SOURCE: "Promised Land and Wasteland in John Edgar Wideman's Recent Fiction," in Revue Francaise D'Etudes, Vol. XVI, No. 48-49, April-June, 1991, pp. 259-70.

Berben is writer and educator at the Université de Nice. In the following essay, she uses examples from Toni Morrison's novel, Sula, to illustrate her explication of the significance of land in Wideman's fiction.

In America, an ex-colony recolonized from within, as everyone knows, the abundance of land itself gave birth to the doctrine of Manifest Destiny and its corollary myth that wealth and power were available virtually for the taking. Within tacit limits. The black slaves and their descendants, many of whom still constitute an underclass blocked in a subservient position, are seldom included among those who control the land factor. Initially, the African relationship with the land of their ancestors had not been one of individual ownership, nor commercial exploitation in the white sense...