Epic Trickster faces the Desert of the Real: An interview with Gregory Rutledge on African-American epic, Western epic tradition in U.S. and the current political crisis

Abstract

In this interview, Dr. Gregory E. Rutledge approaches several questions aimed at creating bridges between West African epic and trickster studies, Homeric Americana as a performance, literature and Cultural Studies. Dr. Rutledge’s theory of the "Epic Trickster" focuses on the trans-Atlantic continuity and discontinuity of African epic tradition in the United States and how it collides with White Western epistemology from the colonial period to the present. His methodology—including West African, First American, and European/American forms; literature, film, music, and sport—has anthropological, literary and policy implications. Inspired by three West African epics and African-American literature, the "Epic Trickster" deploys Du Bois' "double-consciousness," Okpewho's African epic performance, Gates' "Signifyin(g) Monkey" and Lott's "love and theft" minstrelsy paradigms; his theoretical approach reformulates “double-consciousness” to analyze the dynamics of appropriation and cultural, epistemic erasure embodied and perpetrated by White-elite culture upon Black culture.

     Throughout the interview, Dr. Rutledge uses the "Epic Trickster" to raise a deep critique of the Western epistemology. He does so, comparatively, by approaching the U.S.'s literary "melting pot" as a cultural performance including, among other things, archetypal/mythical forms like Homer's epics and an embodied West African epic sense dropped, along with the enslaved, like seasoning into the epic of slavery. Thus, Dr. Rutledge's "Epic Trickster" comparative is situated in the African epic tradition, which was excluded from the Western curricula in the U.S. and Latin America, and animates the deep structures in African-American storytelling from fiction to hip hop.

     Thus, the "Epic Trickster," comprised of epic performances, tricksters, white supremacy and American Exceptionalism as part of the political mythology, equally speaks to threats represented by the current anti-immigrant and white supremacist rhetoric from the U.S. government. This dialogue opens space to consider the political dimension of the Western epic tradition in American Culture, and the connections between the current political crises and the interpretation/appropriation of the Homeric legacy by White American culture. This approach can enter into dialogue with Latin American decolonial studies due to the structural racism that shaped both the history of the formation of Latin American states and the United States of America.