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Authority, (White) Power and the (Black) Critic; It's All Greek to Me

Author(s): Henry Louis Gates, Jr.Source: Cultural Critique, No. 7, The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse II (Autumn,1987), pp. 19-46Published by: University of Minnesota PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1354149 .

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Authority, (White)Power and the (Black)Critic;It's All GreekTo Me

HenryLouisGates, r.

For a language acts in divers ways, upon the spirit of a people;even as the spiritof a people acts with a creativeand spiritualizingforce upon a language. -Alexander CrummellTheFutureof Africa,1860Slowly but steadily, in the following years, a new vision begangradually to replace the dream of political power-a powerfulmovement, the rise of another ideal to guide the unguided, anoth-er pillar of fire by night after a clouded day. It was the ideal of"book-learning";the curiosity,born of compulsory ignorance, toknow and test the power of the cabalistic letters of the white man,the longing to know. Here at last seemed to have been discoveredthe mountain path to Canaan;longer than the highwayof Eman-cipationand law, steep and rugged, but straight, eading to heightshigh enough to overlook life. -W.E.B. Du Bois

TheSoulsofBlackFolk,1903? 1987 by CuluralCritique.882-4371 (Fall 1987). All rights reserved.

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20 Henry Louis Gates,Jr.

The knowledge which would teach the white world was Greek tohis own flesh and blood .. ., and he could not articulatethe mes-sage of another people. -W.E.B. Du BoisTheSoulsofBlackFolk,1903

Alexander Crummell, a pioneering nineteenth-century Pan-Afri-canist, statesman, and missionary who spent the bulk of his crea-tive years as an Anglican minister in Liberia, was also a pioneering in-tellectual and philosopher of language, founding the American NegroAcademy in 1897 and serving as the intellectual godfather of W.E.B.Du Bois.' In his first annual address as president of the academy, deliv-ered on 28 December 1898, Crummell selected as his topic "The Atti-tude of the American Mind toward the Negro Intellect."2 Given the oc-casion of the first annual meeting of the great intellectuals of the race,he could not have chosen a more timely or appropriate topic.Crummell wished to attack, he said, "the denial of intellectuality inthe Negro; the assertion that he was not a human being, that he didnot belong to the human race," assertions, he continued, which set out"to prove that the Negro was of a different species from the whiteman" (10). Crummell argues that the desire "to becloud and stampout the intellect of the Negro" led to the enactment of "laws and stat-utes, closing the pages of every book printed to the eyes of Negroes;barring the doors of every school-room against them!" This, he con-cludes, "was the systematized method of the intellect of the South, tostamp out the brains of the Negro!"-a program which created an "al-most Egyptian darkness [that] fell upon the mind of the race, through-out the whole land" (10). Crummell next shared with his audience aconversation which he had overheard in 1833 or 1834, when he was"an errand boy in the Anti-slavery office in New York City":

1. Du Bois acknowledges Crummell's influence in a moving essayin TheSoulsofBlackFolk(Chicago:A.C.McClung&Co. 1903), eechapter12,"OfAlexanderCrummell."2. AlexanderCrummell, TheAttitude f the AmericanMind owardheNegroIn-tellect," TheAmericanNegroAcademy,OccasionalPapers,no. 3 (Washington, D.C: TheAcademy,1898),8-19;subsequent itationsrom hisworkwillbe givenparenthetical-ly in the text.

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Authority, White)Powerand the (Black)Critic

On a certainoccasion he [Crummell]heard a conversationbetweenthe Secretaryand two eminent lawyersfrom Boston,-Samuel E.Sewelland DavidLeeChild.Theyhad been to Wash-ingtonon some legal business. While at the Capitolthey hap-penedto dinein thecompanyof thegreatJohnC. Calhoun, hensenatorfrom SouthCarolina.It was a periodof greatfermentuponthequestionof Slavery, tates'Rights,andNullification;ndconsequentlyheNegrowasthetopicof conversationt thetable.Oneof the utterances f Mr.Calhounwas to thiseffect-"Thatifhe couldfind a Negrowho knew heGreek yntax,hewouldthenbelievethat the Negrowasa humanbeingand should be treatedas a man."(10-11)

"Justthink of the crude asininity,"Crummell concluded rathergener-ously, "of even a great man" (11).ForJohn C. Calhoun, then-who held during his lifetime the officesof U.S. congressman, secretary of war, vice-president, senator, andsecretaryof state and who stood firmly to his dying day a staunch ad-vocate of states'rightsand a symbol of an unreconstructedSouth-theperson of African descent would never be a full member of the humancommunity, fit to be anything more than a slave, until one individualblack person-just one-demonstrated mastery of the subtleties ofGreeksyntax,of all things! Perhapsfearingthat this goal would be tooeasilyachieved, Calhoun later added masteryof the binomial theoremto his list of black herculean tasks.The salient sign of the black person's humanity-indeed, the onlysign for Calhoun-would be the masteringof the veryessence of West-ern civilization,the veryfoundation of the complex fiction upon whichwhite Western culture had been constructed, which turned out to beGreeksyntax,of all things. It is highly likelythat, forJohn C. Calhoun,"Greek syntax" was merely a hyperbolic figure of speech, a trope ofvirtual impossibility, the first to leap to mind during an impassioneddebate over states' rights and the abolition of slavery. Calhoun, per-haps, felt driven to the hyperbolic mode because of the long racisttra-dition, in Western letters, of demanding that black people prove heirfull humanity,a traditionto which Calhounwas heir. We know this tra-dition all too well, marked as it is with the names of great intellectualWesternracialists,among them FrancisBacon,DavidHume, ImmanuelKant,ThomasJefferson,and G.W.F.Hegel, to list only a few. Whereas

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Authority,White)Powerand the (Black)Critic 23

Crummell accepted fully an argument central to the Enlightenment,that written and spoken language-use is the tangible sign of reason,and that it is the possession of reason which, as FrancisBacon put it inhis NovumOrganon, made man a god to man." Crummell'sfirstanon-ymous epigraph states this relation clearly:Language,n connectionwithreason, o which t gives tsprop-er activity, se, andornament, aisesman abovethe lowerordersof animals,and in proportionas it is polishedand refined,con-tributes reaty.... to exaltone nationaboveanother,n thescaleof civilization nd intellectualdignity. "ELL," )

English, for Crummell, was "in proportion ... polished and re-fined" in an inverse atio as the Africanvernacularlanguages were tar-nished and unrefined. And, while the fact that black people spokeEnglish as a firstlanguage was "indicative of sorrowfulhistory,"a signof "subjection and conquest," it was also "one of those ordinances ofProvidence,designed as a means for the introduction of new ideas intothe language of a people; or to serve as a transitional step from lowdegradation to a higher and nobler civilization" ("ELL,"18).English, for Crummell, was "the speech of Chaucer and Shake-speare, of Milton and Wordsworth, of Bacon and Burke, of Franklinand Webster,"and its potential masterywas "thisone item of compen-sation" that "the Almighty has bestowed upon us" in exchange for"the exile of our fathers from their African homes to America"("ELL," 10). English was "a transformingagency, which is graduallysubvertingthe native languages of our tribes,"he maintainswith greatapproval, as the imperialisticforces of Great Britain"introduce tradeand civilization, pioneer letters and culture, and prepare the wayfor the EnglishLanguageand Religion." It is "this noble language,"he concludes in the unmistakable airof triumph, that is "gradually ift-ing up and enlightening our heathen neighbors" ("ELL," 34, 32).In the English language are embodied "the noblest theories of liber-ty" and "the grandest ideas of humanity." By mastering the master'stongue, these great and grand ideas will become African ideas, be-cause "ideas conserve men, and keep alive the vitalityof nations ....With the noble tongue which Providence has given us, it will be diffi-cult for us to be divorced from the spirit, which for centuries hasbeen speaking through it"("ELL," 51, 52).4 "And this," Crummell

