radical eruptions of desire
RADICAL ERUPTIONS OF DESIRE
The
invitation to write about "the treatment of street lit within academia or
even within African American literary studies more specifically" for
readers who have vested interest in "street lit's place, or lack thereof,
within academia, combating illiteracy amongst black and brown youth, and in
relation to the prison-industrial complex" was too attractive to refuse. Here was an opportunity to plunge with eyes
wide shut into the magma of argument regarding blind spots in American literary
and cultural discourses, to spend a season in the "cultured hell" to
which Claude McKay drew attention in the poem "America," in the territory where radical eruptions are
commonplace.
From
the vantage of literary history as a subset of an always expanding cultural
history, it is fair to suggest that,
especially in the twenty-first century,
American academia is an animal farm not a palace of wisdom. It might be argued that calling a certain
body of works "street lit" rather than "street literature,"
and then incarcerating the body in the prison of urban
fiction is a signal. Is it a signal that radical eruptions of desire (which have
ineluctable kinship with despair and pessimism) are genuinely threatening
? Does
American academia really fear what full disclosure or robust, nuanced
attention to what large numbers of
people read in opposition to what
pedagogical ideologies contend they should read might reveal? Probably, the answer is "YES." Only in venues or public spheres where literary and cultural studies are more
or less detached from the obligations, theories, postures and beliefs, disguised traps and deceptive
civility, enslavements and critical
practices of the Academy might street lit be accorded a fair hearing. Much to
the credit of scholars and writers who contributed to Street Lit: Representing the
Urban Landscape (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2014) and to the
scholars, critics, and writers listed in the bibliography for that anthology,
urban fiction did receive a fair hearing. And it would be irresponsible to
contend urban fiction and nonfiction has been neglected in books and articles
which explore the phenomenon of hip hop.
Nevertheless, American academica in general excludes street lit from its
multicultural canon.
Despite
the esteem that is justly accorded to Barbara Christian's widely anthologized essay "The Race for Theory" (1987), we have scant evidence that the Academy makes
everyday use of the lessons she sought to convey. Christian said nothing about urban
fiction. Her purpose was to focus on
critical difference and distance, on the strategies of academic institutions to
inspire fear regarding tenure and promotion and to silence or symbolically
criminalize dissenters. Two passages in
particular deserve notice.[i] The first was an observation about the
dominant position theory occupied three decades ago.
Perhaps because those who have
effected the takeover have the power (although they deny it) first of all to be
published, and thereby to determine the ideas which are deemed valuable, some
of our most daring and potentially radical critics (and by our I mean black, women, Third World) have been influenced, even
co-opted, into speaking a language and defining their discussion in terms alien
to and opposed to our needs and orientation. (349)
The second (too lengthy to quote
fully) was a stunning claim about how ordinary theorizing was among
non-academic people in her ethnic group.
For people of color have always
theorized ---- but in forms quite
different from the Western form of abstract logic. And I am inclined to say that our theorizing
…is often in narrative forms, in the stories we create, in riddles and
proverbs, in the play with language, since dynamic rather than fixed ideas seem
more to our liking. How else have we managed to survive with such spiritedness
the assault on our bodies, social institutions, countries, our very humanity?
(349)
On the one hand, Christian made a
stinging criticism of hypocrisy in the academic world. On the other, she valorized the entitlement
of her folk to use language(s) and forms that satisfied their needs and
preferences. What academic critics still
fail to grasp is the legitimacy of
street lit as a genre and mode of narrative knowing as they blithely dismiss
it.
A
second example of blindness among academic critics is the failure to accord
esteem to what Carolyn Rodgers contributed to discourse on literacy and
criticism. On neither side of the fence in the Academy between those who have fashioned themselves to have no color
and people who are thrown into a suspect and coded category (people of color),
do we find due diligence being given to Rodger's pioneering work in vernacular
theorizing,[ii] namely her Negro Digest/Black World essays which pre-date Stephen Henderson's Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as
Poetic References ( 1973) and Henry
Louis Gates, Jr.'s The Signifying Monkey:
A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (1988) and Houston A.
