Working the Garden: American Writers and the Industrialization of Agriculture (review)
The glaring flaw of Jimoh's book is that she does not integrate the long-standing tradition of theoretical writing on black music, particularly the blues, into her readings of the various works of literature. Jimoh's oversight is ironic because she cites the majority of these works, many of which directly relate to African-American literature, in her references. Although it is apparent, for example, that Jimoh agrees with LeRoi Jones's reading of spirituals and the blues as emerging from the experience of slavery, Blues Peoples remains only a subtext to Spiritual, Blues, and Jazz People in African American Fiction. In a similar way, Albert Murray's The Hero and the Blues, which asserts a profound role for the blues in literature as the extension of heroic expression, remains an untapped resource. The absence of this deeper analysis is felt in Jimoh's treatment of Invisible Man, particularly in the relationship between Jim Trueblood and the blues. Jimoh argues that Trueblood, the black sharecropper who is shunned for impregnating his own daughter, represents "a mind that is psychologically anesthetized" (137), and by doing so she overlooks Houston A. Baker, Jr.'s reading of this passage in Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature. As Baker sees, the triangulation of desire between the black characters, Trueblood and Invisible Man, and the white philanthropist, Mr. Norton, conveys the complexity of black life to which Jimoh often refers. Trueblood's blues is also commodity; the character in essence sells his blues narrative for one hundred dollars. One wonders to what extent Baker's reading might have a bearing on the other works in Jimoh's book, since his approach points to the blues as literary theory and trope, not simply as an essential identity that might define Trueblood or other characters. In the end, the strength of Jimoh's book lies in recalling us to the broader cultural and historical context of which African-American literature is a part.