Tradition and the Black Atlantic

by Henry Louis Gates

  Reforming Representation

  I promised earlier that we’d be returning to Burke’s speech on a “Motion to Reform Representation,” and I’m a man of my word. In 1988, Julien and Mercer recast the debate about black representation by focusing on the tension “ between representation as a practice of depicting and representation as a practice of delegation. Representational democracy, like the classic realist text, is premised on an implicitly mimetic theory of representation as correspondence with the ‘real.’”33

  Now, I just said that there was a connection between a post-essentialist identity politics (culled from Gramsci, culled from creative exegetes such as Laclau) and the politics of representation. Laclau makes the connection explicit: You can’t stop with the dispersion of the integral subject, because that entails the contingency of all social relations, so that the very notion of a “social formation” goes overboard, and the notion of the political representation of interests as transparency can no longer be taken for granted. In Chapter 1, I read Burke as anticipating the “contingency of the self,” the contingency of all social relations, now lodged at the heart of all our post-modern theories, and his take on the nature of political representation followed that logic.

  Laclau and Mouffe observe, “Now, every relation of representation is founded on a fiction: that of the presence at a certain level of something which, strictly speaking, is absent from it.”34 Their political analysis seeks to supplant what they describe as “the fictio iuris of representation” and what Burke dismissed as a “legal fiction.” Amid eighteenth-century debates over the nature of representational democracy, Burke asserted that true political representation is impossible the minute it involves delegation, the moment we have the separation of the represented from the representative: the moment, that is, it becomes a relation of representation. With Burke’s anti-foundationalist skepticism of what he called “the fairy wand of philosophy,” he spoke instead of “prescription,” where Laclau would employ a vocabulary of “hegemonic articulation.” (“The House of Commons is a legislative body corporate by prescription, not made upon any given theory, but existing prescriptively.”)35 And we might wonder if the intersection here of Burke and our latter-day post-Marxists can’t be construed as a shared conversation on the ramifications of contingency.

  So, should we supplant the vangardist paradigm of representation with the “articulation of interests,” as some have argued? It’s a counter-model meant to deny any natural relation of synecdoche. Yet this model allows us to articulate these relations, to clean a space for the model of populist modernism as a self-conscious practice of articulation. Gilroy and Mercer famously debated the issue of populist modernism, but it’s worth pointing out that there was no point of factual or theoretical disagreement in their respective positions.36

  Gilroy proposes populist modernism as a possible modality of the articulation of interests and cites Richard Wright’s The Outsider as the novel in which this doctrine is “most cogently expressed.” It’s interesting that nowhere is Wright being read more attentively today than in Britain or more creatively than by Gilroy in his highly influential book The Black Atlantic .37 Gilroy finds Wright valuable as a model for ethnicist affirmation tempered with a materialist apprehension. He’s seen, in words I quoted in my previous chapter, as one of the few black writers who saw “black nationalism as a beginning rather than an end.” Part of what’s fascinating about Gilroy’s appropriation of Wright is that it becomes a theory about the disempowering effects of theory. This Richard Wright, as reconstituted for Cultural Studies, asks us to accept the “nationalist implications of our lives” and calls for “a nationalism that knows its origins, its limitations; and is aware of the dangers in its positions.”38

  I submit that a nationalism shorn of idealist illusions, a nationalism that knows its origins and limitations, is no nationalism at all. It is Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. As Kwame Anthony Appiah has observed about the construction of collective identities in general, “The demands of agency may entail a misrecognition of its genesis.”39 A sense of this is poignantly dramatized in Frantz Fanon’s dialogue with Jean-Paul Sartre. Reading Sartre’s account of Négritude (as an antithesis preparatory to a “society without races,” hence “a transition and not a conclusion”), Fanon reported in his justly celebrated essay “The Fact of Blackness,” “I felt I had been robbed of my last chance. . . . A consciousness committed to experience is ignorant, has to be ignorant, of the essences and the determinations of its being. . . . Sartre, in this work, has destroyed black zeal. . . . I needed to lose myself completely in negritude. . . . In any case, I needed not to know. ”40

