The chief cause for objection to the term is that “Negro literature” is too easily placed by certain critics, white and Negro, in an alcove apart. The next step is a double standard of judgment, which is dangerous for the future of Negro writers. “A Negro novel,” thought of as a separate form, is too often condoned as “good enough for a Negro.” That Negroes in America have had a hard time, and that inside stories of Negro life often present unusual and attractive reading matter are incontrovertible facts; but when they enter literary criticism these facts do damage to both the critics and artists.
Yet immediately following this stern admonition, we’re told the editors haven’t been too concerned to maintain “an even level of literary excellence,” because the tradition is defined by both form and content:
Literature by Negro authors about Negro experience . . . must be considered as significant, not only because of a body of established masterpieces, but also because of the illumination it sheds upon a social reality.
And later, in the introduction to the section entitled “The Novel,” the editors elaborate upon this idea by complaining about the relation of revision between Iola Leroy (1892) and Clotel (1853), a relation of the sort central to Calverton’s canon, but here defined most disapprovingly: “There are repetitions of situations from Brown’s Clotel, something of a forecast of a sort of literary inbreeding which causes Negro writers to be influenced by other Negroes more than should ordinarily be expected.” The black canon, for these editors, was that literature which most eloquently refuted white racist stereotypes and which embodied the shared “theme of struggle that is present in so much Negro expression.” Theirs, in other words, was a canon that was unified thematically by self-defense against racist literary conventions, and by the expression of what the editors called “strokes of freedom.” The formal bond that Calverton had claimed was of no academic or political use to these editors, precisely because they wished to project an integrated canon of American literature. As the editors put it:
[i]n spite of such unifying bonds as a common rejection of the popular stereotypes and a common “racial” cause, writings by Negroes do not seem to the editors to fall into a unique cultural pattern. Negro writers have adopted the literary traditions that seemed useful for their purposes. . . . While Frederick Douglass brought more personal knowledge and bitterness into his antislavery agitation than William Lloyd Garrison and Theodore Parker, he is much closer to them in spirit and in form than to Phillis Wheatley, his predecessor, and Booker T. Washington, his successor. . . . The bonds of literary tradition seem to be stronger than race.
Form, then, or the community of structure and sensibility, was called upon to reveal the sheer arbitrariness of American “racial” classifications, and their irrelevance to American canon formation. Above all else, these editors sought to expose the essentialism at the center of racialized subdivisions of the American literary tradition. If we recall that this anthology appeared just thirteen years before Brown v. Board, we should not be surprised by the “integrationist” thrust of the poetics espoused here. Ideological desire and artistic premise were one. African-American literature, then, was a misnomer; “American literature” written by Negroes more aptly designated this body of writing. So much for a definition of the African-American tradition based on formal relationships of revision, text to text.
At the opposite extreme in black canon formation is the canon defined by Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal in Black Fire, published in 1968, an anthology so very familiar to us all. This canon, the blackest canon of all, was defined both by formal innovations and by themes: formally, individual selections tend to aspire to the vernacular or to black music, or to performance; theoretically, each selection reinforces the urge toward black liberation, toward “freedom now” with an up-against-the-wall subtext. The hero, the valorized presence in this volume, is the black vernacular: no longer summoned or invoked through familiar and comfortable rubrics such as “The Spirituals” and “The Blues,” but embodied, assumed, presupposed in a marvelous act of formal bonding often obscured by the stridency of the political message the anthology meant to announce. Absent completely was a desire to “prove” our common humanity with white people, by demonstrating our power of intellect. One mode of essentialism—“African” essentialism—was used to critique the essentialism implicit in notions of a common or universal American heritage. No, in Black Fire, art and act were one.
I have been thinking about these strains in black canon formation because a group of us will be editing still another anthology, which will constitute still another attempt at canon formation: W. W. Norton will be publishing the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature. The editing of this anthology has been a great dream of mine for a long time. After a year of readers’ reports, market surveys, and draft proposals, Norton has enthusiastically embarked upon the publishing of our anthology.
I think that I am most excited about the fact that we will have at our disposal the means to edit an anthology that will define a canon of African-American literature for instructors and students at any institution which desires to teach a course in African-American literature. Once our anthology is published, no one will ever again be able to use the unavailability of black texts as an excuse not to teach our literature. A well-marked anthology functions in the academy to create a tradition, as well as to define and preserve it. A Norton anthology opens up a literary tradition as simply as opening the cover of a carefully edited and ample book.
I am not unaware of the politics and ironies of canon formation. The canon that we define will be “our” canon, one possible set of selections among several possible sets of selections. In part to be as eclectic and as democratically “representative” as possible, most other editors of black anthologies have tried to include as many authors and selections (especially excerpts) as possible, in order to preserve and “resurrect” the tradition. I call this the Sears and Roebuck approach, the “dream book” of black literature.
