The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader

by Henry Louis Jr. Gates

  Well, yes and no. It is clear that every black American text must confess to a complex ancestry, one high and low (literary and vernacular), but also one white and black. There can be no doubt that white texts inform and influence black texts (and vice versa), so that a thoroughly integrated canon of American literature is not only politically sound, it is intellectually sound as well. But the attempts of scholars such as Arnold Rampersad, Houston Baker, M. H. Washington, Nellie McKay, and others to define a black American canon, and to pursue literary interpretation from within this canon, are not meant to refute the soundness of these gestures of integration. Rather, it is a question of perspective, a question of emphasis. Just as we can and must cite a black text within the larger American tradition, we can and must cite it within its own tradition, a tradition not defined by a pseudoscience of racial biology, or a mystically shared essence called blackness, but by the repetition and revision of shared themes, topoi, and tropes, a process that binds the signal texts of the black tradition into a canon just as surely as separate links bind together into a chain. It is no more, or less, essentialist to make this claim than it is to claim the existence of French, English, German, Russian, or American literature—as long as we proceed inductively, from the texts to the theory. For nationalism has always been the dwarf in the critical, canonical chess machine. For anyone to deny us the right to engage in attempts to constitute ourselves as discursive subjects is for them to engage in the double privileging of categories that happen to be preconstituted.

  In our attempts at canon formation we are demanding a return to history in a manner scarcely conceived of by the new historicists. Nor can we opt out of our own private histories, which Houston Baker calls the African-American autobiographical moment, and which I call the autocritography. Let me end, as I began, with an anecdote, one that I had forgotten for so long until just the other day.

  Recently at Cornell, I was listening to Hortense Spillers, the great black feminist critic, read her important essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.” Her delivery, as usual, was flawless, compelling, inimitable. And although I had read this essay as a manuscript, I had never before felt—or heard—the following lines:

  The African-American male has been touched, therefore, by the mother, handled by her in ways that he cannot escape, and in ways that the white American male is allowed to temporize by a fatherly reprieve. This human and historic development—the text that has been inscribed on the benighted heart of the continent—takes us to the center of an inexorable difference in the depths of American women’s community: the African-American woman, the mother, the daughter, becomes historically the powerful and shadowy evocation of a cultural synthesis long evaporated—the law of the Mother—only and precisely because legal enslavement removed the African-American male not so much from sight as from mimetic view as a partner in the prevailing social fiction of the Father’s name, the Father’s law.

  Therefore, the female, in this order of things, breaks in upon the imagination with a forcefulness that marks both a denial and an “illegitimacy.” Because of this peculiar American denial, the black American male embodies the only American community of males which has had the specific occasion to learn who the female is within itself, the infant child who bears the life against the could-be fateful gamble, against the odds of pulverization and murder, including her own. It is the heritage of the mother that the African-American male must regain as an aspect of his own person-hood—the power of “yes” to the “female” within.

  How curious a figure—men, black men, gaining their voices through the black mother. Precisely when some committed feminists or some committed black nationalists would essentialize all “others” out of their critical endeavor, Hortense Spillers rejects that glib and easy solution, calling for a revoicing of the “master’s” discourse in the cadences and timbres of the Black Mother’s voice.

  As I sat there before her, I recalled, to my own astonishment, my own first public performance, when I was a child of four years. My mom attended a small black Methodist Church in Piedmont, West Virginia, just as her mom had done for the past fifty years. I was a fat little kid, a condition that my mom defended as “plump.” I remember that I had just been given a brand new gray suit for the occasion, and a black stringy-brim Dobbs hat, so it must have been Easter, because my brother and I always got new hats for Easter, just as my dad and mom did.

  At any rate, the day came to deliver my Piece. What is a Piece? A Piece is what people in our church called a religious recitation. I don’t know what the folk etymology might be, but I think it reflects the belief that each of the fragments of our praise songs, taken together, amounts to a Master Text. And each of us, during a religious program, was called upon to say our Piece. Mine, if you can believe it, was “Jesus was a boy like me, and like Him I want to be.” That was it—I was only four. So, after weeks of practice in elocution, hair pressed and greased down, shirt starched and pants pressed, I was ready to give my Piece.

  I remember skipping along to the church with all the other kids, driving everyone crazy, saying over and over, “Jesus was a boy like me, and like Him I want to be.” “Will you shut up!” my friends demanded. Just jealous, I thought. They probably don’t even know their Pieces.

  Finally, we made it to the church, and it was packed—bulging and glistening with black people, eager to hear Pieces, despite the fact that they had heard all of the Pieces already, year after year, bits and fragments of a repeated Master Text.

  Because I was the youngest child on the program, I was the first to go. Miss Sarah Russell (whom we called Sister Holy Ghost—behind her back, of course) started the program with a prayer, then asked if little Skippy Gates would step forward. I did so.