  Has there ever been so eloquent a rage against the Medusan face of theory? Bhabha, at once joining forces with and recoiling from post-structuralism, asks, “How [are] we . . . to re-think ‘ourselves’ once we have undermined the immediacy and autonomy of self-consciousness”41 (which is to say, once we have placed ‘ourselves’ between scare quotes)? This, he says, must be left as an open question.42 Unfortunately, a politics founded upon open questions must founder upon these questions; such a politics turns out, once again, to be no politics at all.

  What’s apparent is that the shared subject of Gilroy and Mercer’s exchange is, in fact, less black British cultural production than the role of the black British cultural critic. The conflict is not between two intellectuals; it is symptomatic of the impossible equilibrium that subtends all diasporic criticism. Yes, we can refuse populist modernism as a universal ethics, as a modality of privilege; no, we cannot dismiss it as inherently pernicious. If there’s a Richard Wright in every minority critic, we have no better hope of making peace with him than he had of making peace with himself.

  The Marionette Theater of the Political

  The dilemmas of oppositional criticism haunt the fractured American critical community as well. The 1980s and 1990s witnessed not only a resurgence of what I’ll call the “new moralism,” but also the beginnings of its subsidence. And this development, too, was very much bound up with the problematic of representation, such that the relation between the politics of theory and the politics of politics became a question to be indefinitely deferred or finessed.

  The hermeneutics of the 1970s killed the author; the politics of the 1980s brought the author back. As John Guillory pointed out quite perceptively in an essay on “the pedagogic imaginary,” the debate over the canon entailed the resurrection of the author, this time as the representative of a social constituency.43 The debate over canon formation was concerned, in the first instance, with authors, not with texts.

  And as diasporic critics, we came to play a similar role, in a marionette theater of the political. The result was a certain amount of attendant acrimony. Edward Said early on noted this unsavory tendency, which he described as the “badgering, hectoring, authoritative tone” that persisted in contemporary Cultural Studies, adding, “The great horror I think we should all feel is toward systematic or dogmatic orthodoxies of one sort of another that are paraded as the last word of high Theory still hot from the press.”44 Is it merely the uncanny workings of William Wimsatt’s imitative fallacy that accounts for the authoritarian modalities of scholarship, and scholarly intercourse, where issues of domination are foregrounded?

  Again, I want to stress the way in which minority criticism can become a site for larger contestations. Robert Young, as an editor of the Oxford Literary Review , ventured an intriguing proposition in an essay entitled “The Politics of ‘The Politics of Literary Theory.’” He notes that literary Marxism in contemporary America (as opposed to in Britain) has “few links with the social sciences or with a political base in the public sphere. You can make almost any political claims you like: you know that there is no danger that it will ever have any political effect.” “At the same time,” he continues, “the pressure of feminism, and more recently Black Studies, has meant that today the political cannot be ignored by anyone, and may be responsible for the white male re
treat into Marxism. Marxism can compete with feminism and Black Studies insofar as it offers to return literary criticism to its traditional moral function, but can, more covertly, also act as a defence against them.”45 I just throw this out, but what this relation among Marxism and feminism and Black Studies points to is a struggle for the moral high ground.

  And I think you could argue that this return to a gestural sort of politics, which still obtains in the bloody terrain of Cultural Studies, reflects a moralizing strain in contemporary criticism that has lost faith in its epistemological claims. If we can’t tell you what’s true and what’s false, we’ll at least tell you what’s right and what’s wrong. What’s wrong? Racism, colonialism, class oppression, cultural imperialism, patriarchy, epistemic violence—the usual suspects. Anyway, we lost fact, and we got back ethics. A trade-in, but not necessarily an upgrade.