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24 Henry Louis Gates,Jr.

proclaims, "is our language," and it is "upon the many treasuresofthis English tongue" that he has "dwell[ed]with delight" ("ELL,"29).In direct and darkcontrast to the splendor and wonders of the Eng-lish language, Crummell pits the African vernacular languages.5 "Therefined and cultivated English language" is "alien alike from thespeech of [our] sires and the soil from whence they sprung." Let us, hecontinues, inquire "into the respective values of our native and ac-quired tongue .... The worth of our fathers' language, will, in thisway, stand out in distinct comparison with the Anglo-Saxon, our ac-quired speech" ("ELL," 11, 19). Black vernacular languages, forCrummell, embody "definite marks of inferiority connected withthem all, which place them at the widest distances from civilized lan-guages." Crummell then lists these shared "marks of inferiority" of theblack vernacular:

Of this whole class of languages, it may be said, in the aggregatethat (a) "They are," to use the words of Dr. Leighton Wilson,"harsh,abrupt,energetic,indistinct n enunciation,meagrein pointof words, abound with inarticulatenasal and gutteralsounds, pos-sess but few inflections and grammaticalforms, and are withal ex-ceedingly difficult of acquisition." This is his description of theGrebo;but it may be taken, I think,as, on the whole, a correct de-scriptionof the whole class of dialectswhich are entitled "Negro."(b) These languages, moreover, are characterized by lowness ofideas. As the speech of rude barbarians,they are markedby brutaland vindictivesentiments, and those principleswhich show a pre-4. Crummells hereechoingEmerson's ictionaboutthenecessity f blackpeopleproducing written "ideas" because "ideas only save races"; see Emerson's speech"Emancipationin the West Indies," TheCompletessays ndOtherWritingsfRalphWaldoEmersonNew York:Modem Library, 1940 [1844]).5. Despite his sustained and energetic effort to utilize the acquisition of English asthe saving graceof Africanenslavement, it is only fairto note that Crummell is not un-awareof the terrible irony in his argument. As he admits,"... I would not have you to suppose that I forget the loss which has

accompanied all this gain .... No! I do not forget that to give our smallfraction of the race the advantages I have alluded to, a whole continenthas been brought to ruin;the ocean has been peopled withvictims;wholetribes of men have been destroyed; nations on the threshold of civiliza-tion reduced to barbarism;and generation upon generation of our siresbrutalized!No, my remarks,at best, are discordant;and I avoid collateralthemes in order to preserveas much unity as possible, while endeavoringto set forth the worth and value of the English Language." ("ELL," 30)

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dominance of the animal propensities. (c) Again, they lack thoseideas of virtue, of moral truth, and those distinctions of right andwrong with which we, all our life long, have been familiar. (d)Another marked feature of these languages is the absence of clearideas of Justice, Law, Human Rights, and Governmental Order,which are so prominent and manifest in civilized countries. And(e) lastly-Those supernal truths of a personal, present Deity, ofthe moral government of God, of man's Immortality,of theJudg-ment, and of EverlastingBlessedness, which regulate the lives ofChristians, are either entirely absent, or else exist, and are ex-pressed in an obscure and distorted manner. ("ELL,"19-20)

So much for the black vernacular!Any attempt even to render the master's discourse in our own blackdiscourse is an egregious error, Crummell continues, because to do sois merely to translate sublime utterances "in broken English-a miser-able caricature of their noble tongue" ("ELL" 50). Such was the casewhen English missionaries in the West Indies translated the Bible from

the rich cadences of the KingJames version into the "crude, mongrel,discordant jargon" of the black vernacular. No, translation just won'tdo, because "a language without its characteristic features, stamp, andspirit, is a lifeless and unmeaning thing." The attempt to translate fromEnglish to the black vernacular is "so great a blunder" that we mustabandon forever both indigenous African vernacular languages as wellas the neo-African vernacular languages that our people have prod-uced in the New World. We must do so, concludes Crummell, be-cause:

All low, inferior,and barbaroustongues are, doubtless, but thelees and dregs of noble languages, which have gradually, as thesoul of a nation has died out, sunk down to degradationand ruin.We must not suffer this decay on these shores, in this nation. Wehave been made, providentially, he depositof a noble trust;and weshould be proud to show our appreciationof it. Havingcome to theheritageof this languagewe must cherishits spirit,as well as retainits letter.We must cultivate t among ourselves;we must striveto in-fuse its spiritamong our reclaimed and aspiringnatives.("ELL,"50)

I cite the examples of John C. Calhoun and Alexander Crummell asmetaphors of the relation between the critic of black literature and the

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broader,largerinstitution of literature. However,lest anyone be-lieve that the argumentsof Calhoun, Kant,Jefferson, Hume, andHegelhave been relegated o theirproperplacein thegarbagecanofhistory,she or he need only recallthe words of Japanese premierNagasonea few months ago, when he remarked hatAmericawillneverbe the intellectualequal of Japan because of the presenceofChicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Blacks,whose presence lowers thecountry'scollectiveIQ[!]-To whichRonaldReagan,whenqueried,repliedthatbeforerespondinghe would need to see Nagasone'sre-marks"in context"!)Calhoun and Crummellare my metaphors or acts of empower-ment. Learningthe master's tongue, for our generation of critics,hasbeen an act of empowerment, whether that criticallanguage be NewCriticism,so-called humanism, structuralism,poststructuralism,Marx-ism, feminism, new historicism, or any other "ism" that I may haveforgotten. Each of these criticaldiscourses arises from a specific set oftexts within the Western tradition. For the past decade, at least, manyof us have busied ourselves with the necessary task of studying thesemovements in criticism, drawing upon their modes of reading to ex-plicate the texts of our tradition.This has been an exciting time for critics of Afro-American litera-ture, producing perhaps not as much energy as did, say, the HarlemRenaissance or the Black Arts movement, but certainly producing asmany critical essays and books about black literature, and yes, evenjobs and courses in white English departments. Even with the insti-tutionalization of the racism inherent in "Reagonomics" and with thedeath of Black Power, there have never been more jobs available inAfro-Americanliterature in white colleges and universitiesthan thereare today, as even a cursoryglance at the MLAJob Listwill attest(lastyearalone, thirty-sevensuch positions were advertised).In a few years,we shall at last have our very own Norton Anthology, a sure sign thatthe teaching of Afro-American literature has been institutionalizedand will continue to be so, as only the existence of a well-marketed,affordableanthology can do. Our pressingquestion now becomes this:In what languages shall we choose to speak, and write, our own criti-cisms? What are we now to do with the enabling masks of empower-ment that we have donned as we have practiced one mode of whitecriticism or another?

