"Past lives live in us, through us": African American Authorship and the PEN/Faulkner Prize.

Describing the night of David Bradley's acceptance of the 1982 PEN/Faulkner prize in the Washington Post , reporter Curt Suplee claims that this moment demarcates the start of a new world order and upsets the previous hierarchies indicated by the "vast domed radiance" of Jefferson's structure through an ushering in of an African American writer into a newly established elite. Suplee suggests that Bradley's PEN/Faulkner prize upsets the previous racial hierarchies symbolized by Jefferson's Rotunda building; however, within Bradley's novel, the historian protagonist shows a genealogy of oppression that persists across generations, from before the Civil War to 1979. The tension between these two narratives of Bradley's prize emerges through the increased visibility enabled by the PEN/Faulkner prize. This particular prize highlights Bradley, and his fellow African American prizewinner John Edgar Wideman, during a particularly contentious period for African American writers. In this article, I examine how the first African American recipients of the PEN/Faulkner prize use their fiction to critique the promises of multiculturalism, particularly in response to the culture wars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]