First chapter of an unfinished project
WORDS AND
BEING July
26, 2016 draft/jww
Chapter 1: Literary and
Social Positions
Writing about boundary conditions from his position as
President of the Modern Language Association, K. Anthony Appiah quotes a
sentence from Matthew Arnold's Culture and
Anarchy wherein the phrases "the best that has been thought and known
in the world" and "sweetness and light" delimit Arnold's
Victorian idea of culture. "The word culture
can mean many things (and nothing)," Appiah suggests, "but Arnold is
talking here about the ideal of a liberal education, an education for free
women and men"(Appiah 2016, p. 2). Aside
from the philosophical exactness of
Appiah's proposing that the word culture
might mean nothing, it is noteworthy that his statement is a particular instance
of doing something with words, an instance which positions his immediate
audience (readers of the MLA Newsletter)
to react, one way or another, to what seems to be his commonsensical choice
"to endorse the vision of a liberal education that is of value to people
independent of wealth or occupation and that gives us more than a marketable
skill." Even readers who share
Appiah's vision might bristle, however, when they encounter his carefully
worded rhetorical gesture of saying "a degree in economics is not a
particularly good preparation for a career in business,"(2), because they
recognize there are no guarantees a degree in one of the humanities without
acquisition of non-humanistic skill sets is a good preparation for a career. As a typical example of the humanistic
discourse we take for granted , Appiah's "Boundary Conditions" exposes
some rules of the academic game as nothing more or less than a gamble.[i]
External variables that are not language as well as choice and chance are at
play. To be sure, the mind's constant interplay between limits and ideals, what
is and what might be , urges us to argue that common sense is necessary to
determine our location in the game.
Information about American culture, and those African American culture (s) in which we have
invested interest, rapidly accumulates. We have to make hard choices as we
navigate between "culture" as a totality of interrelated human
activities and "culture" as the domain of highbrow and lowbrow
arts. How does one manage a surplus of empirical
data, a vast range of competing interpretations and culture-bound opinions that
are ineluctably political? What is the
role of knowledge and power, change and continuity, in constituting ideas regarding identity,
authenticity and authority? Do widely
discussed tensions between the
humanities and the sciences compound
uncertainties and/or motivate some scholars to make frantic quests for
power in manufacturing theories ? Are scholars and others who write cultural
commentaries obligated to be forthcoming about how their ideologies condone,
collaborate with, or resist hegemony?
These questions, and dozens of others we have not raised, are central in
determining what might be the purposes,
the problems, and the values of cultural studies.
Aware
that the human mind cannot know all about any subject, we investigate small particles ---in this book we focus
mainly on the small territory African American literature and allied expressions can claim in
the geography of culture, and compare
our tentative findings with evidence coming from people who study other
particles in order to create a larger picture of the order or disorder of
things. The fact that culture is never static and means many things only makes knowing what
counts as evidence a daunting project. Work
in the human sciences that does not fit within paradigms described by Thomas
Kuhn,[ii]
that frequently lacks strict protocols
of verification, that until two or three decades ago looked askance at the value of collaboration,
can promote more confusion than clarity in the construction of knowledge. This condition does not warrant assuming that
work in natural sciences is immune to confusion. Nevertheless, it is tempting to think that
human sciences and cultural studies might be less vulnerable (and slightly more
honest) if they explored the cognitive
properties of art and aesthetics more deliberately. We admit, for example, that Francis Bacon's
promotion of inductive method appeared to give insufficient regard to the
function of imagination in epistemology, but his drawing attention to the
crippling Idols of the Tribe, the Cave, the Marketplace, and the Theater did
provide cautions we do well to remember as we shuttle between the past and the
present in cultural studies. Likewise, Werner
Heisenberg's " Uncertainty Principle " is no panacea, but his thinking about language
in relation to problems in quantum theory has relevance for exploring issues in
literature and culture.[iii]
Indeed, our interest in aspects of sciences does buttress our pragmatic
iconoclasm. The skepticism we associate
with common sense helps us to minimize delusions as we amplify awareness of our
historicity. We are convinced that words
simultaneously reveal and conceal how we occupy literary and social positions.
Our intellectual space is the habitat for concern with
the tradition of black writing, which we
propose is coterminous with the tradition
of black literature. Whether we speak of African American literature or of writing depends on how we
choose to position our research, interpretations, and pedagogy.