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IIBefore considering these questions, it is useful to consider the re-sistance to (white)theory in the (black)tradition.6Unlike almost everyother literarytradition,the Afro-Americanliterary radition was gener-ated as a response to allegations that its authors did not and couldnotcreate "literature."Philosophers such as Hume, Kant,Jefferson, andHegel seemed to decide that the presence of a written literature wasthe signal measure of the potential, innate "humanity"of a race. TheAfricanliving in Europe or in the New World seems to have felt com-pelled to create a literatureto demonstrate, implicity, that blacks didindeed possess the intellectualabilityto createa writtenart but also toindict various social and economic institutionsthat delimited the "hu-

manity" of all black people in Western cultures.So insistent did these racistallegationsprove to be, at least from theeighteenthto the earlytwentiethcenturies,that it is fairto describe thesubtextof the historyof black lettersas this urge to refutethe caim thatbecause blackshad no writtentraditions, heywere bearersof an "inferi-or" culture. The relation between Europeanand American critical heo-ry,then, and the development of the Africanand Afro-Americanliterarytraditions,can readilybe seen to have been ironic indeed. Even as lateas1911, whenJ. E. Casely-Hayfordpublished EthiopiaUnboundthe "first"Africannovel),thatpioneeringauthorfeltcompelled to address this mat-ter in the first two paragraphsof his text. "At the dawn of the twentiethcentury,"the novel opens, "men of light and learningboth in Europeand in America had not yet made up theirminds as to what place to as-sign to the spiritualaspirationsof the blackman. Before this time," thenarrative ontinues, "ithad been discovered thatthe black man was notnecessarilythe missing link between man and ape. It has even beengrantedthat for intellectualendowments he had nothing to be ashamedof in an opencompetition with the Aryan or any other type."7Ethiopia

6. See Paul de Man, "The Resistance to Theory," YaleFrench tudies,no. 63 (1982):3-20. More extensive versions of this section of my essay appear in my "Criticismin theJungle," in BlackLiteraturend LiteraryTheory,d. Henry Louis Gates,Jr. (New York:Methuen, 1984), 1-24, and "Writing'Race' and the Difference It Makes," Critical n-quiry12, no. 1 (Autumn 1985): 1-20.7.J. E. Casely-Hayford,EthiopiaUnbound: tudiesnRaceEmancipationLondon: Cass,1911), 1-2; subsequent citations from this work, abbreviatedEA, will be given paren-theticallyin the text.

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Unbound,t seems obvious, was concerned to "settle" the matter ofblack mental equality, which had remained something of an openquestion in European discourse for two hundred years. Concludingthis curiously polemical exposition of three paragraphs,which pre-cedes the introduction of the novel's protagonist, Casely-Hayfordpoints to "the names of men like [W.E.B.]Du Bois, [Booker T.] Wash-ington, [Wilmot E.] Blyden, [Paul Laurence] Dunbar, [Samuel] Cole-ridge-Taylor,and others"asprimafacie vidence of the sheer saliencyofwhat Carter G. Woodson once termed "the public [Negro] mind."8These were men, the narrative concludes, "who had distinguishedthemselves in the fields of activityand intellectuality,"men who haddemonstrated conclusively that the African's first cousin was indeedthe European ratherthan the ape.That the presenceof a written iteraturecould assume such largepro-portions in several Western cultures from the Enlightenment to thiscenturyis even more curious than is the fact that blacksthemselves, aslate as 1911, felt moved to respond to this stimulus, indeed felt theneed to speakthe mattersilent, to end the argument by producing lit-erature. Few literary traditions have begun or been "sustained" bysuch a complex and curious relation to its criticism:allegations of anabsence led directlyto a presence, a literatureoften inextricablyboundin a dialogue with its most scathing critics.9Black literature,and its criticism, then, have been put to uses thatwere not primarilyaesthetic;rather, they have formed part of a largerdiscourse on the nature of the blackand his or her role in the order ofthings. The integral relation between theory and literarytexts, there-fore, which in other traditions has so very often been a sustainingrela-tion, in our tradition has been an extraordinarilyproblematicone. Therelations between theory, tradition,and integritywithin the black liter-ary traditionhave not been, and perhaps cannot be, a straightforwardmatter.Let us consider the etymology of the word "integrity,"which I taketo be the keyword implied in this matter. "Integrity" is a curiouskeyword to address in a period of bold and sometimes exhilarating

8. Carter G. Woodson, introduction, TheMindoftheNegroas Reflectedn LettersWrittenduring heCrisis,1800-1860 (New York:Negro Univ. Press, 1969), v.9. I have traced the historyand theory of this criticaldebate in my BlackLetters ndtheEnlightenment,orthcoming from Oxford UniversityPress.

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speculationand experimentation, two otherwords which aptlycharac-terize literary criticism in general, and Afro-American criticism inparticular,at the present time. Integritas,he Latinorigin of the Englishword, connotes wholeness, entireness, completeness, chastity,and pu-rity;most of which are descriptiveterms that made theirway frequent-ly into the writings of the American "New Critics,"criticswho seemnot to have caredespeciallyfor, or about, the literatureof Afro-Ameri-cans. Two of the most common definitions of "integrity"elaborateupon the sense of "wholeness" derived from the Latinoriginal.Let mecite these here, as taken from the OxfordEnglishDictionary:

1.The conditionof havingno partor element akenawayorwant-ing, undividedor unbroken tate;materialwholeness,complete-ness,entirety;omethingundivided; nintegralwhole.2. Thecon-ditionof notbeingmarred rviolated; nimpairedruncorruptedcondition;originalperfectstate;soundness.It is the second definition of "integrity"(thatis, connoting the absenceof violation and corruption, the preservationof an initialwholeness orsoundness) which I would like to consider in this deliberationon theo-ry and integrityor, more precisely, upon that relationshipwhich ideal-ly should obtain between African or Afro-Americanliterature and thetheories we borrow, revise, or fabricate to account for the precise na-ture and shape of our literature and its "being" in the world.Eventhough Houston Bakerand I areoften attacked or using theoryand even though some blackreadersrespondto our theoriesby remark-ing that "It's all Greekto me," it is probably true that critics of Afro-American literature(which,by the way, I employ as a less ethnocentricdesignationthan "the BlackCritic")are more concerned with the com-plex relation between literature and literary theory than we have everbeen before. There are many reasons for this, not the least of which isour increasinglycentral role in "the profession," precisely when ourcolleagues in other literatures are engulfed in their own extensive de-bates about the intellectualmerit of so very much theorizing. Theory,as a second-order reflection upon a primary gesture such as "litera-ture," has alwaysbeen viewed with deep mistrust and suspicion bythose scholars who find it presumptuous and perhaps even decadentwhen criticism claims the right to stand, as discourse, on its own, as aparallel textual universe to literature.Theoretical texts breed other,

