culture games

CULTURE GAMES:    A Note to Langston Hughes



As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods,

They kill us for their sport.



King Lear, IV.i





Dear Mr. Hughes:



Unable to deny that American literature has been and continues to be multiethnic, more a confederation of letters than a  unified republic, the once and never again guardians are disconsolate.  The Establishment trembles with remembering the literatures of the United States is neither lily nor snow white.  As is the wont of little gods, they try to make revenge a divisive sport.  One ethnic writer at a time is acclaimed the voice of her or his people.  In the rare instance of Toni Morrison, she speaks for the Americans have not wed irreversible insanity.  In the worst scenarios, the ethnic writer speaks for an artificial thing named people of color. So cruel. So crude.



Everything has changed since 1926, only to remain the same.  So the cliché is yet alive.  The wolf wears a freshly dry-cleaned  sheep's costume, as the community of writers climbs a mountain.  You'd be very much at home in 2019 and would detect what afoot when the MLA President highlights a feature of the 2020 convention -----



"  For the January 2020 convention in Seattle, I have invited two distinguished writers to help us think about what it means to be human: Viet Thanh Nguyen, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Sympathizer,  will help us understand the meaning of lives lived across and outside borders.  And Charles Johnson, th author of the acclaimed novel Middle Passage, will remind us, once again, about the meaning of  our shared humanity."



Simon E. Gikandi, "President's Column." MLA Newsletter 51.4 (Winter 2019): 2.



Have some MLA members , leading thinkers in the humanities, so theorized themselves beyond humanity, that they need to be reminded humanity is not conveniently disposable?



It should be noted the chosen speakers are male.  Who speaks for females?  Toni Morrison?



We must not assume Gikandi intends disrespect, but he is broadcasting a pause-making message about who speaks for whom at higher and lower frequencies. The broadcast might inadvertently serve the dark  designs of imperial democracy.



  It might be argued Johnson speaks  for artists and scholars who  accept his thesis that black Americans need a new story as a tool for reclaiming what victimization can steal [[See "The End of the Black American Narrative." The American Scholar 77.3 (Summer 2008): 32-42 and its references to DuBois and Ralph Ellison.]]  Perhaps Nguyen speaks for people who have anxiety about being and borders, especially his Vietnamese kin.  There is a clue in the first paragraph of his novel, however, that he was chosen to disturb  stereotypes that measure Asian-Americans and other non-WASPs  as "people of color------



The first-person narrator intones: "I am a spy, a sleeper, a spoke, a man of two faces.  Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds.  I am not some misunderstood mutant from a comic book or a horror movie, although some have treated me as such.  I am simply able to see any issue from both sides." (1)



The riff on the first paragraph of Ellison's Invisible Man is ironic and elegant, affirming human traits and possession of "double consciousness" in ethnic subjectivity.  Ah, at last a truth is out.  Isn't it wonderful, Mr. Hughes, to think culture games can self-deconstruct and produce a modicum of solidarity among American ethnic groups.  Only a modicum, a fragile relationship,  a faint trace, because we have no evidence (as far as I know) that Polish-Americans read literature written by Korean-Americans to discover and celebrate the shared humanity of Chicano/Chicana-Americans and Chinese-Americans.  Indeed, Mr. Hughes, the tantalizing prospect of climbing metaphoric mountains is what you so aptly labeled a dream deferred, endlessly deferred.



Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            December 16, 2019