Socrates Fortlow’s Odyssey
Socrates Fortlow’s Odyssey
The Quest for Home and Self
This chapter examines the quest for a home motif in the Socrates Fortlow stories, highlighting an apparent paradox concerning notions of home: “Normatively, home signifies both a place and a feeling of domesticity: comfort, family, and security abide ... Historically for African Americans, however, home, both in the sense of the family house and the homeland’s promise, has been severely limited, often denied.” Drawing on R. W. Emerson’s notion of an idealized, individualized concept of home, the chapter reads the Fortlow stories as redemptive tales that “provide a new communal basis for reconceiving home in distinctively African American terms that transcends historic oppression and contemporary communal violence.”
Keywords: Walter Mosley, African American literature, home, redemption, oppression, communal violence, R. W. Emerson
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