Tradition and the Black Atlantic

by Henry Louis Gates

  Well, yes, this sounds like a nice thing to symbolize. What we forget is that once we have retreated to the level of symbolic, gestural politics, we have to take into account all the other symbolic considerations. So even if you think that the free speech position contains logical holes and inconsistency, you need to register its symbolic force. And it is this level of scrutiny that tips the balance in the other direction.

  Now, I remember thinking at the time that the PC debate was beginning to wear thin; that the apocalyptic, Wagnerian rhetoric was beginning to sound a little over-rehearsed; that those ominous minor-key organ tones were beginning to lose their ability to send chills down our spine. And I, for one, was not sorry in the least, partly because I regarded the PC hysteria as a form of the politics of distraction. Literary scholar John Guillory wryly remarked at the time: “If liberal pluralism has discovered that the cultural is always also the political (which it is), it has seldom escaped the trap of reducing the political to the cultural.”7

  Unfortunately, the tendency is scarcely confined to liberal pluralists. It is now, almost twenty years after Buchanan’s curiously seminal speech, common property across the political spectrum. Worrying about the political tendencies of the New Historicism, for example, makes it easier to lose sight of what is happening on the streets outside—where more than a third of all black children still live below the poverty line and a black male in his twenties is still more likely to end up in jail, in prison, or on parole than in college, just as was true in 1992. As a black scholar, I cannot forget that for the astonishing percentage of African Americans who were functionally illiterate then— who remain functionally illiterate now—the debate over the canon had, and continues to have, all the relevance that an argument over interior decoration has for a homeless person.

  Cultural Literacy: The Sequel

  But if the PC debate turned out to be about less than met the eye, and if presidential and vice-presidential scare-mongering over cultural elites and academic radicals was of uncertain consequence as the 1990s progressed, how are we to gauge the political stakes of the culture wars?

  Closest to hand, on this score, are the arguments put forward by E. D. Hirsch in connection to his “cultural literacy” project. Essentially, Hirsch suggested that by establishing a base of common knowledge, our schools could better produce citizens able to participate on an equal footing in the common polity. His may be our generation’s most Emersonian vision of civic society, in which some minimum core of shared knowledge is important for political empowerment. So what we have here is an anti-elitist, democratizing impulse. The primary beneficiaries Hirsch said he had in mind were the so-called underprivileged, those relatively marginalized from the exercise of power, those for whom the school environment was the main site of transmission of “cultural literacy,” which is, by stipulation, also political literacy.

  What political advantages are conferred by cultural literacy—a knowledge of the common core? There are more and less elaborate explanations, but the short answer is that it’s a matter of “catching the references.” As anyone who learns another language is repeatedly reminded, a crude word knowledge isn’t sufficient properly to understand a text; you need to know something of the rich texture of conventional allusions—“to be or not to be,” that sort of thing. And so it is with discourse from our political leaders, which an informed citizenry must assess.

  For better or worse, however, the patterns of references have changed significantly from Abraham Lincoln’s day, and Hirsch’s vision of the texture of political discourse was embarrassingly generous, as if his model of a modern political figure were confined to Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Similarly, Vice President Quayle, scourge of the cultural elite, announced in 1992 that the presidential campaign would really be about character. It quickly emerged that what he meant was characters—the Waltons, Bart Simpson, Murphy Brown. There’s nothing very new here. About all I can remember of the 1988 presidential campaign were George Bush’s reference to Jake and the Fat Man and Michael Dukakis’s to Joe Isuzu. (Hirsch was widely condemned when he explained that to attain cultural literacy, you didn’t actually have to read any of William Shakespeare’s plays, just recognize the allusions to them. Strangely, no one seemed too alarmed when Bush conceded he’d never seen Jake and the Fat Man and Dan Quayle admitted that he’d never watched an episode of Murphy Brown, thus taking the Hirschian principle to a self-denying extreme.)

  In the public discourse of national politics, then, we waited in vain for the allusion to Shakespeare or any of his characters. Somehow we managed to discuss the vacillating Ross Perot with nary a mention of Hamlet, candidate Bill Clinton with no side glance at Romeo, and the first President Bush with scarcely a thought of King Lear. (Granted, the Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill hearings were an exception to this pattern, being a veritable orgy of Shakespeareana; I can’t explain why, but for more than a few senators, Othello loomed dark and inescapable in their minds. But this I take to be the exception that proves the rule.)

  By contrast, Quayle weighed in on Tupac Shakur, then the lead rapper of the group Digital Underground, and I fully expected George H. W. Bush to pronounce on Madonna’s latest shrink-wrapped endeavor at any time. (Otherwise, high art surfaced into public consciousness only if it had been denied a grant from the NEA.) In short, Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy projected a rather fetchingly idealized image of political colloquy, one quaintly removed from the all-pervasive flux of mass culture. The truth is, we do not require a book on cultural literacy to inform us about the actual referents of political discourse today; a subscription to Vanity Fair or Entertainment Weekly will do quite nicely.

  So it turns out that the democratizing aspect of mass culture—also known as “market penetration”—may have supplanted, to some degree, the role played by the school and by school culture in the dissemination of what we could call “political literacy.” If we want to assess the political stakes of the culture wars, in Pat Buchanan’s day and in ours, we may have to look elsewhere.

  Multiculturalism: The Sequel

  At this point, it may help to focus on one especially populous arena of the cultural wars, that associated with the rubric of “multiculturalism.” What happens when the Vandals and Visigoths—as Buchanan put it—start asking for equal time? What happens when the barbarians within seek full participation in the cultural as well as the civic domain of the nation? Of course, we would do ourselves a disservice to allow a Buchanan to set the terms of argument, and I shall not.

  In what follows, I want to pursue the paradoxes of pluralism, and because the grounds will soon grow muddier, let me set out a blueprint of the critical overview that’s to come. In an unpardonably abbreviated fashion, I want to elicit some of the tensions that were internal to—not all, but some—versions of multiculturalism concerning identity and liberation and concerning multiculturalism’s so-called relativism (something that, I argue, any cogent multiculturalism must repudiate). I want to probe some of the limitations of multiculturalism, which is to say multiculturalism as a model for the range of phenomena it has often been required to subsume, and I want to raise questions about the triumph, the historically recent triumph, of ethnicity (so called) as a paradigm or master code for human difference. In other words, I want to take seriously multiculturalism’s critics on the left as well as the right. And then I want to search for something multiculturalism has sometimes been supposed to lack, namely, and perhaps ironically, a coherent political vision. Leapfrogging, improbably enough, from Frantz Fanon to Isaiah Berlin, I conclude with an appeal for pluralism, but a pluralism, let me serve fair notice, of a singularly banal and uninspiring variety, conducing to a vision of society, and of the university, as a place of what one philosopher calls “constrained disagreement.” To coin a phrase, then, this will be two cheers for multiculturalism. Sorry, now that I’ve told you how this ends, I guess I’ve ruined the suspense. On the other hand, forewarned is forearmed.

  The Limits of Culturalism


  The first thing we usually do when we set out to discuss an issue seriously is to narrow the subject in some useful way, to say that this is, and that is not, what we’re talking about. One difficulty raised by the variety of uses to which this thing called multiculturalism has been put is that multiculturalism itself has certain imperial tendencies. We know it is concerned with the representation of difference. The question naturally arises, Whose differences and which differences? Almost all differences in which we take an interest express themselves in cultural ways; many, perhaps most, are indeed exhausted by their cultural manifestations. To assert this is, in most cases, to assert a tautology. At this point, we might move in a little further and say that multiculturalism is concerned with the representation, not of difference as such, but of cultural identities. We might ask, then, What sorts of identities are helpfully modeled by multiculturalism? The answer is less than obvious. Gender identity, sexual identity, racial identity: if all these things are socially inflected and produced, rather than unmediatedly natural, why won’t they fit into the culturalist model? Or will they?

  We can probably agree, for example, that gender identity and sexual identity are hard to reduce to the model of cultural difference, even though the meanings of these categories are culturally specific. First, these are categories we can discuss in a trans-cultural, trans-historical manner if only to elaborate on their trans-cultural and trans-historical disparities. (Try that with “Basque” or “Catalan.” The very idea, needless to say, is unintelligible.) Second, though, the culturalist model (and I’m using culturalism in a context-specific and anomalous way, as a back formation from multiculturalism) normally thinks in terms of cultural bubbles that may collide but usually could, in principle, exist in splendid isolation from one another (I touch on reasons for this later). Hence the rubric of “cultural diversity.” This sort of cultural externalism—required by a model of cultural distance or disparity—does not work so well in the case of gender identity or sexual identity. Difference, yes, but a difference within, something, as it were, culturally intrinsic. Why won’t the culturalist reduction work? As Jonathan Dollimore once pointed out in the case of sexual difference, homophobia in our culture is part of the structure of sexuality itself. So it’s not, as it were, out there; it’s in here. Othering, as I’ve said elsewhere, starts in the home. So, too, sexism, perhaps even more obviously, is part of our conventional gender identities.

  Which isn’t to deny the existence of subcultural differentia in particular social contexts, wherein sexual difference seems to become, as it were, “ethnicized” and a sexual ethnicity is forged. At the same time, the relation between the sexual and the cultural is necessarily contingent. Obviously, we can’t assume that Ronald Firbank and Sophocles or, for that matter, Marcel Proust and Michelangelo would recognize their putative fraternity.

  And yet it has sometimes seemed to me that what really explained the fervor of some of the Afrocentrist preoccupation with Egypt was an unexpressed belief that very deep continuities supervene upon skin color. So beyond the heartfelt claim that Cleopatra was “black” was the lurking conviction that if you traveled back in time and dropped the needle on a James Brown album, Cleo would instantly break out into the Camel Walk. The hope and belief that we cherish is not so much a proposition about melanin and physiognomy; it’s the proposition that beneath the scales of time and through the mists of history Cleopatra was a sister.

