The Desiring Modes of Being Black: Literature and Critical Theory
192
The Desiring Modes of Being Black: Literature and Critical Theory
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Overview
The Desiring Modes of Being Black includes essays on James Baldwin, Sigmund Freud, Melvin Dixon, Essex Hemphill, Assotto Saint, and Rozena Maart. The metacritical reading they unfold interweaves African American culture, Fanonian and Caribbean thought, South African black consciousness, French theory, psychoanalysis, and gender and queer studies.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783484003 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 08/24/2018 |
| Series: | Global Critical Caribbean Thought |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Other Bites the Dust
Toward an Epistemology of Identity
Why is it always the apartment buildings of Blacks that burn?
— Libération, August 27–28, 2005
Outside Brooklyn Law School yesterday, a man selling recordings of famous African Americans was upset at the failure to have prepared for the worst. The man, who said his name was Muhammad Ali, drew a damning conclusion about the failure to protect New Orleans. "Blacks ain't worth it," he said. "New Orleans is a hopeless case."
— David Gonzalez, "The Victims: From Margins of Society to Center of the Tragedy," New York Times, September 2, 2005
This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish ... You were born where you were born and faced the future you faced because you were black and for no other reason. The limits of your ambition were, thus, expected to be set for ever. You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity.
— James Baldwin, "My Dungeon Shook," in Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation
If we — and now I mean the relatively conscious whites, and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others — do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!
— James Baldwin, "Down at the Cross, Letter from a Region in My Mind," in The Fire Next Time
If we were to parody Frantz Fanon, who wrote in Peau noire, masques blancs [Black Skin, White Masks], "The Negro is not. Anymore than the White man," we could immediately start with a well-meaning but dizzying sentence like "The Other is not, if it is not always as the Other of the Other" — a slightly disillusioned attempt to extract oneself from the logic of differentiation that entangles us and which nevertheless orders the combat against the hierarchies that it brings about. There is, in this "Other of the Other," a memory and an anticipation of the Same, that the chronos of the enunciation or the topos of the written word nevertheless renders different — a difference that, while certainly restrained, is also relative, interactive, intersubjective. A difference that cannot be radical. And from which springs an initial reformulation of our postulate: it is not the Other who is not. It is yours; your Other does not exist.
IN THE ABYSS OF THE OTHER
How, then, can be explained the popularity of the Other in our academic discourse, particularly when identity becomes the object of study? Elevated to the status of a protean concept, operating from one system to another, like a practical commodity readily substituted for sociological categories that are too simple, too subjective, or too complex, the Other has become a prêt-à-penser, or a ready-to-use concept, a theoretical box overflowing with always more specific tools — hybridity, métissage, racial/sexual/gender-related in-betweens, diaspora, interculturality, and more, which, as they multiply, make what they pretend to clarify even more opaque. In this abyss of the Other, where has the human subject gone? What eludes us in this obscurity?
The Other is not the same. Until recently relegated to the margins, it is today at the center of intense attention. And there is no doubt that the progressive but inevitable legitimization of gender, African American, ethnic, or LGBTQ studies — in France, often issuing from recently established disciplines like, in the case of African American research, American studies, which in its turn was originally a dissident colony of English studies — is at the same time the possibility of a political break-through, of scientific progress and of an epistemological rupture. Yet disciplinary history attests to the fact that yesterday's dissidences give birth to today's doxas, and the destiny of psychoanalysis is far from being the only example of this. A neurotic repetition, the incessant definition of the territories of knowledge is perhaps the price to be paid for attaining the recognition that, by thus supplanting the quest for truth, subordinates knowledge to the exigencies of the institution. Perhaps it also betrays the deeper meaning of the production of knowledge: once the dominant theory has been unmasked, the will for domination remains. As evident as that may be, this statement is no less true for all objects or fields of study, all disciplines, whether recognized or about to be, and including those that built their identity from an epistemological rupture that one had hoped would create a renewal in its wake.