Writing refers to specific uses of verbal literacy either in script
(handwriting) or print ( technologies of
mechanical reproduction) or cyberspace (digital imaging). On the other
hand, literature embraces a dimension occupied both by printed works and by orature
or oral literature. In that space one
finds self-consciously isolated instances of writing along with instances
controlled by publishers and literary politics. The myth that literature enjoys
the autonomy of intellectual property is crudely suspect, and it should be
banished in cultural studies.
Typical examples of writing are emails or letters between
friends, captions linked to images, folklore, personal statements attached to
applications, blogs and legal documents. Literature, as it is traditionally
conceptualized, is constituted by
fiction and non-fiction, play scripts and screenplays, poems, and the
sound-crafting of lyrics by performers. African American literature includes blurred genres (mixed
media) in want of adequate description, a fact widely known in the emerging
field of digital humanities. Our robust traditions of mixing orature, literature, writing and music,
especially when they are integrated with visual art, cause unavoidable problems in scholarship as
well as the conduct of everyday life,
not because they are arbitrary but because we make them interchangeable according
to our needs. In turn, those traditions
are entitled to demand that we acknowledge when and how often
our ideologies hibernate
underground.
Critical thinking about African American writing and
literature has the option of yoking the cultural and the political in struggles
for human and civil rights, for agency, and for learning from the conflicting values
implicit in the prior and subsequent
histories of Black Arts/Black Aesthetic projects. The quality and quantity of confirmative African
American ideas and creations do change, as writers, critics, and scholars buy
into or reject the options of the American culture. For everyone, emphases shift
in response to domestic or vernacular events and increasingly to global or
"globalized" events .
It might be
argued that motives, always open to question, for assertions of self and group identity are more stable and slower in changing than the
vast number of expressions associated
with them. Although belief in the
wonderful illusion of “the black community” and communal solidarity in the
United States has given way to accepting the contentious realities of diversity,
intra-ethnic fragmentation and growing
interest in diasporic synthesis, it is
not prudent abandon some ancestral
values always subliminal and likely to be retrofitted in the unfinished enterprise labeled the Black
Aesthetic Movement, if that historic phenomenon is to be understood, as we
understand the American Renaissance of the nineteenth century, as one
and only one cultural manifestation of how people choose to deal with words,
perception, and being-in-the-world. “Ceremonies of poise in a non-rational
universe,” George Kent suggested, can enable us to “play an endless satire upon
Western assumptions of rationality” (Kent 1968, 692). [iv]
Those ceremonies, like such influential texts as Blues People (1963), The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967), and The Signifying Monkey (1988), challenge
but do not annihilate the Western assumptions so permanently anchored in the
unfolding of culture and traditions. As Dr. Carter G. Woodson warned us in Mis-education of the Negro (1933), some
of the most absurd Western assumptions find fertile ground and thrive in
African American minds. [v]
In
various combat zones of culture, refusal to abandon the ideals and the
authority of African American traditions puts one at risk. One becomes an
outsider who is inside. One must be brave and ready to pay what James Baldwin
termed the price of the ticket, even if the price is one’s sanity or one’s
life. Activists who are not cultural
pimps know that. They do not confuse a combat zone with a theatre for neo-minstrelsy. For what does it profit a person to perform
intellectual minstrelsy for the delight of the media and the academic “gods”
who contend struggles for human rights
and social justice ought not be spoken about in the same space as the
achievements of the Enlightenment? One reductive answer, of course, is a
five-letter word: money.
As Ann DuCille remarked in Skin Trade (1996), we do live in “ a
country where ethnic rivalry, race hatred, bigotry, anti-Semitism, sexism,
heterosexism, and even neo-Nazism are on the rise” (172), and “the best thing
we can do for ourselves and our country…is exactly to deromanticize it” (173). [vi]In
thinking about literature, writing, and
people, we find DuCille’s insights are pragmatic; they are consonant with our
choices as an African American Southern males and our penchant for
deromanticizing things in the spirit of David Walker. Wretchedness afflicts all
Americans, recurs in cycles of decrease
and ascent, and is apparently immune to
any lasting resolution. Some ideas promoted by the Black Arts Movement do influence our behaviors and critical
thinking in the combat zones created by Charles Johnson’s essay “The End of the
Black American Narrative” [vii],
by calls to abandon our history in
post-racial revisions, and by arguments that we should cast our expressive
traditions prematurely into the machine of Kenneth W. Warren’s What Was African American Literature? (2011).
