JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Indiana State University and St. Louis University are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to African American Review.As many times as we reopen slavery's closure, we are hurtled rapidly forward into the dizzying motions of a symbolic enterprise, and it becomes increasingly clear that the cultural synthesis we call "slavery" was never homogeneous in its practices and conception, nor unitary in the faces it has yielded. But to behave as if it were so matches precisely the telos of African persons in the United States.... The collective and individual reinvention of the discourse of "slavery" is, therefore, nothing other than an attempt to restore to a spatio-temporal object its eminent historicity, to evoke person/persona in the place of a "shady" ideal. (Spillers, "Changing the Letter" 29) I n his novel Oxherding Tale (1982), Charles Johnson reopens slavery's closure through his reclamation of the nineteenthcentury slave narrative. In so doing, he undermines static formulations of literature, history, and identity: Viewing each account as a potentially mutable rendering of experience and being, he limns their transformative possibilities through a performative poetics. Just as Spillers posits slavery's closure as a point of departure for the recovery of that institution's complex historicity, Johnson deploys seemingly fixed categories of identity and genre in order to overturn deterministic models of being. Specifically, his enslaved, biracial protagonist Andrew Hawkins can only achieve emancipation by comprehending his own subjectivity as multiple, as heterogeneously constructed out of the interstices between "house and field," and "white" and "black." In keeping with this new understanding, Andrew in his role as narrator must also transcend first-person perspective and the confines of traditional autobiography in order to enact a "first-person universal." By extension, Johnson forces his readers to confront the limitations of a conventional, realist reading method (as he calls it, "a heavily conditioned seeing"), proposing as an alternative a more liberated mode of readership (Being 5). Thus, Johnson seizes the discursive aspect of slavery's displaced "person(s)/persona(s)": Refusing to fix the subject, he instead conceives of personhood as the effect of a reiterative and citational practice, as a palimpsest of performances.In both Johnson's philosophical fictions and his philosophy of fiction, he interrogates questions of subjectivity in relation to language and literary form. As he states in his phenomenological treatise on African-American fiction Being and Race (1988), he reserves his greatest respect for "the protean writer, the performer ... wh...