Yet, and as an example of this, the notion of race has remained in many respects the blind spot of gender and sexuality studies while African American research on both sides of the Atlantic, mindful of its relatively fresh legitimacy, confines to its periphery the approaches that contravene its chosen hetero-patriarchal model. And what can one say about post-colonial studies in which, as Houston A. Baker Jr. humorously charges, one still strives to demonstrate, through a sort of protest criticism whose political inefficiency and scientific inanity have long been proven, that a certain autochthonous work is every bit as good as Jane Eyre (Baker: 388)? It is on the strength of the term "post" that the precedence of the empire is preserved, on the obstinacy of science that reassembles what history believes to have dismantled. What should one think then of the stereotype present in the many works where the Other is advanced as the object of desire (hooks, 1992: 21–39) or exhibited as the favored victim of violence? Specular, the academic discourse in this instance redoubles the violence that it is supposed to study and thus paradoxically contributes to the creation of Otherness (Rocchi, 2005): by signifying a human subject whose experience of difference is above all empirical and relative by nature, the Other becomes, through the academic discourse, an ontological category. He/she passes through a human dimension that the researcher abandoned for himself/herself to that of an abstraction and theorization, proof of the researcher's value and professional identity.
POSITING IDENTITY — AND THE DIFFERENCE THAT MAKES
These frequent shifts toward the essence are a fundamental violence that often proceeds from an insufficient reflection on the location where the discourse issued, and on the nature of the perspective toward the object of study — in other words, from the absence of critical reflexivity. The undeclared effect or goal of this is to keep the scholar in the reassuring and illusory gap in which he/she cannot be in the place of his/her object of study. The idea here is precisely to not put oneself in the other's place, an untenable and falsely reflexive posture leading to ventriloquism and intellectual colonialism, but to imagine the possibility of being the other. It is the consciousness of this possibility, moreover, that serves as the foundation for a deontological imperative, as Alain Supiot and the Conseil national du développement des sciences humaines et sociales (National Council for the Development of Human and Social Sciences) remind us in their prospective assessment of French research:
The ethical question [in the human sciences] comes, firstly, from what one studies about human beings who possess a certain autonomy, a certain liberty and responsibility, and that those who study them must also do so from the perspective of autonomy, responsibility and liberty.
Whether they generate, in spite of their best intentions, new hierarchies, that they dull their subversive potential with sterile oppositional strategies, that they take from the so-called dominate/subaltern/marginal/black/ethnic/ Muslim/Jewish/lesbian/gay/transgender ... subject his/her immanence, thus excluding reciprocity and responsibility, studies dedicated to identity as an object are often revealed as prisoners of an aporia: unconsciously repeating observed differentiation and hierarchies. A blindness whose persistence is such that one is tempted to render the ideologies, which supposedly breathed their last breath with the grand paradigms, accountable for it.
These methodological deviations are rooted in the primacy of duality and in the power of a thinking based on analogy (Rocchi, 2004c: 205–10). By distinguishing and identifying objects among themselves, the analogy does render the world meaningful and intelligible, but it initially induces a logic of identification and differentiation, which postulated the identity, the difference, and their value. Only an examination of the conditions of the production of these values and a criticism of the role played by the human subject — who defines and who is defined — can disengage them from their fixed state and underscore their relative and variable characters. And yet these mechanisms of identification and differentiation and their postulates are often taken as secondary. What matters is identity and difference in themselves and not the processes from which they result. A metalepsis that relieves oneself from the responsibility of the object identity, this lacuna produces difference even at the level of scientific discourse, but this Otherness caused by the discourse appears as an effect of the representation of the observed object. There is consequently no reason to suspect some sort of predetermination of which one would have inopportunely forgotten. The Other is not predetermined. He/she is. Period.