  And then the worst happened: I completely forgot the words of my Piece. Standing there, pressed and starched, just as clean as I could be, in front of just about everybody in our part of town, I could not for the life of me remember one word of that Piece.

  After standing there I don’t know how long, struck dumb and captivated by all of those staring eyes, I heard a voice from near the back of the church proclaim, “Jesus was a boy like me, and like Him I want to be.”

  And my mother, having arisen to find my voice, smoothed her dress and sat down again. The congregation’s applause lasted as long as its laughter as I crawled back to my seat.

  For me, I realized as Hortense Spillers spoke, much of my scholarly and critical work has been an attempt to learn how to speak in the strong, compelling cadences of my mother’s voice. To reform core curricula, to account for the comparable eloquence of the African, the Asian, and the Middle Eastern traditions, is to begin to prepare our students for their roles as citizens of a world culture, educated through a truly human notion of “the humanities,” rather than—as Bennett and Bloom would have it—as guardians at the last frontier outpost of white male Western culture, the Keepers of the Master’s Pieces. And for us as scholar-critics, learning to speak in the voice of the black female is perhaps the ultimate challenge of producing a discourse of the critical Other.

  SOURCE: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

  INTRODUCTION, “TELL ME, SIR, . . . WHAT IS ‘BLACK’ LITERATURE?”

  IN MEMORY OF JAMES A. SNEAD

  . . . even today, it seems to me (possibly because I am black) very dangerous to model one’s opposition to the arbitrary definition, the imposed ordeal, merely on the example supplied by one’s oppressor.

  The object of one’s hatred is never, alas, conveniently outside but is seated in one’s lap, stirring in one’s bowels and dictating the beat of one’s heart. And if one does not know this, one risks becoming an imitation—and, therefore, a continuation—of principles one imagines oneself to despise.

  —JAMES BALDWIN, “HERE BE DRAGONS”

  FOR THOSE OF us who were students or professors of African or African American literature in the late sixties or through the se
venties, it is a thing of wonder to behold the various ways in which our specialties and the works we explicate and teach have moved, if not exactly from the margins to the center of the profession of literature, at least from defensive postures to a position of generally accepted validity. My own graduate students often greet with polite skepticism an anecdote I draw on in the introduction to my seminars. When I was a student at the University of Cambridge, Wole Soyinka, recently released from a two-year confinement in a Nigerian prison, was on campus to deliver a lecture series on African literature (collected and published by Cambridge in 1976 under the title Myth, Literature, and the African World). Soyinka had come to Cambridge in 1973 from Ghana, where he had been living in exile, ostensibly to assume a two-year lectureship in the faculty of English. To his astonishment, as he told me in our first supervision, the faculty of English apparently did not recognize African literature as a legitimate area of study within the “English” tripos, so he had been forced to accept an appointment in social anthropology, of all things! (Much later, the distinguished Nigerian literary scholar Emmanuel Obiechina related a similar tale when I asked him why he had taken his Cambridge doctorate in social anthropology.) Shortly after I heard Soyinka’s story, I asked the tutor in English at Clare College, Cambridge, why Soyinka had been treated this way, explaining as politely as I could that I would very much like to write a doctoral thesis on “black literature.” To which the tutor replied with great disdain, “Tell me, sir, . . . what is black literature?” When I responded with a veritable bibliography of texts written by authors who were black, his evident irritation informed me that I had taken as a serious request for information what he had intended as a rhetorical question. Few, if any, students or scholars of African or African American literature encounter the sort of hostility, skepticism, or suspicion that Soyinka, Obiechina, and I did at the University of Cambridge. (To be perfectly fair, I should add that I was later able to find professors who, confessing their ignorance of my topic, were quite willing to allow me to work with them and to write the PhD thesis I chose. The faculty of English there is even trying to fund a chair in “Commonwealth literature.”) At Oxford, meanwhile, a scholar of African American literature is to deliver the Clarendon Lectures in the spring of 1992. At Oxford, Cambridge, Sussex, Birmingham, and Kent—to list just a few institutions—sophisticated and innovative work in “postcolonial” literary criticism is defining this branch of study. Many of the younger scholars in the field are accepting teaching positions in Africa, India, Pakistan, and throughout the “Third World,” attempting to wrestle control of pedagogy and scholarship from older conservative scholars, who are still under the spell of F. R. Leavis (whose influence on “Third World” literary pedagogy merits several doctoral dissertations) and who still believe in the possibility of a “pretheoretical” practical criticism.

