Since its publication in 1995, Dreams from My Father has been received as a memoir that reveals as much about Barack Obama's political worldview as it does about his understanding of American history and culture. Critical analysis has rarely focussed on the book's literary merits, a deficiency ably addressed by this long-overdue contribution to appreciations of Obama's literary influences and aspirations. Purcell and Veggian recognize that a challenge for the modern reader of Dreams is to separate the text from Obama's political career. They suggest in their introduction to this engaging collection that Dreams affords an insight into the literary figure Obama might have become had he turned away from politics. The editors argue that, while Dreams is an unconventional autobiography, it has lasting value as a piece of literature, and they ask for a recalibration of our understanding of Obama that asserts his place in the African American literary tradition.
Despite drawing on a range of literary theories, the seven chapters that comprise the collection are remarkably cohesive, and especially in the ways they consider the memoir genre. Stephanie Li's deft analysis of how Obama engages with the stories of his father passed down through his family reveals a favouring of “the myth over the man” (42), and that it is the myth of the father that informs the identity that the son chooses for himself. This in turn leads Li to question what she describes as the stability of Dreams as memoir. The father figure also features prominently in John Lowney's compelling chapter on Chicago renaissance writer Frank Marshall Davis, whose influence on Obama's identity and development has arguably been marginalized in favour of other writers in the canon of African American literature. Lowney argues that, while Davis's Marxist leanings are obscured through Obama's partial fictionalizations, he functions as a surrogate father who helps Obama negotiate the tensions between pragmatic individualism and radical socialism.
James Fitzmaurice considers Obama to be an “introspective and ambivalent man of letters” (98) whose poetic aspirations were burnished during his time at Occidental College, Los Angeles. Fitzmaurice examines Obama's early writing to infer his literary influences, from W. H. Auden and W. B. Yeats to John Fante, Charles Bukowski and Robert Lowell. Fitzmaurice also separates Obama the author of Dreams from the book's Obama character and locates the text as a piece of creative nonfiction. David Borman, however, places Dreams in the genre of memoirs produced by authors whose heritage is derived from postcolonial Africa. Borman offers a nuanced comparison of Dreams and Aminatta Forna's 2002 memoir The Devil That Danced on the Water, and particularly the ways these texts mediate their authors’ engagement with Africa through return narratives. Borman argues that, in Kenya and Sierra Leone, Obama and Forna find that the vague, culturally ambiguous Africa of their imaginations coalesces into a creative place that shapes identities and reconciles experiences.
There is an interesting connection here with Lee Konstantinou's discussion of Dreams, which considers the book not as an autobiography but as a post-ironic Bildungsroman in which Obama “learns to live with a range of contradictory identities and voices to find a reasonable approximation of a self” (128). Situating his argument alongside Erich Auerbach's Mimesis (1946), Konstantinou examines how Obama repurposes irony within his appeals to hope and belief to articulate a figural logic to his candidacy.
Roberto Sirvent and Neil Baker's appraisal of Obama through the prism of Niebuhrian realism explores the influence of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr on Obama's religious, political and moral outlook. The chapter's sections on being only human, power and idealism, and the ambiguity of moral life lead to the understanding of Obama's faith as rooted in a humility that balances pragmatism and responsibility.
Finally, Donald E. Pease uses the figure of the Black Orpheus to read Obama's desire for political and racial reconciliation, particularly in the context of the War on Terror and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In this excellent chapter, Pease argues that there is a disconnect between Obama's audacious hope for a government that heals racist division and the persistent violent reality, and he wonders whether Obama's legacy will be a union of “radical hope and audacious despair” (190).
Although a chapter on African American writers such as W. E. B. Du Bois or Ralph Ellison might have made for a more complete collection, Purcell and Veggian have produced an insightful and balanced edition that makes a valuable contribution to understandings of Barack Obama's literary ambitions and influences. It encourages readers to consider the contribution that Obama might have made had he pursued a literary career, and which he might yet make.
