Storytelling as Cultural Survival in John Edgar Wideman's The Homewood Trilogy
Dr. Dinesh A. Gundawar
, Dr. Ashok B. Yawale
John Edgar Wideman, The Homewood Trilogy, storytelling, cultural memory, oral tradition, African American identity, community
John Edgar Wideman's The Homewood Trilogy presents storytelling as a means by which an African American community preserves its memory against the pressures of racism, poverty, displacement, and historical erasure. Comprising Damballah, Hiding Place, and Sent for You Yesterday, the trilogy reconstructs Homewood not simply as a Pittsburgh neighborhood but as an imaginative archive made from remembered voices, family anecdotes, music, dreams, and inherited histories. This paper examines how Wideman transforms oral narration into a literary practice of cultural survival. His narrators do not recover a single, stable past; instead, they assemble communal knowledge from fragments and competing versions. Such narrative plurality resists official histories that reduce Black life to crime, deprivation, or sociological abstraction. Across the trilogy, storytelling connects the living with the dead, converts private suffering into shared knowledge, and enables damaged individuals to remain answerable to a community. At the same time, Wideman avoids romanticizing memory: stories can be incomplete, painful, and ethically demanding. The trilogy ultimately suggests that survival requires more than physical endurance. It depends on the continued circulation of names, voices, places, and experiences through which a people can recognize itself and imagine a future.
"Storytelling as Cultural Survival in John Edgar Wideman's The Homewood Trilogy", JNRID - JOURNAL OF NOVEL RESEARCH AND INNOVATIVE DEVELOPMENT (www.JNRID.org), ISSN:2984-8687, Vol.3, Issue 10, page no.a192-a196, October-2025, Available :https://tijer.org/JNRID/papers/JNRID2510023.pdf
Volume 3
Issue 10,
October-2025
Pages : a192-a196
Paper Reg. ID: JNRID_703174
Published Paper Id: JNRID2510023
Downloads: 00016
Research Area: Arts All
Country: -, -, India
ISSN: 2984-8687 | IMPACT FACTOR: 9.57 Calculated By Google Scholar | ESTD YEAR: 2023
An International Scholarly Open Access Journal, Peer-Reviewed, Refereed Journal Impact Factor 9.57 Calculate by Google Scholar and Semantic Scholar | AI-Powered Research Tool, Multidisciplinary, Monthly, Multilanguage Journal Indexing in All Major Database & Metadata, Citation Generator
Publisher: JNRID (IJ Publication) Janvi Wave
