SOURCE: "Exorcizing the Demons: John Edgar Wideman's Literary Response," in Hollins Critic, Vol. XXIX, No. 5, December, 1992, pp. 1-10.

Saunders is a professor of English at Purdue University and critic. In the following essay, he surveys Wideman's works, delineating the author's response to the inherent dualities of sociology, psychology, and image faced by African Americans.

In his socio-literary classic The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W. E. B. Du Bois characterized African-Americans as being in possession of a double-consciousness in which "one ever feels his twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body." The notion is a persistent one in the annals of African-American literature. James Weldon Johnson through his narrator in The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912), makes the further observation that this psychological condition reflects a "dual personality" exacerbated in the psyche of a black man "in...