Baker, Jr.'s Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American
Literature :A Vernacular Theory(1984).
That Rodgers created tools for the
analysis and interpretation of poetry in the then current language/nonce
vocabulary of the street is not acknowledged in such critical guides as Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary
Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present ( 1994
), The Norton Anthology of Theory and
Criticism (2001 ) , African American
Literary Theory: A Reader ( 2000 )
The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary
Theory and Criticism ( 1994 )or
Critical Terms for Literary Study ( 1990 ). Her
absence is no more a surprise than the absence of street lit (also romance,
mystery and detective fiction, science fiction,
fantasy) from critical discourses that announce themselves to be
canonical. The Academy works assiduously
to exclude what it assumes to exist beneath its sense of orthodox dignity,
what a mirror of truth (if we had one)
would expose about its systemic prejudices.
One can surmise that the Academy includes and critiques Christian's essay because it is
cosmopolitan. Rodgers's essays, on the
other hand, are too liberated and abrasive to warrant inclusion. The Academy wants little or nothing to do
with material it can't easily co-opt to buttress hegemony.
As
American academic literary criticism slowly retreats from its romance with
Eurocentric theories, turns once again to interpretation and evaluation
grounded in history as narrative, and explores what the technologies of digital
humanities might offer to the construction of knowledge, it is more than a
little unwilling to maximize its potential as cultural criticism. As a discipline of inquiry, American
criticism is subject to the disabling limits of contractarian thought described brilliantly by the philosopher Charles W. Mills in The Racial Contract (1997), limits that
have been reexamined more recently in George Yancy's On Race: 34 Conversations in
a Time of Crisis (2017). However
rapid change is in the study of the cultural expressions we designate as
literature, race-bound changes in that arena are as slow as those associated
with scientific revolution.
Were
academic criticism predisposed become an authentic cultural criticism, it would
embrace radical eruptions of the desire to know. It would adapt certain objectives of the
Project on the History of Black Writing (PHBW) and reset its terms of engagement
to deal with American writing rather than with a significantly truncated canon of American literature. It would make a
greater investment in the redefining promoted by Paul Lauter and others in the making of The Heath Anthology of American Literature. It would rely more on the findings of
empirical aesthetics to deal with the diverse habits of readers and more fully
contextualize the phenomenon of American writing. Just as one
PHBW product, The Cambridge
History of African American Literature (2011), included Candice Love
Jackson's chapter "From writer to reader: black popular fiction" in
Part III: African American Literature as Academic and Cultural Capital,
cultural criticism would examine street lit and other genres which are
currently denigrated. It would deconstruct the nature of whiteness, proving in
the bargain that whiteness is a calculated and constructed psychosexual fantasy.
It would reduce the frequency of
lamenting that the humanities are in a state of crisis. Such a
turn would not be a quick fix. It would be a long-term project to gradually increase
"objective" and "accurate" accounting for what transpires
in the interactions among writers, readers and the means of producing texts in
the United States of America. It would gradually transform pedagogy as
envisioned in Louise Rosenblatt's Literature
as Exploration (1938) and The Reader
the Text the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work (1978).
Given what is happening to the American mindscape in the Age of Trump, these
ideals are ultimately puffs of warm air.
When did you last read that Herman Melville's "Bartleby the
Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street" (1853) was street lit?
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. December 31, 2017
[i]
These passages are quoted from "The Race for Theory." Within the Circle. Ed. Angelyn Mitchell .Durham: Duke University Press, 1994.348-359.
[ii]
I first commented on the missed opportunity of African American literary
criticism to use Rodgers's writing and to evolve as a movement toward
widespread literacy in "Literacy and Criticism: The Example of Carolyn
Rodgers." Drumvoices Revue 4.1-2
(Fall/Winter 1994/95):62-65.
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