Tradition and the Black Atlantic
Page 13
28 Kobena Mercer and Isaac Julien, “De Margin and De Centre,” introduction to “The Last Special Issue on Race,” Screen 29, no. 4 (Autumn 1988): 1–12.
29 Manthia Diawara, ed., Black American Cinema (New York: Routledge, 1993), 206.
30 Manthia Diawara, “The Absent One: The Avant-Garde and the Black Imaginary in Looking for Langston,” Wide Angle 13, nos. 3–4 (1991): 104.
31 Ibid., 108.
32 Coco Fusco, “Fantasies of Oppositionality,” Screen 29, no. 4 (Autumn 1988), “Last Special Issue on Race,” ed. Isaac Julien and Kobena Mercer; also reprinted in Afterimage 16, no. 5 (December 1988): 6.
33 Julien and Mercer, “De Margin and De Centre,” 4.
34 Ernest Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985), 121.
35 Edmund Burke, “SPEECH on a motion made in the House of Commons, the 7th of May 1782, for a Committee to Inquire into the state of the Representation of the Commons in Parliament,” in Burke, Works, 6:145–146.
36 Paul Gilroy, “The Cruciality of the Frog’s Perspective,” Third Text (1989): 33–44; Kobena Mercer, “Black Art and the Burden of Representation,” Third Text (1990): 41–78.
37 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
38 Gilroy, “Cruciality and the Frog’s Perspective,” 282.
39 Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Social Forces, Natural Kinds,” Science, Gender, and Race panel of the Radical Philosophers Association, American Philosophical Association Eastern Division Meeting, New York, December 1987. See also Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: Norton, 2006), for Appiah’s fullest elaboration of this theory of identity; and Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
40 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 135.
41 Homi Bhabha, “Interrogating Identity: The Post- colonial Prerogative,” in The Anatomy of Racism, ed. David Goldberg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 183–209.
42 See my “Critical Remarks,” in Goldberg, The Anatomy of Racism.
43 John Guillory, “Canon, Syllabus, List: A Note on the Pedagogic Imaginary,” Transition, no. 52 (1991): 36–54.
44 Edward Said and Raymond Williams, “Media, Margins, and Modernity,” in The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists, ed. Tony Pinkney (London: Verso, 1989), 182.
45 Young, “The Politics.”
46 I want to put my finger on a separate difficulty that runs through much political criticism and on equivocation that I take to be symptomatic. We tend to equivocate between, on the one hand, what a text could mean—the possibilities of its signification, the “modalities of the production of meaning,” as de Man has it—and, on the other hand, what a text does mean, which is the issue of its actual political effectivity. Political criticism usually works by demonstrating the former and insinuating the latter. The political charge comes from the latter, the question of reception. But it’s like, what are we, sociologists? Can’t be bothered with much that now, can we? With a few exceptions, it’s not what we lit crits were trained to do. But as political critics, we trade on that ambiguity (although saying so is considered rude). Mushnick’s column appeared in Sports Illustrated on April 6, 1990; the cover story appeared on May 14, 1990.
47 Published as Darker Than Blue (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
48 I don’t think this much of an extrapolation. In an issue of Screen, for instance, a distinguished avant-garde filmmaker, Yvonne Rainer, helpfully listed her conferential others: “Starting with the most victimized (alas, even the most noble fantasy of solidarity has its pecking order), they were: blacks, Lesbians, Latina women, Asians, and gay men.” (She apologized that Latino men “got lost in the shuffle.”) (Bérénice Reynaud and Yvonne Rainer, “Responses to Coco Fusco’s ‘Fantasies of Oppositionality,’” Screen 30 no. 3 [1989]: 91–92). Personally, I think they ought to be listed in alphabetical order, like on Oscar night.
49 Patricia J. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).
Chapter Three: Critical Fanonism
1 Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Masks, directed by Isaac Julien, Arts Council of England, 1996; Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2001); David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Life (London: Granta Books, 2000); Nigel Gibson, ed., Rethinking Fanon: The Continuing Dialogue (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1999); Homi K. Bhabha, “Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche, and the Colonial Condition,” Foreword to Black Skin, White Masks, by Frantz Fanon (London: Pluto Press, 1986); Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Foreword,” to Black Skin, White Masks, by Frantz Fanon (New York: Grove Press, 2008); Homi K. Bhabha, “Framing Fanon,” in The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon (New York: Grove Press, 2004), xv, xli.
2 Jerome McGann, “The Third World of Criticism,” in Rethinking Historicism: Critical Readings in Romantic History , ed. Marjorie Levinson et al. (New York: Blackwell, 1989), 85–107; Donald Pease, “Toward a Sociology of Literary Knowledge: Greenblatt, Colonialism, and the New Historicism,” in Consequences of Theory: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1987–1988, ed. Barbara Johnson and Jonathan Arac (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 108–153.
3 A properly contextualized reading of the text to which I most frequently recur, Black Skin, White Masks, should situate it in respect to such germinal works as Jean-Paul Sartre, Reflexions sur la Question Juive (Paris: Morihien, 1946); O. Mannoni, Psychologies de la Colonisation (Paris, 1950); and Germaine Guex, La Nevrose d’abandon (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950), as well as many lesser-known works. But this is only to begin to sketch out the challenge of rehistoricizing Fanon.