We have all benefited from this approach to collection. Indeed, many of our authors have managed to survive only because an enterprising editor was determined to marshal as much evidence as she or he could to show that the black literary tradition existed. While we must be deeply appreciative of that approach and its results, our task will be a different one.
Our task will be to bring together the “essential” texts of the canon, the “crucially central” authors, those whom we feel to be indispensable to an understanding of the shape, and shaping, of the tradition. A canon is often represented as the “essence” of the tradition, indeed, as the marrow of tradition: the connection between the texts of the canon is meant to reveal the tradition’s inherent, or veiled, logic, its internal rationale.
None of us is naive enough to believe that “the canonical” is self-evident, absolute, or neutral. It is a commonplace of contemporary criticism to say that scholars make canons. But, just as often, writers make canons, too, both by critical revaluation and by reclamation through revision. Keenly aware of this—and, quite frankly, aware of my own biases—I have attempted to bring together a group of scholar-critics whose notions of the black canon might not necessarily agree with my own, or with each others’. I have tried to bring together a diverse array of ideological, methodological, and theoretical perspectives, so that we together might produce an anthology that most fully represents the various definitions of what it means to speak of an African-American literary tradition, and what it means to teach that tradition. And while we are at the earliest stages of organization, I can say that my own biases toward canon formation are to stress the formal relationships that obtain among texts in the black tradition—relations of revision, echo, call and response, antiphony, what have you—and to stress the vernacular roots of the tradition. For the vernacular, or oral literature, in our tradition, has a canon of its own.
But my pursuit of this project has required me to negotiate a position between, on the one hand, William Bennett, who clai
ms that black people can have no canon, no masterpieces, and, on the other hand, those on the critical left who wonder why we want to establish the existence of a canon, any canon, in the first place. On the right hand, we face the outraged reactions of those custodians of Western culture who protest that the canon, that transparent decanter of Western values, may become—breathe the word—politicized. But the only way to answer the charge of “politics” is with an emphatic tu quoque. That people can maintain a straight face while they protest the irruption of politics into something that has always been political from the beginning—well, it says something about how remarkably successful official literary histories have been in presenting themselves as natural and neutral objects, untainted by worldly interests.
I agree with those conservatives who have raised the alarm about our students’ ignorance of history. But part of the history we need to teach has to be the history of the idea of the “canon,” which involves (though it’s hardly exhausted by) the history of literary pedagogy and of the institution of the school. Once we understand how they arose, we no longer see literary canons as objets trouvés washed up on the beach of history. And we can begin to appreciate their ever-changing configuration in relation to a distinctive institutional history.
Universal education in this country was justified by the argument that schooling made good citizens, good American citizens; and when American literature started to be taught in our schools, part of the aim was to show what it was to be an American. As Richard Brodhead, a leading scholar of American literature, has observed, “no past lives without cultural mediation. The past, however worthy, does not survive by its own intrinsic power.” One function of “literary history” is, then, to disguise that mediation, to conceal all connections between institutionalized interests and the literature we remember. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, booms the Great Oz of literary history.
Cynthia Ozick once chastised feminists by warning that strategies become institutions. But isn’t that really another way of warning that their strategies, heaven forfend, may succeed? Here we approach the scruples of those on the cultural left, who worry about, well, the price of success. “Who’s co-opting whom?” might be their slogan. To them, the very idea of the canon is hierarchical, patriarchal, and otherwise politically suspect. They’d like us to disavow it altogether.
But history and its institutions are not just something we study, they’re also something we live, and live through. And how effective and how durable our interventions in contemporary cultural politics will be depends upon our ability to mobilize the institutions that buttress and reproduce that culture. The choice isn’t between institutions and no institutions. The choice is always: What kind of institutions shall there be? Fearing that our strategies will become institutions, we could seclude ourselves from the real world and keep our hands clean, free from the taint of history. But that is to pay obeisance to the status quo, to the entrenched arsenal of sexual and racial authority, to say that they shouldn’t change, become something other, and, let’s hope, better than they are now.
Indeed, this is one case where we’ve got to borrow a leaf from the right, which is exemplarily aware of the role of education in the reproduction of values. We must engage in this sort of canon deformation precisely because Mr. Bennett is correct: the teaching of literature is the teaching of values; not inherently, no, but contingently, yes; it is—it has become—the teaching of an aesthetic and political order, in which no women or people of color were ever able to discover the reflection or representation of their images, or hear the resonances of their cultural voices. The return of “the” canon, the high canon of Western masterpieces, represents the return of an order in which my people were the subjugated, the voiceless, the invisible, the unrepresented, and the unrepresentable. Who would return us to that medieval never-never land?