This bias is not only thematic and methodological but also ideological and political. Underestimating that Otherness is derived from a predetermination, that it is a social construction, of which one determines the meaning when measuring it against its effects through time, is in this capacity exemplary. This is one aspect of the theoretical and philosophical debate about the notion of race. In "'Race,' Writing and Culture," Tzvetan Todorov assimilates the nineteenth-century discourse on race and the twentieth-century idea of cultural difference, explaining that the contemporary ideology of cultural difference suffers from both excessive universalism and relativism, just as the ideology of race did a century earlier, relativist in its classification of human beings and universalist in its values, which it held to be true everywhere. This argument, in fact, serves in Todorov's article to conclude a partial rehabilitation of the philosophy of the Enlightenment whose humanism would not be always denatured by racism or sexism (1985: 372–74). A number of existential black and African American philosophers oppose this reading of history. Lewis R. Gordon thus recalls that in Hegel's Philosophy of History, the relationship between Europe and Africa, white and black, is an absolute opposition, on the order of being and nothingness (Gordon, 1997: 25–28). Clarence Sholé Johnson emphasizes, for his part, that the social construction of blacks as ontologically inferior individuals is a scientific project attested to by L'Encyclopédie and the Encyclopedia Britannica and which has been moreover disseminated across all disciplines (Johnson: 174–76). But in an even more significant fashion, and contrary to Todorov, for whom they are reduced to historical contingencies facilitating, it's true, his improbable connection between race and culture, Gordon and Johnson locate their analyses of the racial discourse in the existential consequences that they had for blacks. That is, in what the construction of the black-being-as-Other concretely signified for centuries and continues to signify: slavery, colonization, and oppression, from the viewpoint of what this human invention, with its social and utilitarian prerogatives, was able to allow in terms of European politico-economic hegemony and what it continues to incite in a neocolonial era.
It is then particularly dangerous — or at least politically oriented — to accommodate the two important dimensions represented by historicity and the existential reality of subjects in history. If they are true for a culturalist and conservative approach like Todorov's, the political stakes of this methodological difficulty are also true for a literary approach where, as Gordon criticizes in Gates's works, literary theory becomes the only criteria for the evaluation of a social phenomenon, thus depoliticizing it (Gordon, 1995: 102).
"POLITICS SIT ON EVERY SIDE OF EVERY TEXT"
The motif of "tragic mulatto," which Werner Sollors dissects in his exemplary study Neither Black, Nor White, Yet Both, is a good illustration of the political dimension produced by methodological choices:
The very fact that the term "Tragic Mulatto" has become part of the dominant vocabulary in American literary studies and cultural discourse raises the possibility that the stereotype not only has helped to criticize an ideology of the past (notably that of active abolitionists in the age of slavery), but has also served as a vehicle of the ideological wish for a wholesale rejection of the representation of interracial life in literature ... In other words, the term "Tragic Mulatto" may have come to such prominence in criticism and in the public realm not because it permits a better understanding of past ideologies, but because it supports, in the guise of subversive-seeming ideological criticism, the ideology of racial dualism and the resistance to interracial life that are still more prevalent in the United States than are calls for hybridity. (242)
Sollors concludes his analysis by arguing that the expression "tragic mulatto" and the discrediting of nineteenth-century literature dealing with interraciality serves today in the United States as an apologia for racial essentialism, the justification of a world in black and white where the in-between ("intermediary categories") would not have their place. From the first pages of his work, whose approach is thematic, contextual, and more than just formal (16), Sollors clearly defines his position, which is at the same time ideological, methodological, and disciplinary: he suggests leaving behind black-white binarism (15–18) by drawing on the literary representation of racial mixing, a motif rather disdained by ethnic and gender studies even when they intend to knock national literatures off their pedestal (10).
In this way, the American literary critic appears to subscribe to the critical and ideological current of interculturality or of cultural hybridization, the theoretical avatar of multiculturalism. Eric Sundquist's To Wake the Nations, which deals with the interpenetration of African American and Euro-American cultures and texts, is one of the most eloquent examples of this, using the approach of "New Historicism." This current opposes — though weakly in truth — now-classic research work in cultural anthropology (like Levine's Black Culture and Black Consciousness) or in literary theory (Gates's The Signifying Monkey), which are more attached to transcribing and fixing an African American identity that, without being authentic — a trap into which no one falls any longer — would be in the very least defined and autonomous. In "Caliban's Triple Play," Houston A. Baker Jr. is not so easily duped and reproaches Gates for giving birth to an African American textuality based on the duality and rationalism of the Enlightenment, the very ideas that he meant to forcefully refute (Baker, 1985: 383).
(Continues…)
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