Voice, Language, and Storytelling, the Craft of Narrative Experimentation in John Edgar Wideman\'s Fiction

The self-assertion of marginalized people has alway s been made in a conscious distantiation from the c ultural values of the mainstream. Self-assertion usually fi nds its way in literature through cultural memory, l anguage valuation, and voice. John Edgar Wideman is one of the African A merican authors whose literary esthetics is radicall y committed to African American’s social and cultural redemption . His work, produced from the margins of the American society, is a forceful assertion of identity that intertwines an d fuses. West African cultural strands, orality, pop ular arts, audiovisual arts techniques, and various English lan guage registers, in a borderline politics of experi mentation. This paper purports to bring out, through a reading based on narratology, postcolonialism, and postmod ernism, that expression of the politics of identity in Wideman’s aesthetics of experimentation.