An Abstract Architecture: John Keene’s Counternarratives

"Long hours in the study of any text will reveal inner, unseen contours, an abstract architecture," writes John Keene.1 But even long hours of studying the stories and novellas that make up Counternarratives may not yield a clear sense of the book's challenging form. Part of this elusiveness has to do with the uses of abstractionism, as Philip Brian Harper suggests, and part of it with Keene's massive ambition: to rewrite myths of origin, both historical and fictive, across five centuries and several continents.2 To discern the invisible architecture of Counternarratives, I place the text next to the neoslave narrative, a burgeoning genre in contemporary African diaspora literature that returns to the scene of Atlantic slavery to assess its ongoing afterlife. Keene participates in the core concerns of the genre, I suggest, but also exceeds its boundaries. In doing so, Keene may be said to counter the insurrectionary genre itself, using collage, fragmentation, and juxtaposition to remake the genre by turning it inside out.

I should grant at the outset, however, that the neoslave narrative in no way exhausts the multiple predecessors Keene rewrites in his formidable sweep across time and space. To read Counternarratives as a neoslave narrative is not to taxonomize or to overlook the many other notes it sounds — the sensuality and glamor of Langston Hughes in Mexico and Harlem, the isolated and somewhat irritated genius of W. E. B. Du Bois at Harvard, the many alienations of erstwhile vaudeville star, Robert Allen Cole. Moreover, the book announces the creation of a new genre in its very title and plays havoc with received genres throughout. Nor do I wish to turn to genre to identify what is singular about Keene and what may be placed within a larger project in African American writing. Rather, such a turn takes us to fundamental questions about the relation of fiction to history and geography, the reception of Black writing in the catastrophic present, and the power of speculative worldmaking in the wider tradition of African diaspora letters. In the end, such an exploration helps discern Keene's subtle and somewhat elusive conception of race itself as well as the vaunted question of how we assess African American literature outside or beyond its social function alone. Harping on the uniqueness of Keene may be appealing, but it does disservice to his deep and profound engagement with existing literary traditions, on the one hand, and his revision of established narratives on the other.  

Keene's central strategy is a form of literary ventriloquism, or what I call elsewhere an instance of "talking books, talking back."3 Olaudah Equiano's encounter with his master's "talking book" and his despair at the book refusing to speak to him modeled for Henry Louis Gates, Jr. a wider Black relation to enlightenment traditions of print humanism. For Gates, the trope of the "talking book" emblematizes the entire project of Black literary traditions and it frames his canonizing efforts in the Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Keene rewrites a dizzying array of such "talking books." In the most famous vignette of the book, "Rivers," he imagines Mark Twain's Huck Finn running into James Alton Rivers, now a veteran of the Union army, reflecting on his varied experiences (by no means contained by the book from "that writer . . . from Hannibal, who had made him, both of us, briefly famous").4 Living in a queer family arrangement with Augustine and Louisa, confident that what people call his "mumbo jumbo and hoodoo claptrap"5 is a wisdom that lies in being able to interpret "a ghost language" to see "patterns of the future,"6 Rivers refuses to be limited by either Tom Sawyer's hostile or Huck's paternalist racism nor does he accept that the story of his life should begin with "that little boy."7 Along similar lines, turning to the barest sliver of a possible historical encounter — Xavier Villaurrutia's dedication of his poem "North Carolina Blues" to Langston Hughes — Keene imagines them meeting in Mexico City and Harlem (in the vein of Isaac Julien's Looking for Langston) in order to revive what he calls a "hemispheric queer modernism, a black-brown queer modernism."8

Such efforts are most legible as part of a range of revisionist projects of reclamation as the twenty-first century has witnessed numerous efforts to correct the distortions and absences of received histories. The massive return to the history of slavery - in roiling debates about monuments and memorials, in relation to the funding and founding of elite universities, as the source of ongoing racial terror, and of lingering economic inequality - is often framed through the vocabularies of recovery or restitution. And critical response to Keene sees him in a similar vein, as "recuperating" fragmented voices of the disenfranchised" or achieving the recovery of lost histories. A 2019 interview directly links Keene to the reckoning called for by Black Lives Matter: "as young black men and women continue to die at the hands of the police, Keene's world feels particularly resonant."9

And it is certainly true that Keene challenges the ways in which received histories (of race, migration, and slavery; of the founding and settling of nations; of revolutions and ruptures) have erased and distorted Black presence across the Americas. I submit, however, that his ongoing work bespeaks a deeper, more oblique, and ultimately far more unsettling attempt to reckon with the history of race after slavery. No wonder that the same interviewer also wonders if the work of politics and the art of the experimental writer easily connect.