  The New Moralism

  I can give you a characteristic example of a now-familiar version of the politics of interpretation. I once read an unpublished paper by an extremely distinguished scholar that actually attacked Spike Lee for being responsible, though perhaps indirectly, for the death of black youths, echoing the well-known exchange between Phil Mushnick and Lee in Sports Illustrated , which actually resulted in a cover story entitled “Your Sneakers or Your Life.” I’ll explain the logic of the argument. Here’s Spike, who sells Nikes—he directs and stars in commercials that promote Air Jordans, right?—and then here’s the devastated, crack-ridden inner city, and then here’s a dead black youth, bullet through the brain or maybe stabbed in the stomach, murdered for those Air Jordans. And all because Spike said that he’s gotta have it. You think Mars Blackmon is funny? Those commercials have a body count.

  I’m not exaggerating. This was a state-of-the-art critical essay,46 which represents the impasse we’ve reached in the American academy. This is how we’ve been taught to do cultural politics. You find the body. Then you find the culprit. It’s also where the critique of the commodity will lead you. It’s an old phenomenon on the left (and certain kinds of Marxism can be very theological on this point): Commodification is like original sin, and any cultural form it touches is tainted. And yet these critiques are usually anchored to semi-organic notions of authenticity. (Hazel Carby has criticized my valorization of urban vernacular forms, and beyond that the very concept of the vernacular, for being too easily appropriable, let’s say, to this kind of perspective—and I think she has a point.)

  The old leftist critiques of the commodity have a usefully confining tendency: The critiques set up a cunning trap that practically guarantees that the marginalized cultures being glorified will remain marginalized. The authors of these critiques knew just how to keep us in our place. And the logic was breathtakingly simple: If you win, you lose.

  And that’s because it’s just a fact about the current conjuncture that if a cultural form reaches a substantial audience, it has entered the circuits of commodification. Gilroy explored this phenomenon with great subtlety in his Du Bois Lectures at Harvard in 2006, entitled “On the Moral Economy of Blackness.”47 Populist modernism stays in good ideological odor so long as it doesn’t get too popular. And one of the most important contributions of the younger black British theorists has been a critique of the old critique of the commodity form. Mercer explores ways in which commodity forms have been expressively manipulated by the marginalized to explore and explode the artificiality of the identities to which they ’ve been confined. (What’s wrong with a conk? Mercer asks. Does it have to signify “racial” shame? Given the historic association of people of color with “nature,” isn’t it ironic to be insisting on the “naturalness” of their culture—not to mention hair?)

  If Isaac Julien signs up for a distribution deal for one of his films, such as Young Soul Rebels, should we start hating him? Among proponents of the black British renascence, there’s been a tendency to use a presumed polarity between Spike and Isaac to police the borders of black cultural production. Spike, corporate populism, Universal Studios: bad. Isaac, collectivist, independent cinema: good. You hear that in the American cineaste circuit. In Britain, you could get a different opposition set up. Isaac, high-falutin’ Europeanized aesthetic, mostly white audience, darling of the highbrows: bad. Ceddo, nationalistic, naturalistic, dreadlocks, mostly black audience: good. Well, as Mr. Dooley says, you pays yer money and takes your pick.

  I want to propose that it’s worth distinguishing between morality and moralism. I want to propose that criticism doesn’t always fulfill an ethico-political desideratum. But I do so with trepidation. As Logan Pearsall Smith has observed, “That we should practice what we preach is generally admitted; but anyone who preaches what he and his hearers practice must incur the gravest moral disapprobation.”

  A friend of mine suggested that we make official, that is, institutionalize, what we already do implicitly at conferences on “minority discourse”: award a prize at the end for the panelist, respondent, or contestant most oppressed. Then at the end of the year, we could have the “Oppression Emmy Awards.”48 What became clear, by the end of 1990s, was that this establishment of what J. G. Melquior calls an “official marginality” meant that minority critics were accepted by the academy, but in return, they must accept a role already scripted for them. The rejected return triumphant. You think of Sally Field’s address to the Motion Picture Academy when she received her Oscar. “You like me! You really, really like me!” we authorized others shriek into the microphone, exultation momentarily breaking our dour countenances. (We can, of course, be a little more self-conscious about it and acknowledge our problematic positionality: “You like me! You really, really like me—you racist, patriarchal, Eurotrash elitists!”)