4 Edward W. Said, “Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors,” Critical Inquiry 15 (Winter 1989): 223.
5 Ibid., 223–225.
6 Albert Memmi, The Colonized and the Colonizer, trans. Howard Greenfeld (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 85.
7 Homi Bhabha, “Difference, Discrimination, and the Discourse of Colonialism,” in The Politics of Theory, ed. Francis Barker et al., proceedings of the Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature, July 1982 (Colchester, UK: University of Essex, 1983), 200.
8 Bhabha, “Remembering Fanon.”
9 Homi K. Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority Under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817,” in “Race,” Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 169.
10 Bhabha, “Difference, Discrimination,” 200.
11 Cited in Bhabha, “Remembering Fanon,” xxv.
12 Benita Parry, “Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse,” Oxford Literary Review 9, nos. 1–2 (Winter 1987): 31.
13 Ibid., xiii.
14 Bhabha, “Remembering Fanon,” xiv–xv.
15 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 161n25.
16 Ibid., 162.
17 Bhabha, “Remembering Fanon,” xviii.
18 Ibid., xix.
19 Ibid., xx.
20 Abdul R. JanMohamed, “The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonial Literature,” in “Race,” Writing , and Difference, ed. Gates, 78, 79.
21 Stephen Heath, “Le Pere Noel,” October 26 (Fall 1983): 77.
22 JanMohamed, “The Economy of Manichean Allegory,” 83.
23 Ibid., 84.
24 Spivak may keep him company here. In “Three Women’s Texts,” she writes: “No perspective critical of imperialism can turn the Other into a self, because the project of imperialism has always already historically refracted what might have been the absolutely Other into a domesticated Other that consolidates the imperialist self” (in “Race,” Writing, and Difference, ed. Gates, 272). The “abso
lutely Other” here seems to be something we find rather than make. I should stress that it’s not the notion of otherness as such but of absolute otherness that I want to question.
25 Parry, “Problems in Current Theories,” 47.
26 Ibid., 29.
27 Ibid., 31–32.
28 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 10.
29 Parry, “Problems in Current Theories,” 43.
30 Ibid., 45.
31 Ibid., 43–44.
32 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Theory in the Margin, Coetzee’s Foe Reading Defoe’s Crusoe/Roxana,” English in Africa 17, no. 2 (1990): 191–223.
33 Maria Loundoura, “Naming Gayatri Spivak” (interview with Spivak), Stanford Humanities Review 1, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 92.
34 Ibid., 92–93.
35 Ibid., 93.
36 Angela McRobbie, “Strategies of Vigilance: An interview with Gayatri Spivak,” Block 10 (1985): 9.
37 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 12.
38 See Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 173, citing Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1962), 51.
39 Stephan Feuchtwang, “Fanonian Spaces,” New Formations 1 (1993): 124–130, 127.
40 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 13.
41 Albert Memmi, The Colonized and the Colonizer (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), xiii.
42 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Preface” to Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1968), 10.
43 McGann, “The Third World of Criticism,” 86, 87.
44 Albert Memmi, review of Fanon by Peter Geismer and Frantz Fanon by David Caute, New York Times Book Review, March 14, 1971, 5. Bhabha, “Framing Fanon,” xxxii. Bhabha cites Albert Memmi, “The Impossible Life of Frantz Fanon,” Massachusetts Review (Winter 1973): 9–39; Albert Memmi, Dominated Man: Notes Toward a Portrait (New York: Orion Press, 1968); and Francois Vergès, Monsters and Revolutionaries: Colonial Family Romances and Metissage (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 211.
45 Bhabha, “Framing Fanon,” xxxii.
46 Ibid., xxxiii.
47 Memmi, review, 5; Bhabha, “Framing Fanon,” xxxiii.
48 Memmi, review, 5.
49 Ibid.
50 Memmi, Dominated Man.
51 Ibid., 88.
52 Ibid.
53 Memmi, review, 5.
54 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 15.
55 This chapter was originally prepared as a paper for and delivered (in abridged form) at the 1989 MSA panel on “Race and Psychoanalysis,” at the invitation of Jane Gallop, which partly explains why my references to Fanon are largely to his first and most overtly psychoanalytic book, Black Skin, White Masks. Because Fanon’s oeuvre receives scant attention in this chapter, I should remind readers unfamiliar with his works that early and late Fanon oppositional critics regard the later essays collected in, for example, For the African Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967) to be his most valuable contribution. Finally, I’m grateful to Benita Parry and Henry Finder, who commented on an earlier draft, even though I have failed to respond to their criticisms as I would have wished.
Chapter Four: Beyond the Culture Wars: Identities in Dialogue
1 Michael Tomasky, “Something New on the Mall,” New York Review of Books, October 22, 2009, 4.
2 Adam Gopnik, “A Critic at Large: Read All About It,” New Yorker, December 12, 1994, 12
3 “The Culture Warriors Get Laid Off,” New York Times, March 14, 2009.