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equally "decadent,"theoreticalresponses in a creativeprocess thatcanbe remarkablyfar removed from a poem or a novel.For the critic of Afro-American literaturethis process is even moreperilous, precisely because the largest part of contemporary literary"theory"derivesfrom critics of WesternEuropeanlanguagesand liter-atures. Is the use of "theory"to write about Afro-Americanliterature,we might ask rhetorically, merely another form of intellectual inden-ture, a form of mental servitude as pernicious in its intellectual impli-cations as any other form of enslavement?This is the issue raised, forme at least, by the implied presence of the word "integrity" n this dis-cussion. Does the propensity to theorize about a text or a literary radi-tion "mar," "violate,""impair,"or "corrupt,"the "soundness" of an"originalperfect state" of a black text or of the black tradition? To ar-gue the affirmative s to align one's position with the New Criticalposi-tion that texts are "wholes" in the first place.To be sure, this matter of criticism and integrityhas a long and rath-er tortured history in black letters. It was David Hume, afterall, whocalled FrancisWilliams,theJamaican poet of Latinverse "aparrotwhomerely speaks a few words plainly."'0 Phillis Wheatley has for fartoo long suffered from the spurious attacks of black and white criticsalike for being the original raraavis of a school of so-called mocking-bird poets, whose use and imitation of received European and Ameri-can literaryconventions has been regarded, simply put, as a corrup-tion itself of a "purer"black expression, privileged somehow in blackartisticforms such as the blues, signifying,the spirituals,and the Afro-American dance. Can we, as critics, escape a "mockingbird"relationto "theory,"one destined to be derivative,often to the point of paro-dy? Can we, moreover, escape the racism of so many criticaltheorists,from Hume and Kantthrough the SouthernAgrariansand the Frank-furt School?As I have argued elsewhere, there are complex historicalreasons forthe resistanceto theory among critics of comparativeblack literature,which stem in part from healthy reactions against the marriage oflogocentrism and ethnocentrism in much of post-RenaissanceWesternaesthetic discourse. Although there have been a few notable excep-tions, theory as a subject of inquiry has only in the past decade begun

10. David Hume, "Of National Characters," n ThePhilosophical orks,d. ThomasHill Green and Thomas Hodge Grose (Darmstadt, 1964), 3: 252 n. 1.

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to sneak into the discourse of Afro-American literature. The implicitracism of some of the Southern Agrarianswho became the New Crit-ics-not to mention Adorno's bizarre thoughts about something hecalls "jazz"-did not serve to speed this process along at all. SterlingA. Brown has summed up the relation of the black tradition to theWestern critical tradition: in response to Robert Penn Warren's linefrom "Pondy Woods" (1945), "Nigger, your breed ain't metaphysi-cal," Brown replies, "Cracker,your breed ain't exegetical."lNo tradition is "naturally" metaphysical or exegetical, of course.Only recently have some scholars attempted to convince critics ofblackliteraturethat the racism of the Westerncritical tradition is not asufficient reason for us to fail to theorize about our own endeavor oreven to make use of contemporary theoretical innovations when thisseems either useful or appropriate. Perhaps predictably,a number ofthese attempts share a concern with that which, in the received tradi-tion of Afro-Americancriticism,has been most repressed:that is, withcose readings of the text itself. This returnof the repressed-the verylanguage of the black text-has generated among our criticsa new in-terestin theory. My chargedadvocacyof the relevanceof contempora-ry theory to reading Afro-Americanand African literatureclosely hasbeen designed as the prelude to the definition of principles of literarycriticismpeculiar to the black literarytraditionsthemselves, related toand compatible with contemporary critical theory generally, yet "in-delibly black,"as Robert FarrisThompson puts it.12All theory is text-specific, and ours must be as well. Lest I be misunderstood, I havetried to work through contemporary theories of literaturenotto "ap-ply" them to blacktextsbut rather to transformy translatinghem into anew rhetorical realm. These attempts have been successful in varyingdegrees;nevertheless, I have tried to make them at all times interestingepisodes in one critic'sreflection on the black "text milieu," by whichhe means "the tradition,"and from which he extracts his "canon."It is only through this criticalactivitythat the profession, in a worldof dramaticallyfluid relations of knowledge and power, and of thereemerging presence of the tongues of Babel, can redefine itself awayfrom a Eurocentric notion of a hierarchial "canon" of texts, mostly

11. SterlingA. Brown, lecture, Yale University, 17 April 1979.12. Robert FarrisThompson, IndeliblyBlack.Essayson African ndAfro-Americanrt(forthcoming).

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32 HenryLouisGates,r.

white, Western, and male, and encourage and sustain a trulycomparativeand pluralisticnotion of the institution of literature.Whatall students of literaturehave in common is the art of interpretation,even where we do not have in common the same texts. The hegemonyimplicit in the phrase, "the Westerntradition,"primarilyreflectsmate-rialrelationships,and not so-called universal,transcendent,normativejudgments. Judgment is specific, both culturallyand temporally. Thesometimes vulgar nationalism implicit in would-be literary categoriessuch as "American Literature," or the not-so-latent imperialismimplied by the vulgar phrase "Commonwealth Literature,"are extra-literarydesignations of control, symbolic of material and concomitantpolitical relations, rather than literaryones. We, the scholars of ourprofession, must eschew these categories of domination and ideologyand insist upon the fundamental redefinition of what it is to speak of"the canon."Whether we realize it or not, each of us brings to a text an implicittheory of literature,or even an unwitting hybrid of theories-a criticalgumbo, as it were. To become aware of contemporarytheory is to be-come awareof one's own presuppositions, those ideological and aes-thetic assumptions that we bring to a text unwittingly.It is incumbentupon us, those of us who respect the sheer integrityof the black tradi-tion, to turn to this very tradition to create self-generated theoriesabout the blackliterary ndeavor. We must, aboveall,respectthe integrityof the separate raditionsembodied in the black work of art,by bringingto bearupon the explicationof itsmeaningsall the attentionto languagethat we may glean from developments in contemporary theory. By theveryprocess of "application,"as it were, we recreate,through revision,the criticaltheory at hand. As our familiaritywith the black traditionand with literarytheory expands, we shall invent our own theories, assome of us have begun to do-black, text-specific theories. We mustlearn to read a black text within a black-formal cultural matrix.I have tried to utilize contemporary theoryto defamiliarizehe texts ofthe black tradition, to create a distance between this black reader andour black texts, so that I may more readilyseethe formal workings ofthose texts. Wilhelm von Humboldt describes this phenomenon:

Manliveswiththings mainly,even exclusively-since sentimentand actionin him depend upon his mentalrepresentations-astheyareconveyed o him by language.Through he same actby

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which he spins languageout of himselfhe weaveshimself nto it,andevery anguagedrawsa circlearoundthe people to whichitbelongs,a circlethat canonlybe transcended n so faras one atthe same timeentersanotherone.

I have turned to literary heory as a "second circe." I have done this topreserve the integrityof these texts, by trying to avoid confusing myexperience as an Afro-Americanwith the black act of language that de-fines a text. On the other hand, by learningto read a black text within ablack formal cultural matrix, and explicating it with the principles ofcriticismat work in both he Euro-Americanand African-American ra-ditions, I believe thatwe critics can produce richer structuresof mean-ing than are possible otherwise.This is the challenge facing the criticof black literaturein the 1980s:not to shy away from white power-that is, literarytheory; rather, totranslateit into the black idiom, renaming rinciples of criticismwhereappropriate,but especiallynamingndigenous black principles of criti-cism and applying these to explicate our own texts. It is incumbentupon us to protect the integrity of our tradition by bringing to bearupon its criticismany tool of sensitivityto language that is appropriate.And what do I mean by "appropriate"?Simply this:anytool that ena-bles the critic to explain the complex workingsof the language of a textis an "appropriate"tool. For it is language itself, the blacklanguage ofblack texts, that expresses the distinctive quality of our literarytradi-tion. A literarytradition,like an individual, is to a large extent definedby its past, its received traditions. We critics in the 1980s have the es-pecial privilege of explicating the black tradition in ever closer detail.We shall not meet this challenge by remaining afraid of, or naiveabout, literarytheory-that would only inflict upon our literarytradi-tion the violation of the uninformed reading.We arethe keepersof theblack literarytradition. No matter what theories we seem to embrace,we have more in common with each other than we do with any othercriticof any other literature.We write for each other, and for our owncontemporary writers.This relation is a critical trust.It is also apolitical rust. How can the demonstration that our textssustain ever closer and sophisticated readingsnotbe political at a timein the academy when all sorts of so-called canonical critics mediatetheir racism through calls for "purity"of "the tradition,"demands asimplicitlyracistas anythingthe SouthernAgrarianssaid? How can the

