African American/ Ethnic Studies Passages

Question 1

Variety

Answer 1

Barbara Christian p. 59

It is this tendency towards the monolithic, monotheistic, etc., which worries me about the racy for theory. Constructs like the center and the periphery reveal that tendency to want to make the world less complex …
Variety, multiplicity, eroticism are difficult to control. And it may well be that these are the reasons why writers are often seen as persona non grata by political states, whatever form they take, since writers/artists have a tendency to refuse to give up their way of seeing the world and of playing with possibilities … This is why creative literature, even when written by politically reactionary people, can be so freeing, for in having to embody ideas and recreate the world, writers cannot merely produce “one way.”

Question 2

Desire for Power

Answer 2

Barbara Christian p. 61

For one must distinguish the desire for power from the need to become empowered – that is, seeing oneself as capable of and having the right to determine one’s life. Such empowerment is partially derived from a knowledge of history. The Black Arts Movement did result in the creation of Afro-American Studies as a concept, thus giving it a place in the university where one might engage in the reclamation of Afro-American history and culture and pass it on to others.

Question 3

Redefine Theory

Answer 3

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. p. 44

We must redefine “theory” itself from within our own black cultures, refusing to grant the racist premise that theory is something that white people do, so that we are doomed to imitate our white colleagues, like reverse black ministrel critics done up in whiteface. We are all heirs to critical theory, but we black critics are heir to the black vernacular critical tradition as well. Our task now is to invent and employ our own critical theory, to assume our own propositions, and to stand within the academy as politically responsible and responsive parts of a social and cultural African-American whole.

Question 4

New Possibility

Answer 4

Bell Hooks

Criticisms of directions in postmodern thinking should not obscure insights it may offer that open up our understanding of African- American experience. The critique of essentialism encouraged by postmodernist thought is useful for African-Americans concerned with reformulating outmoded notions of identity. We have too long had imposed upon us, both from the outside and the inside, a narrow constricting notion of blackness. Postmodern critiques of essentialism which challenge notions of universality and static over-determined identity within mass culture and mass consciousness can open up new possibilities for the construction of the self and the assertion of agency.

Question 5

Liberatory Identity

Answer 5

Bell Hooks

This critique [a critique of essentialism] should not be made synonymous with the dismissal of the struggle of oppressed and exploited peoples to make ourselves subjects. Nor should it deny that in certain circumstances that experience affords us a privileged critical location from which to speak. This is not a reinscription of modernist master narratives of authority which privilege some voices by denying voice to others. Part of our struggle for radical black subjectivity is the quest to find ways to construct self and identity that are oppositional and liberatory.

Question 6

Black Innovation

Answer 6

Nathaniel Mackey

We need more than content analyses based on assumptions of representationality. The dislocating tilt of artistic othering, especially as practiced by African-American artists, deserves a great deal more attention than it’s been given. While the regressive racial views of white writers like Stein and Ezra Pound tend to be regarded … as secondary to their artistic innovations, black writers tend to be read racially, primarily at the content level, the noun level, as responding to racism, representing “the black experience.” That black writers have been experimentally and innovatively engaged with the medium, addressing issues of form as well issues of content, tend to be ignored. The ability to impact upon and to influence the course of the medium, to move the medium, entails an order of animacy granted only to whites when it comes to writing. … The nonrecognition of black artistic othering is symptomatic of the social othering to which black people are subjected, particularly in light of the celebration accorded artistic othering practiced by whites.