Buch, Englisch, Band 27, 294 Seiten, Format (B × H): 140 mm x 215 mm, Gewicht: 408 g
Reihe: Nordamerikastudien
Black Genealogies, White Hegemony, and the Essay as Critical Intervention
Buch, Englisch, Band 27, 294 Seiten, Format (B × H): 140 mm x 215 mm, Gewicht: 408 g
Reihe: Nordamerikastudien
ISBN: 978-3-593-39099-4
Verlag: Campus
Autoren/Hrsg.
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Weitere Infos & Material
Contents
Acknowledgments 7
Introduction: Genre Matters 11
1. Establishing Black Positions of Critical Intervention from the New Negro to Black Fire 30
Negotiating a Black Aesthetic 31
Black Writing between Integration and Separation 47
The Boundary Work of the Essay 90
2. Consolidating the Idea of Black Culture as Critique in the Debate Surrounding Native Son 96
Contesting the Protest Novel Paradigm 100
The Dialogic Structure of the Essay 130
3. Appropriating a Position of Critical Intervention in the Figure of "The White Negro" 137
Positing Chromatic Authority 142
The Essay and the "Authority of Experience" 154
4. Remapping Knowledge and Renegotiating Speaking Positions in the Desegregation Debates 180
Coming into Knowledge under Segregation 185
Debating the Desegregation of Schools 207
The Essay between the Public and the Private 238
Conclusion: the Performative Logic of the Essay 252
Essays Referenced 262
Bibliography 264
Index 287
Negotiating a Black Aesthetic
As Winston Napier points out in his introduction to the anthology African American Literary Theory,
The formal beginnings of African American literary speculation are located in the early part of the twentieth century. Writing mainly in magazines established to report on their society, African American literary thinkers from the start displayed concern with the use of literature as a means to counteract traditional European characterization of blacks as less than human. (2000, 1)
This reference to Black writers' occupation with literature as a means of counteracting "traditional European characterization of blacks as less than human" points toward the function of essay writing that I am concerned with here, namely the potential impact that writing has had on processes of what Omi and Winant have called "racial formation in the United States." What comes into focus, in other words, are the effects of writing on the ways in which "concepts of race are created and changed, [and] how they become the focus of political conflict" (1994, vii). I contend that the essay has been important in providing Black writers with - in a Foucauldian sense - "conditions of possibility" to claim a position in a white-dominated public discourse that had historically assigned Blacks the position of a constitutive Other and denied them access to political and cultural participation.
In the course of the twentieth century, Black writers carved out a position of critical intervention against the backdrop of an ideology of white supremacy that provided speaking positions predominantly for white men and made artistic and intellectual work primarily thinkable with reference to white masculinity. It had to be established within a white framework of discourses on race, that is, within "oppressive regimes of knowledge and power" that had continuously stigmatized and excluded racialized subjects. Scientific discourses contributed to the reproduction of that white framework. At the turn of the twentieth century, legal, medical and other authoritative discourses on race were largely racist in the sense that they made truth claims about a biological foundation of race and racial differences and thus legitimized social stratifications grounded in racial hierarchies. As Arnold Rampersad points out, "[r]ace, and the idea of white racial supremacy, enjoyed the lofty status of a science at the turn of the century and down into the 1920s" (1997, xv). However, the predominance of scientific racism over biologistic interpretations of race was being contested by social scientists, anthropologists, and historians who gained ground in pointing out that race was not a natural given but a socially constructed and historically contingent category that served as a foundation in legitimizing social stratifications based on supposedly inherent racial differences. Richard King locates the demise of race as a valid scientific idea, particularly in the English-speaking world, in the first part of the twentieth century: "Several recent studies fix on the years between 1920 and 1945 as the period in which race, racial difference, and racial hierarchy were largely discredited among intellectuals and scientific elites" (2004, 1). That is not to say that a racist claim for racial differentiations did not continue to show its concomitant effects; the power structures that had been legitimized by racist discourse were not easily dismantled through the disavowal of its discursive foundations.
One strategy of disendowing scientific racism with the credibility that race scientists had given the concept of race over the previous centuries was to validate cultural achievements by Black Americans and recognize them as worthy of study, as did, for example, white German-born anthropologist Franz Boas. "Leading the intellectual fight against doctrines of white supremacy, Boas's work, especially The Mind of Primitive Man (1911), was an indispensable part of the movement to reappraise African-American culture" (Rampersad 1997, xvii). This aim could only be achieved by constituting a field that defined what Rampersad would later call African-American culture, a task that was taken up by a small but growing number of white and Black scholars and writers. Among them was, for instance, Zora Neale Hurston, a student of Boas, who pursued ethnographic research in the U.S. American South and the Caribbean. Hurston's work followed a political agenda by challenging predominant conceptualizations of the value and significance of cultural production by African Americans. Generally, she challenged exclusionary and elitist preconceptions of what art was and who could create it, such that art would not be left the domain of white men.
In a 1926 letter, the Black poet and diplomat James Weldon Johnson wrote to a white patron of Black artists, Carl Van Vechten, "that nothing can go farther to destroy race prejudice than the recognition of the Negro as a creator [of] and contributor to American civilization" (Gates 1987, xxiii). Johnson's observation points to a relationship between texts by Black writers and sociopolitical and cultural change that prefigures the assumption of a functional aspect of "Black" literature, namely that of establishing Black subjectivity and forging Black speaking positions, and using that position to challenge existing power structures. This question of function, which subsumes concerns of a formal, thematic and historical scope, becomes crucial in the material I consider in this chapter.
In terms of a specific function that writing served Black Americans, Gerald Early has argued that "Black writers could not help but see their writing as political, since they saw their condition in these terms and their writing and their condition have been largely inseparable" (1992, x). Some of the dominant concerns of Black writers were questions of political empowerment and reform: "Starting life in the Americas with this sensibility," Napier argues, "African Americans tempered their desire to reconfigure conventional notions of race and inequality with a general concern for social acceptance and participation" (1).
Black writers needed to gain access to publications to be able to address these issues, and white-owned publishing companies severely restricted or denied Blacks that access. What McDowell notes for the second part of the twentieth century applies to the turn to the twentieth century and the following decades to an even larger extent: "Even […] when African Americans of an enlarged black middle class attempted to found their own publishing houses for the express purpose of reaching a black audience, the economics of the publishing industry generally, along with distribution processes, still posed a formidable obstacle" (1995, 93).
Further, what Black writers could and did write about depended on how receptive an audience was, whether it was comprised predominantly of white or Black readers, whether it was located in the North or South, etc. Neither could Black writers draw on a wide range of publications that served them as outlets for their writing, nor did there exist an established Black reading community that they could address, which in return would create a demand for their writing.
The field of literature and, more broadly speaking, of art was particularly significant in the endeavor to overcome political and social restrictions. As Houston A. Baker, Jr., has argued,
Art seemed to offer the only means of advancement because it was the only area in America - from an Afro-American perspective - where the color line had not been rigidly drawn. Excluded from politics and education, from profitable and challenging areas of the professions, and brutalized by all American economic arrangements, Afro-Americans adopted the arts as a domain of hope and an arena of possible progress. (1987, 11)