What such a concern misses is that Keene should be accorded the label of experimental writer not just for his avant-garde elliptical poetics but also as a philosopher of history, as an interrogator of myths of origin, as a creator of a new kind of founding story for the Americas. Keene's epic does not cement a foundation for stable monuments but digs deeper and wider to unearth everything, unafraid of what ghosts are conjured up in this overdue but still challenging excavation. Keene thus does more than recover or repair — his excursions into the history of Atlantic slavery and his imaginative rewriting of stray archives are not instrumental but pose a queer anticolonial challenge to historiography itself.

Such a challenge dovetails with the neoslave narrative, which returns to the form of the antebellum slave narrative where the fugitive narrator outlines a precarious journey from bondage to freedom, often from the US South to the North. Already a genre that speaks in many tongues, the slave narrative is transformed beyond recognition in such famed novels as Toni Morrison's Beloved, Octavia Butler's Kindred, Edward Jones's The Known World, Caryl Phillips's Crossing the River, Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing, and Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad. A troubled and troubling genre, the neoslave narrative upends all assumptions about national myths of origin, a coherent self, and the work of art. In this vein, it continues the difficult task of its historical predecessor. As R.A. Judy rightly notes, we have not fully dealt with the deep negation and nihilism that informs the telling of the enslaved narrator's search for freedom.10 And yet, it is common to see the neoslave narrative as an attempt to reshape identity, community, and memory, to bridge the gap between past and present, and to refuse historical amnesia. Critical frames for such writing often focus on the psychic landscape of the enslaved, trauma and possible healing, mourning and melancholy. To read Counternarratives as a neoslave narrative thus requires an adjustment of critical expectations shaped by such lauded fictions, since Keene — conscious of the modes through which neoliberalism coopts even avant-garde or radical Black art - creates openings that chart a path toward something other than recovery or an encounter with trauma. He writes against redress or reconciliation and shifts us beyond injunctions to care and repair, summoning up narratives of sharply etched characters facing immense violence and forced displacements but holding their own with the help of magic, spirituality, and prophecy. Keene's efforts do not distill a kernel of an essential meaning to Black presence in the Americas; instead, they outline its mutability and multifarious trajectory.

This is first evident in the sheer scope of Counternarratives. Keene's sustained exploration of slavery in Latin America not only attends to historical details of Atlantic slavery (where a majority of Africans who endured the Middle Passage were transported to the Caribbean and Latin America) but also corrects current efforts to memorialize the histories of these forced migrations.11 As Hazel Carby pointedly notes with respect to the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC — which displays "more items associated with the history of the black community on Martha's Vineyard than with the whole of Latin America, including the Caribbean" — several current commemorative projects fall short of acknowledging the "global, not national, project of colonial modernity" in favor of an exceptionalist narrative bound by the borders of the nation.12

In contrast, Keene looks back to look across — his revisionist history explores an expansive geography of the African diaspora and its encounter with modernity, hopping from Harlem to Puritan New England, from seventeenth-century Brazil of the Reformation era to a convent in Kentucky, from Civil War United States to Haiti and San Domingo. Counternarratives suggestively opens with Juan Rodriguez, a black Dominican sailor who lands in Manhattan before Columbus, and who allies himself with the landscape and with the prior territorial claims of Algonquian Indians, ultimately resolving to desert the crew of his ship, the Jonge Tobias. The book closes with a chilling dialogue set in an unnamed African country in the present between two anticolonial heroes who have become postcolonial despots. Along the way, encounters among Black modernist writers and muses, surreal exchanges in convents and plantations, living rooms and battlefields force open any self-contained history of African American life. As Michelle Wright notes in her response to the much-discussed The 1619 Project, it is crucial to acknowledge that the history of slavery is "a sprawling, global, messily complicated — and unfinished — collective of names, dates, events, interpretations, archives, and material evidence," which should not be boiled down to a "single story" constructed "to tell US Blacks who they are and how they know who they are."13 Along these lines, Keene's stories and novellas foreshorten distances across the globe, refusing to allow any single meaning of the legacy of slavery to settle in the present as a truism or parable.

