African American/ Ethnic Studies Terms Flashcards
a “race” for theory
“For people of color have always theorized - but in forms quite different from the Western form of abstract logic. And I am inclined to say that our theorizing… is often in narrative form, in the stories we create, in riddles
and proverbs, in the play with language, since dynamic rather than fixed ideas seem more to our liking. …And women, at least the women I grew up around, continuously speculated about the nature of life through pithy language that unmasked the power relations of their world. It is this language, and the grace and pleasure with which they played with it, that I find celebrated, refined, critiqued in the works of writers like Morrison and Walker. My folk, in other words, have always been a race for theory - though more in the form of the hieroglyph, a written figure which is both sensual and abstract, both beautiful and communicative.” Christian
authoritative discourse
“I could go on critiquing the positions of French feminists who are themselves more various in their points of view than the label which is used to describe them, but that is not my point. What I am concerned about is the authority this school now has in feminist scholarship- the way it has become authoritative discourse, monologic, which occurs precisely because it does have access to the means of promulgating its ideas. … Hence one of the reasons for the surge of Afro-American women’s writing during the 1970s and its emphasis on sexism in the black community is precisely that when the ideologues of the 1960s said black, they meant black male.” Christian
canon
“The hegemony implicit in the phrase, “the Western tradition,” primarily reflects material relationships, and not so-called universal, transcendent, normative judgments. Judgment is specific, both culturally and temporally. The sometimes vulgar nationalism implicit in would-be literary categories such as “American Literature,” or the not-so-latent imperialism implied by the vulgar phrase “Commonwealth Literature,” are extra-literary designations of control, symbolic of material and concomitant political relations, rather than literary ones. We, the scholars of our profession, must eschew these categories of domination and ideology and insist upon the fundamental redefinition of what it is to speak of “the canon.”’ Gates
self-generated theory
Whether we realize it or not, each of us brings to a text an implicit theory of literature, or even an unwitting hybrid of theories-a critical gumbo, as it were. To become aware of contemporary theory is to become aware of one’s own presuppositions, those ideological and aesthetic assumptions that we bring to a text unwittingly. It is incumbent upon us, those of us who respect the sheer integrity of the black tradition, to turn to this very tradition to create self-generated theories about the black literary endeavor. We must, above all, respect the integrity of the separate traditions embodied in the black work of art, by bringing to bear upon the explication of its meanings all the attention to language that we may glean from developments in contemporary theory. By the very process of “application,” as it were, we recreate, through revision, the critical theory at hand. As our familiarity with the black tradition and with literary theory expands, we shall invent our own theories, as some of us have begun to do-black, text-specific theories. We must learn to read a black text within a black-formal cultural matrix” Gates
vernacular criticism
“But what of the ideology of the black critical text?And what of our own critical discourse? In whose voices do we speak?Have we merely renamed terms received from the White Other? Just as we must urge that our writers meet of this challenge, we as critics must turn to our own peculiarly black structures of thought and feeling to develop our own language of criticism. We must do so by turning to the black vernacular, the language we use to speak to each other when no white people are around. My central argument is this: black people theorize about their art and their lives in the black vernacular.” Gates
essentialism
“We should indeed suspicious of postmodern critiques of the “subject” when they surface at a historical moment when many subjugated people feel themselves coming to voice for the first time.
[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.” hooks
radical postmodernism
“Part of our struggle for radical black subjectivity is the quest to find ways to construct self and identity that are oppositional and liberatory. The unwillingness to critique essentialism on the part of many African-Americans is rooted in the fear that it will cause folks to lose sight of the specific history and experience of African- Americans and the unique sensibilities and culture that arise from that experience. An adequate response to this concern is to critique essentialism while emphasizing the significance of “the authority of experience.” There is a radical difference between a repudiation of the idea that there is a black “essence” and recognition of the way black identity has been specifically constituted in the experience of exile and struggle.” hooks
empathy
“…Now because of the deindustrialization, we also have a devastated black industrial working class. We are talking here about tremendous hopelessness. This hopelessness creates longing for insight and strategies for change that can renew spirits and reconstruct grounds for collective black liberation struggle. The overall impact of the postmodern condition is that many other groups now share with black folks a sense of deep alienation, despair, uncertainty, loss of a sense of grounding, even if it is not informed by shared circumstance. Radical postmodernism calls attention to those sensibilities which are shared across the boundaries of class, gender, and race, and which could be fertile ground for the construction of empathy–ties that would promote recognition of common commitments and serve as a base for solidarity and coalition.” hooks
artistic othering
Artistic othering is an action of othering in artistic media, creating a new form of art as well as seeking for a way out of, and for reacting against, social othering that others people situated in the margin, that is, African Americans in Mackey. In other words, artistic othering is an artistic action resisting against being contained and being nouned by the social norms. Artistic othering is very much in line with what reggae musicians call “versioning” by accenting variance and variability so as to keep black mobility and escape the confinement.
Mackey
fugitive spirit
Fugitive spirit is a sort of defining feature of black artistic works. Fugitive here is both literal and figurative. Fugitive spirit has had its impact on African-American literary practices as fact, as metaphor, and as formal disposition. Fugitive spirit not only shows the black art’s alliance with the slave fugitive narrative/writing, but also shows black artists’ tendency to go beyond the white conception of art, thus not being caught. For example, Western musical notation is unable to capture the tonal and rhythmic mobility and variability of black music, because the black art, because of its openness, experimentation, and formal innovation, escapes and transcends the Western categorization like a fugitive escaping its master.
Mackey