Those specifiable zones are minute in the context of the vast zones
constituted by cultural change itself, zones that evade naming. In those
spaces, a scholarly activist must depend
on folk wisdom and common sense.
Integrity
bids us to acknowledge our ideas about words
and cultural combat zones are derived from accepting the imperatives in
Gwendolyn Brooks’ magnificent sonnet “First Fight. Then Fiddle”. We likewise acknowledge indebtedness to Mary Louise Pratt’s speech “Arts of the
Contact Zone” and to her description of those zones as “social spaces where
cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly
asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their
aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today” (Pratt
1). These spaces where people communicate
inside and across cultures have crossroads that are race/class/gender/color-coded. Decisions about oppositions and dilemmas must
be made there and then negotiated on fields where one can do no more than hope
mutual respect will arise. Nothing is guaranteed. Dealing with traditions and
their revisions, however, obligates one to deal with an actuality that Pratt
chose not to emphasize: the psychological violence that marks cultural
encounters.[viii]
In
the early years of the twenty-first century, we are embroiled in combat zones
that the Internet, its social networks, and litigation regarding intellectual
property highlight and render unavoidable., Our battles have much to do with ideas about access,
hegemony, the rites of capitalism, and authority. From elite sites that pretend
to be race-free, both in print and online, we are told LITERATURE must be
segregated by philosophical and linguistic sleight-of-hand from such democratic
expressive categories as “writing” or “speech” (that is, speech associated with
oral traditions). LITERATURE is a saintly commodity. Pray tell us how elite bullshit fertilizes the lawns of the Academy.
In an essay on how the poet Carolyn Rodgers
sought to connect poetry and literacy, it was argued that “criticism [rightly belongs] to the realm of
the pedagogy of the oppressed, because language is a political instrument”(
Ward, "Literacy and Criticism," 63). Carolyn Rodgers’ four touchstone
essays in Negro Digest and Black World between 1969 and 1971[ix]
should be reexamined for how expertly
she exploited the vernacular and illustrated the potential of speech act theory
in promoting literacy. Rodgers addressed how the folk, whoever they are, use
drylongso intuitions “as fundamental ingredients of reality and creativity as
they construct their worlds” (63). In reclaiming what must still be dealt with
in combat zones, perhaps we can finally acknowledge that Rodgers, a gifted
poet, disclosed “crucial aspects of language’s behavior for those who would
attain literacy in a space that is decidedly multiethnic” (Ward, "Literacy
and Criticism," 65).[x] Perhaps we can finally acknowledge that her critical legacy of common
sense has lasting value for understanding meaning and significance in American
cultures.
We
might ask ourselves whether cyberspace and advancing technologies are diminishing
(or destroying) a tradition of black writing wherein Rodgers located herself as
a leading figure in Chicago's OBAC (Organization of Black American Culture)
Writers' Workshop, a tradition which had for a long time used both drylongso
intuitions and rigorous scholarship as modes of interpretation.[xi]
Often the interconnectedness of literature and life rather than theoretical divorce of life
from literature was the object of interpretation. Are new technologies
replacing the old traditions with emerging
traditions, freely embraced now by older and younger Americans of all
ethnicities, which are marked by complacent, non-critical consumption that was rarely
countenanced by many Black Arts/Black Aesthetic Movement (BAM) thinkers? Can serious cultural examination and
reclaiming of what was positive, progressive, and nominally Black between 1960
and 1975 (imagined beginning and end points for BAM) help us to retard the
downsizing of American critical thought and imagination?
Serious
action in combat zones requires that we give more than casual notice to such
questions. Serious action precludes nostalgia for a past that is also the
present in bringing “culture” to the foreground but is remiss in attending to African American interests in the use and
abuse of the sciences; transnational
cultural pollination; nuclear proliferation; ending cycles of welfare,
criminalization and poverty; deliberate miseducation, the pedagogy of
oppression, and vile uses of
disinformation; invisible racism and benign genocide; alternative fuel sources; world affairs military and non-military,
health care and the quality of human life.