  In the United States, the status of black literatures within the academy has changed even more dramatically. Since 1985, according to the MLA Job Information Lists, few departments of English, for example, have not engaged in, or will not continue to engage in, searches for junior and senior professors of African American, African, or postcolonial literatures. Because of the sharp increase in demand, along with the scarcity of PhDs in these fields, scholars of African American literature commonly find themselves pursued by several departments competing to make imaginative job offers—especially at institutions that confuse the inclusion of black studies with affirmative action. Although nonminority job seekers in this area sometimes encounter difficulties reaching, or surviving, interviews at the MLA convention (if their ethnic identities have not been ascertained beforehand, often by phone calls to their referees), several of the major scholar-critics of African American and African literature are white. (Last year, I wrote forty-nine letters of recommendation for one talented white job candidate in African literature; all forty-nine applications were unsuccessful.) Despite such exceptional instances, however, African American and African literatures have never been more widely taught or analyzed in the academy than they are today. We have come a long way since the early twenties, when Charles Eaton Burch (1891–1941), as chairman of the department of English at Howard, introduced into the curriculum a course entitled Poetry and Prose of Negro Life, and a long way, too, from the middle thirties, when James Weldon Johnson, then the Adam K. Spence Professor of Creative Literature and Writing at Fisk University, became the first scholar to teach black literature at a white institution, New York University, where he delivered an annual lecture series on “Negro literature.”

  These larger changes, however, have yet to reach the high schools. As Arthur N. Applebee reports, Shakespeare, Steinbeck, Dickens, and Twain are the most frequently required authors, even in public schools with the highest proportion of minority students. In public schools overall, only Lorraine Hansberry and Richard Wright appear among the top fifty authors required in English classes between grades 7 and 12. In urban schools, they rank twenty-fifth and thirty-seventh. In schools with a fifty percent or higher minority enrollment, they rank only fourteenth and seventeenth(16). (Wright’s Black Boy, in contrast, is among the three books most frequently banned from public schools.) These figures are still more surprising when we recall the extraordinarily large sales of the novels of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Gloria Naylor. Clearly the opening of the canon in traditional university literature departments has not yet affected the pedagogical practices of high school teachers.

  What has happened within the profession of literature at the college level to elevate the status of African American and other “minority” texts within the past decade and a half? It is difficult to be certain about the reasons for the heightened popularity of any area of study. Nevertheless, we can isolate several factors that, in retrospect, seem to bear directly both on the growth of student interest in these fields—an interest that has never been greater, if we can judge from the proliferation of titles being produced and the high sales figures—and on the vast increase in the number of teachers attempting to satisfy student demand.

  One factor would seem to be the women’s movement within African American and African literature. Since 1970, when Toni Morrison published The Bluest Eye, Alice Walker published The Third Life of Granger Copeland, and Toni Cade Bambara published her anthology, The Black Woman, black women writers have produced a remarkable number of novels and books of poetry. Morrison alone has published five novels, Walker four, and Gloria Naylor three. The list of black women writers with first and second novels is a very long one. Walker, Morrison, Naylor, and, in poetry, Rita Dove have won Pulitzer Prizes and National and American Book Awards; before 1970, Ralph Ellison and Gwendolyn Brooks were the only black writers who had been accorded these honors. The works by black women novelists, especially Walker and Morrison, are selling in record-breaking numbers, in part because of an expanded market that includes white and black feminists as well as the general black studies readership. What has happened, clearly, is that the feminist movement, in the form of women’s studies on campus and the abandonment of quotas for the admission of women to heretofore elite male institutions, has had a direct impact on what we might think of as black women’s studies. Indeed, black studies and women’s studies have met on the common terrain of black women’s studies, ensuring a larger audience for black women authors than ever before.

  Scholars of women’s studies have accepted the work and lives of black women as their subject matter in a manner unprecedented in the American academy. Perhaps only the Anglo-American abolitionist movement was as cosmopolitan as the women’s movement has been in its concern for the literature of blacks. Certainly, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin did not become the subjects of essays, reviews, books, and dissertations as quickly as Morrison and Walker have. Hurston, of course, attracted her largest following only after 1975, precisely when other black women authors rose to prominence. The women’s studies movement in the academy has given new life to African American studies, broadly con
ceived. Forecasts of the death of African American studies abounded in 1975. Although the field had benefited from a great burst of interest in the late sixties, when student protests on its behalf were at their noisiest, it had begun to stagnate by the mid-seventies, as many ill-conceived, politically overt programs collapsed or were relegated to an even more marginal status than they had been before. American publishers, ever sensitive to their own predictions about market size, became reluctant to publish works in this field. Toni Morrison, however, herself an editor at Random House, continued to publish texts by black women and men, from Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. The burgeoning sales of books by black women, for many of whom Morrison served as editor, began to reverse the trends that by 1975 had jeopardized the survival of black studies. Morrison’s own novels, especially Tar Baby (1981), which led to a cover story in Newsweek, were pivotal in redefining the market for books in black studies. The popularity of—and the controversy surrounding—Michele Wallace’s Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (1978) and Ntozake Shange’s For Coloured Girls Who Have Considered Suicide (1977) also generated a great amount of interest in the writings of black women.