SOURCE: Thaden, Barbara Z. “Charles Johnson's Middle Passage as Historiographic Metafiction.” College English 59, no. 7 (November 1997): 753-66.

In the following essay, Thaden examines The Middle Passage as a postmodern novel that both draws from and questions American literary traditions.

Critics have found in Charles Johnson's Middle Passage a variety of themes and allusions. For Madelyn Jablon, Johnson's text is about writing an African and American self; for S. X. Goudie, it is a deconstruction of the racist and colonialist world view which marks us as either the enslaver or the enslaved; for Ashraf Rushdy (“Properties of Desire”) it is a philosophical exploration, indebted to the early Karl Marx, of the slave's struggle to create an identity and subvert, through theft, love, and writing, the capitalism which commodified him. For Celestin Walby, it is a rewriting of ancient African and Egyptian myths and rituals expressing “a condition of fragmentation and...