94

This paper seeks to explore the double discourse on identity in the work of the Afro-American writer John Edgar Wideman, inscribing it in the broader context of a postcolonial double consciousness involving simultaneous, paradoxical gestures of reconstruction and deconstruction. I borrow metaphors from the game of basketball, at which Wideman excelled, and which has influenced his work both thematically and formally, to follow a network of tensions and ambiguities running through his work. I attempt to relate those tensions to the fundamental predicament of the Afro-American artist writing inevitably both from within and without his original cultural community. I probe the narrative inscriptions, in Wideman's essays and fiction, of the deeper ironies which turn discourses on cultural reconstruction into statements of cultural exile and loss. I suggest that Wideman's originality partly lies in his choice to face and tap the full force of the irony, turning his meditative prose into the means for a daring ritual of unmaking.