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deconstruction, s it were,of the formsof racism tself(ascarriedout,forexample, n a recent ssueof Criticalnquiryy blackandnonblackpoststructuralists)ot be political?13 owcan the use of literary naly-sis to explicate he racistsocialtext in whichwe stillfind ourselvesbeanythingbutpolitical?To be political,however,does not mean thatIhaveto writeat the level of diction of a Marvelcomicbook. No, mytask-as I seeit-is to helptoguaranteehatblackand so-calledThird-World iteratures taughtto blackand ThirdWorld(and white)stu-dentsby blackand ThirdWorld(andwhite)professorsn heretoforewhite mainstreamdepartmentsof literatureand to trainuniversitygraduateand undergraduatetudentsto think,to read,and even towrite learly,helping hem to exposefalse usesof language, raudulentclaimsandmuddledarguments,propaganda ndvicious ies,from allof whichour people have suffered ust as surelyas we havefrom aneconomicorder n whichwe were zeroesand a metaphysical rder nwhichwe were absences.Thesearethe "values" hatshould be trans-mittedthroughblackcritical heory.

And,if onlyfortherecord, et me stateclearlyherethatonlya blackpersonalienatedromblack anguage-useouldfailto understand hatwe have been deconstructingwhitepeople's anguagesanddiscoursessincethatdreadfuldayin 1619 when we weremarchedoffthe boatinVirginia.Derridadid not inventdeconstruction,wedid! Thatis whatthe blues and signifying re all about. Ours mustbe a signifying, er-nacular riticism, elated o othercriticalheories,yet indeliblyblack,acritical heoryof our own.III

Inthe9 December1986 ssueof theVoiceiteraryupplement,n an es-sayentitled"Cult-NatsMeetFreaky-Deke," regTatearguescogentlyand compellingly hat:... black aestheticians eed to developa coherentcriticism ocommunicate hecomplexities f ourculture.There'sno periodi-calon blackculturalphenomenaequivalento The Village oicerArtforum,o publicationhatprovides ournalismon blackvisual

13. See CriticalInquiry12, no. 1 (Autumn 1985).

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art,philosophy, conomics,media, iterature,inguistics, sychol-ogy,sexuality, pirituality,ndpop culture.Thoughthereare cer-tainlyblackeditors,ournalists, ndacademics apableof produc-ingsuch ajournal, hedisintegrationf theblackculturalnation-alistmovementand thebrain-drainf black ntellectualso whiteinstitutionshave destroyedthe vociferouspublic dialoguethatusedto exist between hem. (5)While I would argue that Sage,Calaloo, nd BALFare indeed fulfillingthat function for academic critics, I am afraidthat the truth of Tate'sclaim is irrefutable.But Tate's real and very important contribution tothe future of blackcriticismis to be found in his most damning allega-tion. "What'sunfortunate," he writes,

is that while blackartists have opened up the entire "text ofblackness"or fun andgames,not manyblackcriticshaveprod-uced writingas fecund, eclectic,and freaky-dekes the art, letalone the culture,itself. For those who preferexegesiswith apolemicalbend,just imaginehow criticsas fluentin blackandWestern ultureas thepostliberatedrtists ould strike error ntothat bastionof whitesupremacisthinking, he Westernart[andliterary]worlds." 5)

To which I can only say, echoing Shug in TheColorPurple,"Amen.Amen." Only by reshaping the critical canon with our own voices inour own images can we meet Tate's challenge head-on.Tate's challenge is a serious one because neither ideology nor criti-cism nor blacknesscan exist as an entityof itself,outside its forms or itstexts. This is the central theme of InvisibleMan and Mumboumbo, orexample. But how can we write or read the text of black theory?Whatlanguage(s)do blackpeople use to representor to contain their criticalor ideological positions? In what forms of language do we speak, orwrite, or rewrite? hese are the issues at the heart of my essay.Can we derive a valid, integral"black"text of criticism or ideologyfrom borrowed or appropriatedforms?That is, can an authentic blacktext emerge in the forms of language inherited from the master'sclass,whether that be, for instance, the realistic novel or poststructuralisttheory? Can a black woman's text emerge authenticallyas borrowed,or "liberated,"or revised, from the patriarchialforms of the slavenarratives,on one hand, or from the white matriarchial forms of the

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sentimental novel, on the other, as HarrietJacobs and HarrietWilsonattempted to do in Incidentsn theLifeofa SlaveGirl(1861) and OurNig(1859) respectively?How much space is there between these two forms throughwhich tomaneuver, to maneuver without a certainpreordained confinement or"garreting,"such as that to which ValerieSmith alludes so pregnantlyin her superb poststructuralistreadingofJacobs's Incidentsn theLifeofaSlaveGirl?'4s to revise, in this sense, to exist within the confines of thegarret,to extend the metaphor, only to learn to manipulate the repre-sentation of black structures of feeling between the cracks, the darkspaces, provided for us by the white masters?Can we write true textsof our ideological selves by appropriatingthe receivedforms of the op-pressor-be that oppressor patriarchyor racism-forms in which wesee no reflection of our own faces and through which we hear no trueresonances of our own voices? Where lies the liberation in revision,where lies the ideological integrityof defining freedom in the modesand forms of difference charted so cogently by so many poststructur-ralistcritics of black literature?It is in these spaces, or garrets,of differencethat blackliteraturehasdwelled. And while it is crucial to read cosely these patternsof formaldifference,it is incumbent upon us as well to understand thatthe questwas lost, in a major sense, before it had even begun, simply becausethe terms of our own self-representationhave been provided by themaster.Are our choices only to dwell either in the quicksand or in thegarretof refutation,or negation, or revision? The ideological critiqueof revision must follow, for us as critics, our detailed and ever-closerreadings of these very modes of revision. It is not enough for us toshow that these exist and to define them as satisfactorygestures of ide-ological independence. In this sense, our next set of concerns must beto addressthe blackpolitical signified,which is, the culturalvision andthe black criticallanguage that underpin the search through literatureand art for a profound reordering and humanizing of everydayexist-ence. We must urge for our writers and critics the fullest and mostironic exploration of manner and matter, of content and form, ofstructure and sensibility so familiarand poignant to us in verbal and

14.ValerieSmith, " 'Loopholes of Retreat':Architectureand Ideology in HarrietJa-cobs's Incidentsn theLifeofa Slave,"paper presented at the 1985 American Studies As-sociation meeting, San Diego.