  For obvious reasons, sexual dimorphism is a quite basic aspect of human experience; racial difference is certainly less so. Understanding its significance always requires a particular engagement with a specific historical trajectory. There is no master key. But what emerges, again, is that, despite the very complex interrelations between race and culture—a matter that takes a sinister turn in the racialization of culture in the nineteenth century—no ready conversion factor connects the two, only the vagaries of history.

  As critic John Brenkman notes, in an important essay to which I return, African Americans have been inscribed in the American matrix in a particular way. It’s not merely that they are missing or absent or elsewhere: “Blacks were historically not merely excluded from the American polity; they were inscribed within it as nonparticipants.” He continues: “The forms of that negating inscription have varied through a complex history of legal and political designations. These set the conditions of the African-American discourse on identity and citizenship, and the meaning of that discourse would in turn have to be interpreted in light of those conditions and of the strategies embedded in its response to them.”8 (Later on, we see how race complicates even Brenkman’s own sketch of a multicultural polity.)

  What good are roots, Gertrude Stein once remarked, if you can’t take them with you? But a number of critics now suggest that the contemporary model of ethnicity sometimes fails us by its historically foreshortened perspective, its inability to grasp the roots as well as the branches of cultural identity. As early as 1992, theorist E. San Juan harshly decried what he called the “cult of ethnicity and the fetish of pluralism” and launched probably the most thoroughgoing critique of multiculturalism from a radical perspective we had before Bill Clinton became president. “With the gradual institutionalization/academicization of Ethnic Studies,” San Juan wrote, “‘the cult of ethnicity’ based on the paradigm of European immigrant success became the orthodox doctrine. The theoretical aggrandizement of ethnicity systematically erased from the historical frame of reference any perception of race and racism as causal factors in the making of the political and economic structure of the United States.”9 In a similar vein, Hazel Carby proposed that “insisting that ‘culture’ denotes antagonistic relations of domination and subordination . . . undermines the pluralistic notion of compatibility inherent in multiculturalism.” She continued: “The paradigm of multiculturalism actually excludes the concept of dominant and subordinate cultures—either indigenous or migrant—and fails to recognize that the existence of racism relates to the possession and exercise of politico-economic control and authority and also to forms of resistance to the power of dominant social groups.”10 (Later on, we see how some versions of emancipation are in conflict with some versions of identity politics.)

  I want to take up some of the issues raised here, but I want to make an aside as well because it strikes me that a failure to engage with radical critiques of this sort has been a characteristic of liberal multiculturalism and an impoverishing one. Those familiar with multiculturalism only through its right-wing opponents are sometimes surprised to discover that these broadly gauged radical critiques even existed. And as I’ve remarked elsewhere, I think the extended face-off with conservatism has had its deforming effects; what you can sometimes end up with is a multiculturalism that knows what it’s against but not what it’s for. So even if we finally demur from aspects of the radical critique, we will be better off for having sorted through these arguments. Spoken—I can hear the put-down already—like a true liberal. End of aside.

  In any event, as a rather mundane demonstration of the way in which the multiculturalistic paradigm tends even today to occlude race, I suggest that each of you perform the following little test. When you read the newspaper, take careful note of the way the word “multicultural” is used. In a column on advertising, a Benetton’s ad with black and white and Asian children together will be described as “multicultural.” But do these children—presumably supplied by the Ford Modeling Agency and in all likelihood hailing from exotic Westchester County—in fact represent different cultures? That, of course, is the one thing you cannot tell from a photograph of this sort. But I think you will find that in every instance where the older form “multiracial” would have been used, the newer lexeme “multicultural” is employed instead, even where cultural traits, as opposed to physiognomic traits, are obviously undiscoverable or irrelevant.

  Now, I want to be clear. In many, many cases, the shift from race to ethnicity was a salutary one, a necessary move away from the essentialist biol
ogizing of a previous era. The emphasis on the social construction of race may be a familiar one, but it remains an imperative one for all that. And yet we ought to consider the correlative danger of essentializing culture when we blithely allow culture to substitute for race without affecting the basic circulation of the term. In a conventional multicultural vision, for every insult there is a culture: that is, if I can be denigrated as an X, I can be affirmed as an X. Perhaps not the most sophisticated mechanism of remediation, but the intentions are good.

  So far, we’ve seen the ethnicity paradigm faulted for a tendency to leave out history, power relations, and, of course, the history of power relations. But its perplexities do not end here. We might bear in mind that the ascent of the vocabulary of ethnicity is, as Werner Sollors has emphasized, largely a post-war phenomenon, the very term having been coined by W. Lloyd Warner in 1941. It may be that what’s most conservative about some populist versions of multiculturalism is an understanding of group identity and groups rights that borrows whole hog a reified conception of cultural membership borrowed from the social sciences of midcentury. What’s new is that cultural survival—the preservation of cultural differentia—is assigned an almost medical sense of urgency. And if the delimitation of cultural identity borrows from the social sciences, the interpretation of its products sometimes seems to court the gaze of anthropology; in place of hermeneutics, it would seem, some might prefer ethnography.