4 May 9 address at Liberty College, published in Human Events, May 23, 1992; cited in Garry Wills, “The Born-Again Republicans,” New York Review of Books, September 24, 1992, 9.
5 In Will’s review, “The foreign adversaries her husband Dick must keep at bay are less dangerous, in the long run, than the domestic forces with which she must deal. These forces are fighting against the conservation of the common culture that is the nation’s social cement” (cited in Louis Menand, “What Are Universities For?” Harper’s December 1991, 56).
6 Calvin Coolidge, “Are the ‘Reds’ Stalking Our College Women?” cited in Maurice Isserman, “Travels with Dinesh,” Tikkun, September–October 1991, 81
7 John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 13.
8 John Brenkman, “Multiculturalism and Criticism,” in English Inside and Out: The Places of Literary Criticism, ed. Susan Gubar and Jonathan Kamholtz (New York: Routledge, 1993), 98.
9 E. San Juan Jr., Racial Formations/Critical Transformations: Articulations of Power in Ethnic and Racial Studies in the United States (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1992), 132.
10 Hazel Carby, “Multi-culture,” Screen 34 (Spring 1980): 64–65.
11 Guillory, Cultural Capital, 47.
12 Brenkman, “Multiculturalism and Criticism,” 97.
13 Jean-Loup Amselle, Affirmative Exclusion: Cultural Pluralism and the Rule of Custom in France, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).
14 Guillory, Cultural Capital, 13.
15 Working Papers of the John F. Kennedy Institute, Freie Universität, Berlin, No. 55, Higham, John: Multiculturalism in Disarray, Johns Hopkins University, Department of History, Baltimore, MD, 1992 (History).
16 Brenkman, “Multiculturalism and Criticism,” 89.
17 J. G. A. Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time (New York: Athenaeum, 1971), 85.
18 Brenkman, “Multiculturalism and Criticism,” 95.
19 Ibid., 99.
20 Richard Rorty, “Pragmatism, Relativism, Irrational-ism,” in Consequences of Pragmatism, by Richard Rorty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 166.
21 Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958), 15.
22 F. Allan Hanson, Meaning in Culture (London: Routledge, 1975); Roy Wagner, The Invention of Culture (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1975). See John M. Beattie, “Objectivity and Social Anthropology,” in Objectivity and Cultural Divergence, ed. S. C. Brown (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 1–20.
23 Kwasi Wiredu, Philosophy and an African Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 220–221.
24 Martin Hollis, “Reason and Ritual,” Philosophy 43 (1967): 240.
25 Isaiah Berlin, “Alleged Relativism in Eighteenth-Century European Thought,” in Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, by Isaiah Berlin, ed. Henry Hardy (New York: Knopf, 1991), 85.
26 Isaiah Berlin, “The Pursuit of the Ideal,” in The Crooked Timber of Humanity, 11.
27 Ibid., 12–13.
28 Ibid., 19.
29 John Higham, Hanging Together: Unity and Diversity in American Culture, ed. Carl J. Guarneri (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 234.
30 Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 231.
31 Charles M. Blow, “An Article of Faith,” New York Times, April 3, 2010, p. A17.
Index
Academic left
free speech and speech bans
introduced
political correctness
politicized curriculum
Adjaye, David
Aesthetic movement of 1890s England
African American literary canon
on artists and critics
big three authors
radical black nationalism
African Americans
citizenship, identity
continuing illiteracy
Douglass as “Representative Colored Man,”
Hughes as “Representative Negro,”
President Obama
tendency to censure each other
See also Black Americans
African culture
served by religion as surrogate
shattered (Wright)
Wright’s ambivalence toward
See also Traditions in Africa and Asia
Age of Reason
AIDS epidemic
Akomfrah, John
Alexis, Jacques Stephen
Algeria
Alice in Wonderland (Carroll)
Allen, Woody
Als, Hilton
Alterity
Burke as a theorist of
reinstated by Jan Mohamed
sentimental romance of
Spivak and Bhabha’s critique
Amselle, Jean-Loup
Anti-colonialism
Burke as father of
counter-narratives devalued as reverse discourse
of Fanon
and relativizing strain in Burke
Anti-foundationalism of Burkean critique
Appiah, Kwame Anthony
Arnold, Matthew
Articulation of interests
Arts Council England Lottery Capital 2
Assimilation
contrasted to value, integrity, of cultures
in dichotomy with separatism
literacy withheld as tool
reality of
Auguiste, Reece
Autograph ABP
Baker, Houston
Baldwin, James
and black homosexuality
and Looking for Langston
on unlikelihood of dictators voluntarily ceding power
victim of Black Arts Movement
Baraka, Amiri
on racial homosexuality
as too assimilationist, then Marxist
Barbados
Beam, Joseph
Beattie, John
Benetton’s ads and models
Bennett, William
Benthamite liberalism
Berlin, Isaiah
Bhabha, Homi
critique of alterity
critiqued by Parry
on Fanon
on Fanon as proto-theorist
featured in Frantz Fanon film
Lacan psychoanalysis
on post-structuralism
Bigger Thomas (protagonist character in Native Son)
Biko, Steve
Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies