of Dante bespeaks a familiar dichotomy of highbrow
and lowbrow culture, of establishmentarian and radical responses to Dante, of
aesthetic and political readings of Dante." (p. 159).
How these two trajectories interact is the essence of Freedom Readers no less than Linden Hills.
For Naylor an interesting moment of both convergence and
conversion occurred in college when she read Dante the same year (1977) that
she read Toni Morrison's first novel, The
Bluest Eye, in which, as Looney tells us, "Dante plays a small but
significant part" (p. 183). Looney's look at The Bluest Eye shows us something of the extraordinary precision of
Morrison’s artistry in her appropriation of Dante. Through the character of
Soaphead Church, "a hybrid product of mixed colonial culture,"
Morrison imagines someone whose reading of Dante is dazzlingly defective, someone
who uses Dante "for a moral system that coheres with his perverted sense
of the world" (p. 187). Morrison
"takes the reader into Soaphead's warped mind for a theological
disquisition on good and evil, with Dante as arbiter" (p. 185). If Dante is everywhere in Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills, which is in effect a
modern recreation of the Inferno, his
appearance in The Bluest Eye is
carefully circumscribed, injected by
means of a brilliant surgical strike, with a laser-like intensity that provides
evidence that Morrison knew the Dante that she was withholding from her
character.
In this schematic summary I do not mean to give the
impression that there is more unity in the African American experience of Dante
than there actually is. Looney
understands the degree to which any reception study that spans two hundred
years is going to be both complicated and a little bit messy. The study asks questions and provokes further
investigation. Nevertheless, I think
that it is interesting that my response to the book was of a piece with other
important studies of Dante that have changed my way of looking at him. After
assimilating any new and cogent interpretation of Dante, something I have never
thought of before, something clicks in, and the new interpretation becomes part
of the way I look at Dante as though it had always been there, and as though it
would be perfectly obvious to everyone else as well. Such is what happened
after my first experience of Freedom
Readers. Despite an obvious
connection between the two traditions--the Exodus narrative after all is the
structural and thematic skeleton onto which the Commedia is fleshed out as well as the defining master narrative of
the movement from slavery to freedom in the African American tradition--before
Looney's work, I had never made any kind of connection between Dante and the
African American experience. After
reading the book (and, spurred by my reading, teaching a course called
"Dante and African American Literature" with my African-Americanist
colleague), its revelations, some of them stunning when I first came across
them, now seem in my mind to belong to the "everyone knows this"
category. But everybody does not know
them, and so Looney has opened up for us huge possibilities. It will be interesting to see how much more
we find now that we have found a new way to look.
Ronald Herzman
SUNY Geneseo