  What moralism had to confront was the nature of commodified post-modern ethnicity—which we could describe as the Benetton’s model. “All the colors of the world,” none of the oppression. It was a seductive vision: cashmere instead of power relations.

  And it was a change. Usually, the third world presented itself to us as the page people turn when the ad says you can help little Maria or you can turn the page. It was a tropological locale of suffering and destitution. Now little Maria’s wearing a purple cashmere scarf and a black V-neck sweater, and the message is: You can have style like Maria here and shop at Benetton—or don’t you give a damn about ethnic harmony?

  The Benettonization of the first world was not without its ironies. In New York, as Patricia Williams has pointed out, they may not buzz you in if you actually look like one of those “ethnic” models.49 Or, again, think of the controversy over the Benetton’s ad that showed a black hand and a white hand cuffed together. Many people found it disturbing, because they assumed that the black was the prisoner. The image itself was perfectly symmetrical, which demonstrates how real-world power relations determine the way images are actually read.

  Is academic politics finally a highbrow version of what Women’s Wear Daily would call the “style wars”? I think that too easily lets us off the hook of history; it’s the sort of newly fashionable cynicism that’s based on an overly reductionist conception of the political. So even though I want to agree with Gayatri Spivak and others that criticism need not be, in the first instance, an “ethico-political” project—and that many of our critical debates have referents more immediate and mundane than their ostensible concerns—I also find something attractive in the Trotskyite vision of an historic bloc that wills itself out of existence when its purpose has been filled. Can global, imperializing theory will itself out of existence once its time has passed? Can we wave what Burke called the “fairy wand of philosophy,” and say, “Vanish”?

  In my next chapter, I want to trespass through what may be the last refuge of theory’s imperial hope—the discursive locale of the third world itself. In that chapter, I’ll be tracing, not the burden of Burke, but the phantom of Fanon.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Critical Fanonism

  This book, it is hoped, will be a mi
rror.

  FRANTZ FANON, BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS

  One of the signal developments in contemporary criticism has been the ascendancy of the colonial paradigm. And to a marked degree, what has accompanied this turn is the reinstatement of Frantz Fanon as a global theorist. In 1996, Isaac Julien produced a remarkable film, Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Masks, featuring, incredibly, both Stuart Hall and Homi Bhabha, which implicitly assessed the role of Fanon’s theories of culture, race, and nation in the history of Britain’s vibrant Black Arts Movement and effectively canonized him as the patron saint of black British cultural studies. Robert Young canonized Fanon in the history of post-structuralism through a marvelously accessible overview of his work in the introduction to Postcolonialism, published in 2001, a year after David Macey had published his magisterial life of Fanon and two years after Nigel Gibson had collected a plethora of interpretations of Fanon’s life and works from a multiplicity of critical and ideological approaches. Bhabha and Kwame Anthony Appiah have both published editions of Black Skin, White Masks, and Bhabha’s “Foreword” to his edition of Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth masterfully points to Fanon as the proto-theorist of “the fin de siècle and the end of the cold war” through “a genealogy for globalization.” Bhabha, writing in a 2004 world riven by tribalism, ethnic cleansing, fundamentalism, al-Qaeda, and Iraq, says that Fanon—who died of leukemia in 1961, just a year after Richard Wright had died, five years after both had met at the Amphithéâtre Descartes at the First International Conference of Negro Writers and Artists—is even useful for explaining this post–Berlin Wall, post–cold war world of ours: “I have tried, in this essay, to trace the prophecies of Fanon’s living hand as it rises again to beckon enigmatically toward our own times.” There is a Fanon for all seasons.1