The classic critique of our attempts to reconstitute our own subjectivity, as women, as blacks, etc., is that of Jacques Derrida: “This is the risk. The effect of Law is to build a structure of the subject, and as soon as you say, ‘well, the woman is a subject and this subject deserves equal rights,’ and so on—then you are caught in the logic of phallocentricism and you have rebuilt the empire of Law.” To expressions such as this, made by a critic whose stands on sexism and racism have been exemplary, we must respond that the Western male subject has long been constituted historically for himself and in himself. And, while we readily accept, acknowledge, and partake of the critique of this subject as transcendent, to deny us the process of exploring and reclaiming our subjectivity before we critique it is the critical version of the grandfather clause, the double privileging of categories that happen to be preconstituted. Such a position leaves us nowhere, invisible and voiceless in the republic of Western letters. Consider the irony: precisely when we (and other Third World peoples) obtain the complex wherewithal to define our black subjectivity in the republic of Western letters, our theoretical colleagues declare that there ain’t no such thing as a subject, so why should we be bothered with that? In this way, those of us in feminist criticism or African-American criticism who are engaged in the necessary work of canon deformation and reformation confront the skepticism even of those who are allies on other fronts, over this matter of the death of the subject and our own discursive subjectivity.
So far I’ve been talking about social identity and political agency as if they were logically connected. I think they are. And that has a lot to do with what I think the task of the critic today must be.
Simone de Beauvoir wrote that one is not born a woman; no, and one is not born a Negro; but then, as Donna Haraway has pointed out, one isn’t even born an organism. Lord knows that black art has been attacked for well over a century as being “not universal,” though no one ever says quite what this might mean. If this means an attack against self-identification, then I must confess that I am opposed to “universality.” This line of argument is an echo from the political right. As Allan Bloom wrote:
. . . [T]he substantial human contact, indifferent to race, soul to soul, that prevails in all other aspects of student life simply does not usually exist between the two races. There are exceptions, perfectly integrated black students, but they are rare and in a difficult position. I do not believe this somber situation is the fault of the white students who are rather straightforward in such matters and frequently embarrassingly eager to prove their liberal credentials in the one area where Americans are especially sensitive to a history of past injustice. . . . Thus, just at the moment when everyone else has become “a person,” blacks have become blacks. . . . “They stick together” was a phrase once used by the prejudiced, by this or that distinctive group, but it has become true by and large of the black students.
Self-identification proves a condition for agency, for social change. And to benefit from such collective agency, we need to construct ourselves, just as the nation was constructed, just as the class was, just as all the furniture in the social universe was. It’s Utopian to think we can now disavow our social identities; there’s not another one to take its place. You can’t opt out of a Form of Life. We can’t become one of those bodiless vapor trails of sentience portrayed on that “Star Trek” episode, though often it seems as if the universalists want us to be just that. You can’t opt out of history. History may be a nightmare, as Joyce suggested, but it’s time to stop pinching ourselves.
But there’s a treacherous non sequitur here, from “socially constructed” to essentially unreal. I suppose there’s a lurking positivism in the sentiment, in which social facts are unreal compared to putatively biological ones. We go from “constructed” to “unstable,” which is one non sequitur; or to “changeable by will,” which is a bigger problem still, since the “will” is yet another construction.
And theory is conducive to these slippages, however illegitimate, because of the real ascendancy of the paradigm of dismantlement. Reversals don’t work, we’re told; dismantle the scheme of dif
ference altogether. And I don’t deny the importance, on the level of theory, of the project; it’s important to remember that “race” is only a sociopolitical category, nothing more. At the same time—in terms of its practical performative force—that doesn’t help me when I’m trying to get a taxi on the corner of 125th and Lenox Avenue. (“Please sir, it’s only a metaphor.”)
Maybe the most important thing here is the tension between the imperatives of agency and the rhetoric of dismantlement. An example: Foucault says, and let’s take him at his word, that the “homosexual” as life form was invented sometime in the mid-nineteenth century. Now, if there’s no such thing as a homosexual, then homophobia, at least as directed toward people rather than acts, loses its rationale. But you can’t respond to the discrimination against gay people by saying, “I’m sorry, I don’t exist; you’ve got the wrong guy.” The simple historical fact is, Stonewall was necessary, concerted action was necessary to take action against the very structures that, as it were, called the homosexual into being, that subjected certain people to this imaginary identity. To reverse Audre Lorde, only the master’s tools will ever dismantle the master’s house.
Let me be specific. Those of us working in my own tradition confront the hegemony of the Western tradition, generally, and of the larger American tradition, specifically, as we set about theorizing about our tradition, and engaging in attempts at canon formation. Long after white American literature has been anthologized and canonized, and recanonized, our attempts to define a black American canon, foregrounded on its own against a white backdrop, are often decried as racist, separatist, nationalist, or “essentialist.” Attempts to derive theories about our literary tradition from the black tradition—a tradition, I might add, that must include black vernacular forms as well as written literary forms—are often greeted by our colleagues in traditional literature departments as misguided attempts to secede from a union which only recently, and with considerable kicking and screaming, has been forged. What is wrong with you people, our friends ask us in genuine passion and concern; after all, aren’t we all just citizens of literature here?
The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader Page 22