It is the less obvious that we should acknowledge and cultivate as we
condemn the retarding binary of white and black in cultural explanations . Although we must acknowledge our indebtedness
to an imperfect past (which included paradigms independent from the limits of
Eurocentricisms and Afrocentricisms), we must attempt to balance that imperfect past with dedicated specifications
of our oppositional roles in building a future.
We must make hard decisions about who are our allies and who are our
enemies as we deal with literary traditions and the inevitability of
change. It is easy to become promiscuous
in our intimacies with alienating methodologies and ideologies. Obviously we need to know who are our
comrades, who can we trust to participate in our projects in black writing that
extend beyond narrowly defined “literature” and creative expressions ; obviously,
we need to be relentless in identifying our cultural enemies, those who would
confuse and destroy our memories and
practices of tradition, or silence our utterance and make their own terrorism
legitimate by virtue of dubious "objectivity." We must know how Americans construct positions, loyalties, and beliefs as
justifications for battle in the combat zones of the intellectual and the
practical. That we have traditions worth
fighting for is beyond dispute.
Hortense
Spillers partially mapped the territory of conflict in her essay, “The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Post-Date:”
We
could say with a great deal of justification that the black creative
intellectual has been more hesitant than not to acknowledge precisely where and
how she “is coming from” and in what ways location marks in fact a chunk of the
historical material. A more efficacious critique, or, I should say, one that is
less loaded with pretenses and pretensions, altogether depends on such
acknowledgements (449-450).
Spillers’ observation
about hesitance strengthens belief that
creative intellectuals of all colors and in all locations should acknowledge
where they are coming from.[xii]
Given that American institutions of higher education rarely acknowledge that
our nation is a post-colonial empire, that its social compact is actually a racial contract, or that its Constitution
was ratified as a proslavery document which still legitimates deceptive forms
of “enslavement,” those institutions are
de facto sites of combat and
contact. Acknowledgement is only
provisional evidence that a person is a potential friend or foe; the proof of
the pudding is extended contact.
The
tradition of black writing can teach us that skin-privilege cards are played more
frequently than race cards both within and outside of spaces of education,
social policy, cultural production, labor, and sports. Thus, those who
undertake scholarship in the combat zone
of cultural traditions should bluntly acknowledge their designs and give a name
to their complex ideologies. Sustained
skepticism about ethical values in literary cultural studies does perhaps
support the genuine,
uncertainty-plagued pursuit of knowledge.
Like the Harlem Renaissance, the Black
Arts/Black Aesthetic phenomenon was at once necessary and limited in its
duration. Nevertheless, both movements, in concert with the very old struggles
for civil rights and self-determination (cultural and political nationalism)
effectively exposed the nature of hypocrisy and hegemony in our republic which
is not a democracy in the classic sense.
We argue in Chapter 2 "Traditions and Critical Talents" that
“The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” by Langston Hughes and “Blueprint for Negro Writing” by Richard
Wright were inspirations for the cultural disruptions and specificity inscribed
in “Myth of a Negro Literature” and
“Black Writing” by LeRoi Jones, Ishmael Reed’s introduction in 19 Necromancers from Now, Stephen
Henderson’s “Introduction: The Forms of Things Unknown” in Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as
Poetic References, and Hoyt W. Fuller’s “Towards a Black Aesthetic.” Eugene B. Redmond's Drumvoices,
a model of comprehensive, literary
historical description of one genre, provides a contrast to the critical turn
and reconstruction of instruction in African American critical positions
represented by the post-modernist theorizing of Houston A. Baker, Jr. and Henry
Louis Gates, Jr., by the critique of American creative praxis in Toni Morrison's Playing
in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination , and by the
feminist/womanist interventions of Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens and Barbara Christian’s “The Race for Theory.”
Our argument is exploratory, raising questions about selective features of the
combat zones wherein contemporary African American cultural critics do much to
open the mind; it addresses a limited range of possible literary and social
positions . But it does suggest that Ishmael Reed did not lie when he proclaimed
writing is fighting.
These
words of wisdom from the “tradition” and wit from the laughing barrel are but a
small fraction of the intellectual
ammunition to be used for
combat. Every person who struggles to be
an engaged writer and critical thinker must gather her or his own arsenal of weapons.
The arsenal must contain great amounts of interdisciplinary information,
especially if the struggling writer is also a teacher. Items for the armory
must be gathered by independent critical reading and critical thinking. Truth
be told, acquiring weapons from various educational programs and communal
discussions is necessary but not sufficient.