Keene erodes distinctions among north and south, colony and empire, mainland and outpost, frontier and backwater. Both the theater of war and the stage of home are sites where race is manufactured and eroded to suit changing needs of power. A long footnote to an encyclopedia entry in "Gloss on a History of Roman Catholics in the Early American Republic, 1790-1825; or the Strange History of Our Lady of the Sorrows" elaborates the fantastical journey of Carmel from a plantation in Saint-Domingue to a convent in Kentucky. With magical powers inherited from her mother, Carmel's story probes "the role of duty" as well as the meaning of freedom.14 As Keene puts it, in a Joycean vein, "within the context shaped by a musket barrel, is there any ethical responsibility besides silence, resistance and cunning?"15 Carmel not only learns how to read and write multiple languages, she also draws with the power of second sight, and the reader learns of these developments in rapidly changing genres, wondering what it might really mean to "TEAR THE WHITE OUT" on the plantation.16 "An Outtake from the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution," silently corrects the absences of Bernard Bailyn's tome on the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, which pays no heed to the voices of the African diaspora. The travails of a man named Zion, continuously hounded for his efforts to be free and his "defiance of the social order,"17 make a mockery of the 1776 Declaration of Independence appended next to the site of his planned execution, no more so than when we learn that not finding Zion in his jail cell, the authorities execute "another Negro, whose particular crimes are not recorded" and that this happens not in Mississippi or Alabama, but in the Worcester Town Square.18 The story interrogates the notion of innocence and crime, rebellion and theft, liberation and violation, highlighting absences and losses in official archives that can never be fully reconstructed or made whole.

An account of an eccentric project to launch a hot air balloon during the Civil War reimagines the longstanding trope of the flying African, which in the book's counternarrative logic no longer functions as an inspirational story of the power of myth, but instead shifts genres by offering a keenly observed social drama. "The Aeronauts" entangles the pursuit of science and learning with the hypocrisies of antebellum America. In the first-person account of a young queer man with a phenomenal memory and a voracious appetite for learning, who serves as a steward at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, we learn of cultural and scientific experiments on Black people by seemingly benevolent whites whose flaws are writ large. A single sentence reconstructs the stream-of-consciousness "inner contours" of Miss La La — Anna Olga Albertina Brown — variously known as "African Princess,"19 "la Venus noire," and "la mulatresse-canon,"20 who was famed for being painted by Edgar Degas hanging from a rope by her teeth as a circus performer. In "Cold," Robert Allen Cole, a ragtime composer known for "Under the Bamboo Tree" and who died by suicide in 1911, gives voice to his anguish and alienation in a stream-of-consciousness narration that challenges readers to peer intently beneath the mask of the sellout or stereotype. None of these histories are excavated straight: as an epistolary narrator, D'Azevedo (himself a Jewish man passing as Roman Catholic and rescued and spirited away by the enslaved Burunbana to Palmares), wryly acknowledges in "A Letter on the Trials of the Counterreformation in New Lisbon," Keene forces us to continually recognize that "perhaps some queer things may have transpired here in the past."21 The book thus imagines models of kinship and forms of relation that queer received notions of descent and genealogy, but unlike many other such efforts to reckon with the legacy of slavery, it stops short of imagining a queer romance or a heroic ancestor, a sentimental story of triumph or redemption, or an unspeakable trauma that strains against the impossibility of documentation. Keene, in his interview with McElroy, has said that he was looking for a way to "show complexity without interiority" and many of the cryptic tales involve precisely this effort, thus refusing readers access to any kind of visceral or emotional identification with the characters from the past.22

This is why the architecture of the book requires attention. Counternarratives insists that we pursue such questions: how and why and where do these varied experiences connect? While we could read the thirteen stories and novellas chronologically from 1613 to the present, no straightforward genealogy or chronicle emerges. Rather, Keene invites us to probe latent connections in these occluded histories, insisting on something other than "soft multiculturalism."23 As the narrative voice shifts — from neutral, seemingly dispassionate omniscient narration to first person, in turns sly and sardonic, ironic and grim — Keene approximates the worldview and cadences of enslaved and free, dominant and subaltern, continually calling attention to the conditions that make narration possible, both then and now. We find no clear call for reckoning or repair, no blueprint for tackling inequality in the present, and no call for either symbolic or literal reparations.

Rather, Keene insists that we read each individual story next to another. The collection is bookended by two particularly confounding stories. It begins with the first Black explorer in 1613, someone who refutes the logic of discovery and colonialism, signaling an ethics of fugitivity. And it ends with the voluble unnamed African dictators — the lion and the prophet — who seemingly cannot stop talking. What do these stories — of an encounter between Lenape Indians and Jan/Juan/João as the origin of this alternate genealogy — have to do with each other? Why does this expansive excursion in Atlantic history — requiring the reader to learn about Portuguese and Dutch colonialism, the counter-Reformation, the Civil War, American revolution, the Haitian revolution, among other historical events — conclude with a story about postcolonial dystopia?