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Authority, (White)Power and the (Black)Critic

nonverbalblackmusic-our most sublimeformsof art-where ideol-ogyand artareone,whetherwe listento BessieSmithor to post-mod-em and poststructuralistoltrane.Butwhatof the ideologyof the blackcriticalext?Andwhat of ourown critical iscourse?nwhosevoicesdo wespeak?Havewemerely e-namedtermsreceivedromthe WhiteOther? ustas we musturgethatourwritersmeet of thischallenge,we as criticsmustturnto our ownpeculiarlyblackstructures f thoughtand feelingto developour ownlanguageof criticism.We must do so by turningto the black ver-nacular, he languagewe use to speakto each other when no whitepeopleare around.Mycentralarguments this:blackeopleheorizebouttheir rtand heirives n theblackernacular.nlesswe turnto thevernac-ularto groundourtheoriesand modes of reading,we willsurelysinkin themireof NellaLarsen'squicksand, emainalienatedn the isola-tion of HarrietJacobs'sarret,or masked n thereceived tereotype fthe BlackOtherhelpingHuckHoneyto return o the raftagain, inging"ChinaGate"with Nat KingCole underthe Da Nangmoon, standingwith the IncredibleHulkas the monstrousdouble of mild manneredyet implicitly acistwhitepeople,or reflecting urbaldedheadsin theshiningflash of Mr. T's signifyinggold chains.

IVBefore return oJohn C. Calhounand AlexanderCrummell,hosemetaphors f progress, levation,andintellectualqualitywithwhichIbegan my paper, et us consideranotherexampleof the blackartistatthe peculiarcrossroadswhere the black world of lettersmeets thewhite. If mastering he forms of Westernpoetryto refute the racistlogocentrismepitomized by CalhounmotivatedPhillisWheatley obreak orever he silenceof the blackvoicein the courtof Westernet-ters,and motivatedCrummell o sail to Cambridgeo masterGreeksyntax,how didWoleSoyinka espondto becomingthe firstblackre-

cipientof the Nobel Prize n Literature? he Nobel Prize,thatsacredicon of Western ntellectualand artisticattainment,many of us be-lieved would be withheld from blacks for yet anothercentury,andmanyof us consider o be anothernuclearwarheaddroppeduponthelast bastionof whiteracism-that is, theirtheoriesof our intellectualinferiority. oyinka,born in Abeokuta,Nigeria,whichCrummellhad

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predictedto be one of the placesin WestAfricaatwhich the Englishlan-guagewould reachperfectionas spokenby blackpeople ("ELL,"36), re-sponded not as Crummelldid to the racism thatled him to Cambridgeby extollingthe virtuesof the Englishlanguageover the Africanvernacu-lar languages,which he thought to reflect the animalpropensitiesof aninferior,barelyhuman intellect.Instead,Soyinkarecalledthe irony thatthis single event in the historyof black literatureoccurredwhile NelsonMandellalanguishesin prison and while Westerncapitalismguaranteesthe survival and indeed the growth of the prison-house of apartheid.Dedicatinghis LaureateSpeechto Nelson Mandella,Soyinkaproceededto attack he existenceof Apartheidand the complicityof the West in itscontinuation,as a nervous SwedishAcademyshifted itsweight uneasily.Soyinkawas most concerned to analyze the implications of Africanartistryand intellect being acknowledged before the white world, atlong last, through this curious ritual called the Nobel Prize, endowedby the West's Kingof Dynamite and Weaponry.Soyinkarefused to ad-dress his black audience; rather,he addressed his white auditors and,indeed, the racist intellectual tradition of Europe as exemplified byHegel, Hume, Locke, Voltaire, Frobenius, Kant, and company, who"were unabashed theorists of racialsuperiorityand denigratorsof theAfrican history and being."'5

The blacksof course are locked into an unambiguouscondi-tion: on this occasionI do not need to addressus.Weknow,andwe embraceour mission.It is theotherhatthisprecedent eizestheopportunityoaddress,and notmerely hosewho liveoutside,on the fringesof conscience ...Someatavisticbugis atworkherewhichdefies allscientific x-planation,an arrest n time withinthe evolutionarymandateofnature,whichputs all humanexperienceof learning o seriousquestion!We have to ask ourselves hen,whatevent canspeak osucha breedof people?How do we reactivatehatpetrifiedcellwhichhouseshistoricapprehension nddevelopment?s itpossi-ble perhaps hatevents,gatheringsuchas thismighthelp?Darewe skirt heedgeof hubrisandsayto them:Takeagoodlook.Pro-videyourresponse.In your anxiety o provethat thismoment is15. Wole Soyinka,"Nobel Lecture, 1986: This Past Must Address Its Present," 10December 1986, 10; subsequent citations from this work, abbreviated"NL," will begiven parentheticallyn the text.

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not possible,you havekilled,maimed, silenced, ortured, xiled,debased and dehumanized hundredsof thousandsencased inthisvery kin,crownedwith suchhair,proudlycontentwiththeirvery being.("NL,"8-9)

Soyinka's brilliant rhetorical gesture was to bring together an un-compromising renunciationof apartheidand a considered indictmentof the racisttraditionin Western letters that equates the possession ofreason with the reflection of the voice and face of the master, a tradi-tion that overwhelmed Alexander Crummell, standing as he did at apoint of liminalitybetween Western culture and African culture. Citingthe work of Hume, Hegel, Montesquieu, and a host of others as "Dan-gerous for your racial self-esteem!" ("NL," 19), Soyinkamarshalled amost impressive arrayof citations to chartthe racisttraditionin West-ern letters that would deny to the black world the particularityof itsdiscourse, as typifiedfor Soyinkaby the sentiment of the expressionistJohannes Becher:"Negro tribes, fever, tuberculosis, venereal epidem-ics, intellectual psychic defects-I'll vanquish them" ("NL," 16). Tounderscore the failure of the Western intellectual to escape his or herown myopic racism in even the most sublime encounters with theBlack Other, Soyinka compares Becher's exhortation with the com-mentary of Leo Frobenius upon encountering the most sacred, andmost brilliantlyrendered, bronze of the Yorubapeople:

Andwasitbycoincidence hatcontemporaneouslyiththis stir-ringmanifesto,yet anotherGermanenthusiast,LeoFrobenius-with no claims whatever o being partof, or indeedhavingtheleast nterest n the Expressionistmovement,wasableto visit Ile-Ife,theheartland ndcradleof theYoruba aceandbe profound-ly stirredbyan objectof beauty, he productof theYorubamindandhand,a classicexpressionof thatsereneportionof the worldresolution f thatrace.Inhis ownwords:"Beforeus stood a headof marvellous eauty,wonderfullyast n antiquebronze,true tothelife,incrustedwithapatinaofgloriousdarkgreen.Thiswas, nverydeed, the Olokun,AtanticAfrica'sPoseidon."Yetlisten towhathe had to writeabout theverypeoplewhose handiwork adlifted him into theserealmsof universal ublimity:"Profoundlystirred,I stood for many minutes before the remnantof theerstwhileLordand Rulerof the Empireof Atlantis.My compan-ionswere no less astounded.As thoughwe hadagreed o do so,

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weheldourpeace.ThenI lookedaroundand saw-the blacks-thecircleof the sons of the 'venerable riest,'his Holiness he Oni'sfriends,andhis intelligentofficials. was moved to silentmelan-cholyat the thoughtthat thisassemblyof degenerate ndfeeble-mindedposterity houldbe the legitimateguardians f so muchloveliness."A direct nvitation o a free-for-allace for disposses-sion, ustified n thegroundsofthekeeper's nworthiness,trecallsotherschizophreniconditionswhich are mother o, for instance,thefarmore ethal,darkmythopoeia f[the Nazis]. "NL,"16-17)"He is breakingan open door," one member of the SwedishAcade-my said to me while Soyinkaspoke. "Whywould he choose to indictApartheid at an historic moment such as this?" Soyinkachoose to doso to remind the world that no black person can be trulyfree until weall are freed from even thepossibilityf racialoppression, and that evenNobel Prizes in Literatureare useful only when its firstblackrecipientreminds the world of that fact,and of the historyof the use of race andreason as tropes of oppression in Westernletters. As criticsand artists,

