ABSTRACT
From the very beginning, speaking comfortably of African-American identity formation has been a difficult, almost impossible act. For in order to do so, to utter speculations about the being inherent to being African American, one must reconcile the relationship between the African American-optimistically figured as a subject-and the narratives of communal selfhood that have come to constitute African-American history. The precarious status of AfricanAmerican subjectivity, and the often-thorny function of reconstructed AfricanAmerican historical narratives, produces a profound quandary for anyone seeking to understand and represent African Americans as agents in history; theirs is a quandary that leaves one troubled and altogether uncomfortable.
