Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has, despite moves to ban the book nationally as well as have it removed from Junior High School curricula because of its derogatory representation of African-Americans, maintained its status in the American literary canon. Race and racial representation are fundamental to the novel's plot and this paper extends their significance by arguing for the centrality of what Toni Morrison has identified as an 'Africanist' African-American presence that pervades and in fact, inspires America's founding literature.(1) The paper argues that Twain's representation of the 'Nigger' Jim is contingent on an 'Africanist' African-American presence which, 'real or fabricated', is premised on a particular idea of blackness signified by Africans. Through a close study of blackface minstrelsy, entertainment popular in the nineteenth-century, this paper investigates (white) Western perceptions of Africa and Africans utilized in African-American literary representations. The paper thus suggests a re-reading of Huckleberry Finn that focuses on the ways in which Africa and Africans are implicated in and central to white and black Western constructions of identity. Far from re-hashing the now banal argument of the racist, and therefore unreadable, character of the novel, this paper hopes to stimulate new readings and discussions of Huckleberry Finn.(2) That is, the paper attempts to interrogate critically the novel's canonical significance and its applicability to (black) African audiences seemingly far-removed from, but integral to, its racial ideology and its literary status, so linking global theories of identity as well as African and (African-) American literary studies.