Soyinkaargues,we must utilize the creativeand criticaltools at hand tostomp out racism. This is our first great task.Butwhat else contributes to the relation, then, between (white)pow-er and the (black)critic?Soyinka'sterms, and my tite, might suggestthat ours is the fate of perpetual negation, that we are doomed merelyto "oppose," to serve within the academy as black signs of oppositionto a political order in which we are the subjugated.We must oppose,of course, when opposition is called for. But our task is so very muchmore complex. Again, to define this task, I can do no better than tocite Soyinka:"And when we borrow an alien language to sculpt orpaint in, we must begin by co-opting the entire properties of that lan-guage as correspondences to properties in our matrix of thought andexpression."16Soyinka'sown brilliantachievement in the drama is tohave done just this, to have redefined the veryconcept of "tragedy"byproducing a synthesis of African and European tragic forms. At allpoints, his "English" is Yoruba-informed,Yoruba-based.To assumethatwe can wear the masks, and speak the languages, of Westernliter-arytheorywithout accepting Soyinka'schallenge is to accept, willingly,the intellectual equivalent of neocolonialism, placing ourselves in a

16. Soyinka,cited in "Nigeria:The New Culture,"New York ost,17 February1987.

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Authority,White)Powerandthe (Black)Critic 41

relationship f discursivendenture.It is thechallengeof the black radition o critique hisrelationof in-denture,an indenture hat obtainsfor our writersand for our critics.Wemustmaster,as evenJacquesDerridaunderstands, ow "tospeakthe other'slanguagewithoutrenouncing[our]own."17When we at-tempt,byinversion, o appropriate race"asatermfor an essence-asdid the negritudemovement,for example ("Wefeel, thereforeweare,"as LeopoldSenghorarguedof theAfrican)-we yieldtoo much:in thiscase,reason s the basisof a sharedhumanity.Suchgestures,as

AnthonyAppiahobserves,arefutile anddangerousbecausetheyfur-ther inscribenew and bizarrestereotypes.How do we meet Soyinka's hallenge n the discourseof criticism?The Western ritical radition as a canon,as theWesterniteraryradi-tiondoes.I oncethoughttour most mportantestureo masterhe can-on of criticism,oimitatendapplyt,butI now believe hatwemustturnto the black raditiontselfto developtheoriesof criticismndigenousto our literatures.AliceWalker's evisionof Rebecca CoxJackson'sparableof white nterpretationwrittenn 1836)makes hispointmosttellingly. ackson,a Shaker lderandblackvisionary, laimed ikeJohnJea to have been taught o readby the Lord.She writes n her autobi-ography hatshe dreameda whiteman cameto her house to teachherhow to interpretnd understand he wordof God, now thatGod hadtaughther to read:

A whitemantook me by my righthandand led me on thenorth ideof theroom,where ata squareable.Onitlaya bookopen.Andhesaid o me. "Thou hallbe instructedn thisbook,fromGenesiso Revelations."ndthenhe tookme on the westside,where tooda table.And it looked ikethe first.Andsaid,"Yea,houshallbe instructedrom hebeginningf creationothe endof time."And thenhe tookme on theeastsideof theroomalso,where tooda tableandbook ikethe twofirst,andsaid,"Iwill nstructhee-yea, thoushallbe instructedrom hebeginningfallthingso theendof allthings.Yea, houshallbewell nstructed.will nstruct."And hen awoke, ndIsawhimasplainasI did nmydream.

17.Jacques Derrida, "The LastWord in Racism," in "Race,"Writing, ndDifference,ed. Henry Louis Gates,Jr. (Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1986), 333.

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Andafter hathe taughtme daily.Andwhen I would be readingand come to a hard word, I would see him standingby mysideandhe would teach me the word right.And often,when Iwould be in meditation ndlooking ntothingswhichwas hard ounderstand, wouldfind himby me, teachingandgivingme un-derstanding.Andoh, hislaborandcarewhichhe hadwithme of-ten causedme to weepbitterly,whenI would see mygreat gno-ranceand thegreat roublehe had to makeme understand ternalthings.ForIwas soburied n thedepthof the tradition fmyfore-fathers, hatit did seem as if I never couldbe dug up.18In response to Jackson's relation of interpretiveindenture to "a whiteman," Walker,in TheColorPurple, ecords an exchange between Celieand Shug about turning away from "the old white man" which soonturns into a conversation about the elimination of "man" as a media-tor between a woman and "everything":

Youhaveto gitmanoffyour eyeball,beforeyoucanseeanythinga'tall.Mancorrupteverything, ay Shug.He on yourbox of grits, nyourhead,and all over the radio. He tryto makeyou think heeverywhere. oonasyou thinkhe everywhere, ou thinkhe God.Buthe ain't.Whenever ou trying o pray,andmanplop himselfon the otherend of it, tell him to git lost, sayShug.19

Celie and Shug's omnipresent "man," of course, echoes the black tra-dition's synecdoche for the white power structure,"the man."For non-Western, so-called noncanonical critics, getting the "manoff your eyeball" means using the most sophisticated criticaltheoriesand methods available to reappropriateand redefineour own "coloni-al" discourses. We must use these theories and methods insofaras theyare relevant to the study of our own literatures.The danger in doingso, however, is best put by Anthony Appiah in his definition of whathe calls "the Naipaul fallacy":

18. Rebecca CoxJackson, "A Dream of Three Books and a Holy One," GiftsofPow-er:TheWritingsf Rebeccaackson, lackVisionary,haker ldress,d. Jean McMahonHumex (Amherst, Mass.: The Universityof MassachusettsPress, 1981), 146, 147.19.AliceWalker,TheColor urpleNew York:Harcourt,Brace,Jovanovich, 1982), 179.

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Authority,White) owerandthe (Black)Critic

It is not necessaryo showthatAfricaniteratures fundamentallythe same as European iterature n order to show that it canbetreatedwith the sametools;... norshouldwe endorsea moresinisterine....: thepost-colonialegacywhichrequires s toshowthatAfricaniteraturesworthy f studypreciselybutonly)becauseit is fundamentallyhe same as Europeaniterature.20We mustnot, Appiah concludes, ask "the reader to understandAfricaby embedding it in European culture" ("S," 146).We must, I believe, analyze the waysin which writingrelatesto race,how attitudestoward racialdifferences generate and structureliterarytexts by us andabout us. We must determine how criticalmethods caneffectivelydisclose the tracesof ethnic differences in literature.But wemust also understandhow certainforms of difference and the languageswe employ to define those supposed differences not only reinforceeach other but tend to create and maintain each other. Similarly,andas important,we must analyze the language of contemporarycriticismitself, recognizing especially that hermeneutic systems are not univer-sal, color-blind, apolitical, or neutral. Whereas some critics wonderaloud, as Appiah notes, about such matters as whether or not "astructuralistpoetics is inapplicable in Africa because structuralism isEuropean" ("S," 145), the concern of the Third World critic shouldproperlybe to understand the ideological subtext that any criticalthe-ory reflects and embodies and the relation this subtext bears to theproduction of meaning. No criticaltheory-be it Marxism, feminism,poststructuralism,KwameNkrumah's "consciencism," or whatever-escapes the specificityof value and ideology, no matter how mediatedit may be. To attempt to appropriate our own discourses by usingWestern critical theory uncriticallyis to substitute one mode of neo-colonialism for another.To begin to do this in my own tradition,theo-ristshave turned to the blackvernaculartradition--to paraphraseJack-son, they have begun to dig into the depths of the tradition of ourforeparents-to isolate the signifying black difference through whichto theorize about the so-called discourse of the Other.Even Crummell recognized that Western economic and political

20. Anthony Appiah, "Strictureson Structures:The Prospectsfor a StructuralistPo-etics of AfricanFiction,"in BlackLiteraturendLiterary heory,46, 145;subsequent cita-tions from this work, abbreviated"S," will be given parentheticallyin the text.