The best weapons are forged in the discipline of one’s mind as Margaret
Walker’s voice intones “For My People” in the background. This is merely an
opinion. It is neither a prescription
nor an imperative. As far as tradition
and acknowledgement can be associated with words and being in combat zones as a future priority, it is less
than amazing that many of our comrades are not black and many of our enemies
are not white in the permanent cultural wars that give our nation its unique
flavor.
NOTES
[i]
Appiah, K. Anthony. "Boundary Conditions." MLA Newsletter 48.1 (2016): 2
[ii]
See Thomas S. Kuhn's The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1962)
Chicago Press, 1962)
[iv] Kent,
George E. "Ethnic Impact in American Literature." Black Voices. Ed.
Abraham Chapman. New York: Mentor, 1968: 691-697.
[v] See
Sandra Adell. Double-Consciousness/Double-Bind:
Theoretical Issues in Twentieth-Century Black Literature. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1994. Adell argued that while Henry Louis Gates,
Jr. and Houston A. Baker, Jr. do not succeed in “their emancipatory goal of
freeing Afro-American literature from the hegemony of Eurocentric discourses,”
they do “bring into sharp relief what can best be described as a nostalgia for tradition”(137). What is
brought into sharper relief is Adell’s own gendered-nostalgia for hegemony , a
desire which led her to conflate the
evidence of African American literature
with facts of theory and to misidentify
quite splendidly what Gates and Baker
were growing in their respective gardens.
[vii]Charles
Johnson. "The End
of the Black American Narrative." The
American Scholar 77.2 (2008): 32-42.
Johnson's call, in one of the nation's most prestigious intellectual
journals, to have "the old black
American narrative" of racial victimization replaced by "a
provisional reading of reality, a single phenomenological profile that one day is likely to be revised" (42) is
reviewed in Chapter 2. Cultural scholars
should not miss the humor in the fact Johnson's article follows William Deresiewicz's lamentation on the social
disadvantages of an elite education.
[viii]
In Autobiography and Black Identity
Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), , Kenneth Mostern
proposes that if a “general” United States popular culture does exist, it is “
‘African,’ having been infused with the performance styles and musical beats of
people of African descent for centuries to the point that these styles are
clearly a large part of all performing traditions” (19). It seems that we find greater
acknowledgement of his proposal in discussions of music than we find in
racialized literary discourses about words. We find no acknowledgement of his
proposal in the violence of American
politics.
[ix] Jerry
W. Ward, Jr., “Literacy
and Criticism: The Example of Carolyn Rodgers.” Drumvoices 4.1-2 (Fall-Winter 1994/95): 62-65. Rodgers's four essays are “Black Poetry
---Where It’s At.” Negro Digest 18.11
(1969): 7-16; “The Literature of Black.” Black
World 19.8 (1970):5-11; “Breakforth.
In Deed.” Black World 19.11 (1970):
13-22; “Uh Nat’chal Thang –the WHOLE TRUTH –US.” Black World 20.11 (1971): 4-14.
[x] Reading Elizabeth A. Flynn’s
“Reconsiderations: Louise Rosenblatt and the Ethical Turn in Literary Theory.” College English 70.1 (2007): 52-69 can
deepen our thinking about the combat zone wherein Rodgers did battle. Rosenblatt’s Literature as Exploration (1938, 1976) and The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the
Literary Work (1978) are useful for studies of the tension between what is
aesthetic and what is political in pedagogy and praxis and for knowing who our
potential allies might be. For those who say they are interested in the
historical importance of the Black Arts/Black Aesthetic moment, reading Carolyn Fowler’s Black Arts and Black Aesthetics: A Bibliography (1976, 1981) is
obligatory. Fowler was one of the first people in higher education to accord
the moment serious attention in teaching and writing and to use the concept of
culture in a global sense that still resonates.
[xi] Lawrence
P. Jackson’s The Indignant Generation: A
Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2010) is a brilliant account of black and critical writing
practices between the Harlem Renaissance and the emergence of the Black
Arts/Black Aesthetic phenomenon.
[xii]
Hortense J. Spillers, "The Crisis
of the Negro Intellectual: A Post-Date." in Black,
White and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2003), 428-470.
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