To compare "Mannahatta," the inscrutable sliver of a story that opens Counternarratives, to the familiar openings of slave narratives and neoslave narratives is to further confront difficulties. The famed "I was born" (a placing of the narrator in time and place, with an acknowledgement of the murky conditions of birth under slavery's sexual economy that gestures outward to the multiple violations of the world the narrator enters) has been memorably transformed into such heart-stopping beginnings as Morrison's "124 was spiteful"; Butler's "I lost an arm on my last trip home"; and Phillips's "A desperate foolishness. The crops failed. I sold my children."24 Keene's opening delivers no such spectacle, inviting rumination instead. His expansive geography continually moves us outward. We no longer trace a flight from Kentucky to Ohio alongside visitations from the afterlife in the vein of Beloved, nor from present-day California to the slave-holding Maryland of Kindred. Nor do we follow a speculative project that traces an imaginary train from Georgia to South Carolina to the Carolinas to Tennessee to Indiana, as The Underground Railroad does. Similarly, so many African American political visions have turned to Africa in the hope for an alternative, from Du Bois to Marcus Garvey, Richard Wright to Maya Angelou. But Keene ends with an African dystopia, perhaps modeled on historical figures like Robert Mugabe, reminding us that dreams of liberation have spawned postcolonial nightmares.25 How might we connect Juan, son of a "Lusitanian sailor father" from Hispaniola of the opening story to Twain's reimagined Jim to a figure like Mugabe?26 And further, how do they relate to such Counternarrative characters and narrators as Hughes, Carmel, Zion, or Cole? Clearly, Keene is not after a coherent portrait of the African diaspora where we could trace origins with a respectful Black explorer and end with the sublimity of evil. "The Lions" is distinct from all previous narratives which, despite their range, are situated within a particular historical context and archive. Drawing attention to what remains, what exceeds even the previous (albeit expansive) roaming, roving eye, "The Lions" refuses to separate the political dystopia of postcolonial Africa from the rest of the story, forcing us to inhabit the minds of these evil characters. Keene rejects facile hopes of survival or transcendence, serving a chilling warning about our collective future instead. The postcolony thus appears not as a footnote to the New World, or as a past to be transcended, but as a prologue.

The terrain of the neoslave narrative is already immensely variegated. In my 2019 book Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery, I range over multiple contemporary returns to the slave narrative, from human rights bestsellers to post-Black satires, from immigrant narratives of new African diasporas to gothic war novels.27 Keene seems to absorb many of these modes (humor, horror, pathos, opacity), collecting them in a mazelike structure, where meaning emerges, if at all, through our frustrated attempts to find connections. Consider the differences between Counternarratives and Crossing the River. Despite its justly famous fragmented structure, Phillips's novel proposes a coherent story of two and a half centuries of the African diaspora as a family torn apart. Similarly, despite its vast historical span, Gyasi's Homegoing conceives of the diaspora through a fractured family line of two sisters, imagining the descendants from both sides of the Atlantic finding each other, and a measure of redemption, at the end. In contrast, Keene clearly exceeds the template of diaspora as trauma, scattering, and return, imagining both continuity and rupture in unexpected fashion, prompting new queries into suppressed histories. He thus renders impossible a direct circuit between past and present even as he hints at subtle and confounding continuities. We often think of the contemporary turn to slavery as a means to foreshorten the distance between our era and a violently disremembered history, but Keene underlines the incommensurability of past and present. In his hands, the past emerges as resistant to meaning — available, certainly, for projection, fantasy, re-imagining. But it yields no clarity for the present.

To say this is not to suggest that Keene explicitly sets out to offer a rejoinder to the neo-slave narrative, nor to reduce the expansive scope of Counternarratives to the challenge it poses to historiography. Rather, Keene's insistence on the global reach of these stories and novellas prevents any single story of slavery's afterlife from becoming foundational. His architecture requires rumination and (always) further research, while his confounding plots demand engagement beyond instrumentalization. Race, itself, emerges not just as fundamentally linked to far-flung histories and geographies but also as something that must be read through previous archives of slavery and colonization. Nothing given can be attributed to race: it materializes not as an identity but as a script, multiply overwritten, often obscured, demanding the labor of interpretation. This is especially true if we follow the trails he sets up, not just easter eggs to discover, but as deep dives into the quagmire of history. Keene elucidates the power of the literary, as his allusions spark excursions into varied histories that resist the instrumentalities of the present in order to expand our aesthetic and political imagination. Counternarratives thus asks us to loosen the grip of such cherished concepts as diaspora as a scattered family, or of trauma as the only legacy of slavery's archive, guiding us toward connections that unsettle more than they reassure. In the end, Keene's work also perhaps underlines the limits of interpretations like mine, pushing beyond the desire to discern a stable function for the work of art even as it promises that learning lies in the effort to find the connections that may always exceed our grasp.

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Yogita Goyal (she/her), @pocothought, is Professor of African American Studies and English at UCLA and author of Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature (2010) and Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery (2019), winner of the René Wellek and Perkins Prizes. She has published widely on African diaspora, postcolonial, and US literature, and served as President of A.S.A.P. and editor of the journal, Contemporary Literature. She is writing a book about the genres of anticolonial thought.

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