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subjugationhas inflictedupon us a desire to imitate,to please, torefashionour publicdiscursivemagesof our blackselves after hatofthe colonizer: "He will part," Crummell with great satisfactionconcludesof the colonizedAfrican,"atanymoment,withthe crudeuncouth utterancesof his nativetongue, for that other higherlan-guage, which brings with its utterance,wealth and gratification"("ELL," 4-35).This, it seems to me, is the trap,the tragic ure, towhichthose who believethat critical heory s a color-blind,universaldiscourseor a culturallyneutral ool likea hammeror a screwdriverhave unwittingly uccumbed.And by succumbingto this mistake,these criticsfail to acceptthe wonderfulopportunityoffered to ourgenerationof criticsas heirs to the BlackArtsmovement,the greatachievement f which,as GregTatecorrectly oncludes,wasto definea "blackculturaldifference" nd "producea post-liberated lackaes-thetic [which is] responsiblefor the degree to which contemporaryblackartists ndintellectualseelthemselvesheirs o a cultureeverybitas def [sic] s classicalWesterncivilization.Thisculturalconfidence,"he concludes,"hasfreedup more blackartists o do workas wonder-fully absurdist as black life itself."21As Tate concludes, where is theblackcritical heoryas greatas thisgreatestblackart?Our criticism sdestinedmerelyto be derivative,o be a pale shadow,of the whitemaster's riticaldiscourse,untilwe become confidentenoughto speakin our own blacklanguagesas we theorize about the blackcriticalendeavor.We must redefine"theory" tself from withinour own blackcul-tures,refusing o grant heracistpremise hattheory s something hatwhite people do, so that we are doomed to imitiateour white col-leagues,likereverseblackministrelcriticsdone up in whiteface.Weare all heirsto critical heory,butwe blackcriticsare heir to the blackvernacular riticalraditionas well.Ourtasknowis to inventandem-ploy our own critical heory, o assume our own propositions,and tostand within the academyas politicallyresponsibleand responsivepartsof a socialandculturalAfrican-Americanhole.Again,Soyinka'swords about our relation o the blacktraditionarerelevanthere:

Thatworldwhich is so conveniently raducedby Apartheid21. GregTate, "Cult-NatsMeet Freaky-Deke,"Voice iteraryupplement, December1986, 5.

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Authority, White)Powerand the (Black)Critic

thought sof course hatwhichI sowholeheartedlymbrace-andthis is my choice-among severaloptions-of the significanceofmypresencehere. It is a worldthat nourishesmy being, onewhich s so self-sufficient,o replete n allaspectsof itsproductivi-ty, so confident n itself and in its destinythatit experiencesnofearin reachingout to othersand in responding o the reachofothers.Itis thehearthstonef our creative xistence. tconstitutesthe prismof ourworldperceptionandthis meansthatour sightneednotbe andhas neverbeenpermanentlyurned nwards. f itwere,we could not so easilyunderstandhe enemyon our door-step,nor understand ow to obtain hemeansto disarm t.Whenthissocietywhich sApartheid outhAfricandulges romtimetotime in appeals o theoutsideworldthat t representshe lastbas-tionof civilization gainsthe hordesof barbarismrom tsNorth,we can even affordan indulgentsmile. It is sufficient,maginesthis state,to raise the spectreof a few renegadeAfricaneaders,psychopathsnd robberbaronswhoweourselves revictimsof-whom we denouncebefore he worldand overthrowwhen we areable-this Apartheid ociety nsists o the worldthat tspictureofthe future s the realitywhichonlyitspoliciescan erase.Thisis acontinentwhichonly destroys,tproclaims,t ispeopledbya racewhichhas nevercontributed nythingpositive o the world'spoolof knowledge.Avacuum, hatwill suck ntoitsinsatiablemawtheentirefruitsof centuriesof European ivilization,hen spewoutthe resultingmush with contempt.How strangethat a societywhichclaims o representhisendangeredaceof progress houlditselfbe lockedin centuries-oldantasies,blithelyunawareof, orindifferento the fact thatit is the last,institutionallyunctioningproductof archaic rticles f faith n Euro-Judaichought. "NL,"11-12]

As deconstruction and other poststructuralismsor even an a-racialMarxism,and other "articles of faith in Euro-Judaicthought" exhaustthemselves in a self-willed racial never-never land in which we see notrue reflections of our black faces and hear no echoes of our blackvoices, let us-at long last-master the critical traditions and lan-guages of Africaand Afro-America. Even as we continue to reach outto others in the critical canon, let us be confident in our own blacktraditionand in their compelling strengthto sustain systems of criticalthoughtas yet dormant and unexplicated.We must, in the truestsense,turn inward even as we turn outward to redefine every institution in

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this profession-the English Institute, the MLA, the School of Criti-cism, what haveyou-in our own images.We must not succumb, as didAlexander Crummell, to the tragiclure of white power, the mistake ofacceptingthe empowering language of white criticaltheory as "univer-sal" or as our own language, the mistake of confusing the enablingmask of theorywith our own black faces. Eachof us has, in some literalor figurative manner, boarded a ship and sailed to a metaphoricalCambridge, seeking to master the master's tools, and to outwit thisracist master by compensating for a presupposed lack. In nly own in-stance, being quite literal-minded, I booked passage some fourteenyears ago on the QE II!And much of my earlyworkreflectsthis desireto outwit the master by tryingto speak his language as fluently as he.Now, we must, at last, don the empowering mask of blackness and talkthattalk,the language of blackdifference.While it is true thatwe must,as Du Bois said so long ago, "know and test the power of the cabalisticlettersof the white man," we must also know and test the darksecretsof a black and hermetic discursive universe that awaits its disclosurethrough the blackartsof interpretation.Forthe future of theory, in theremainder of this century, is black, indeed.

Rethinking" MARXISM

A Journalf PoliticalEconomyandSocialAnalysisRethinking MARXISM is a quarterly journal of Marxian thought thatwill begin publication in January 1988.First year's issues to includeJack Amariglio, "Foucault: Marxism and Post-Marxism" ISamir Amin,"Accumulation on a World Scale: 30 Years Later"lCornel West, "RethinkingMarxism: A Third World Perspective"/Stephen Resnick & Richard Wolff,"What is Communism?"/Rosalyn Baxandall, "Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: ASexual/Political Life" ... and many other articles.Subscriptionates: ndividuals$24/lyear,$4512years; Students 18/1year;Institutions$40/1 year, $75/2 years (pleaseadd $4 for all foreignsubscriptions).Make checkormoneyorderpayable o RethinkingMARXISM.Please addressall inquiriesand ordersto RethinkingMARXISM, P.O. Box 715,MA 01004-0715.

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