From coatesrd@casmail.muohio.edu
Date: Wed, 01 May 96 16:12:39 +0
From: Rodney Coates <coatesrd@casmail.muohio.edu>
To: PROGRESSIVE SOCIOLOGISTS NETWORK <psn@csf.colorado.edu>
Subject: POSTMODERN BLACKNESS
POSTMODERN BLACKNESS
by
BELL HOOKS
Oberlin College
Copyright (c) 1990 by bell hooks, all rights reserved
_Postmodern Culture_ vol. 1, no. 1 (Sep. 1990).
[1] Postmodernist discourses are often exclusionary
even when, having been accused of lacking concrete
relevance, they call attention to and appropriate the
experience of "difference" and "otherness" in order to
provide themselves with oppositional political meaning,
legitimacy, and immediacy. Very few African-American
intellectuals have talked or written about
postmodernism. Recently at a dinner party, I talked
about trying to grapple with the significance of
postmodernism for contemporary black experience. It
was one of those social gatherings where only one other
black person was present. The setting quickly became a
field of contestation. I was told by the other black
person that I was wasting my time, that "this stuff
does not relate in any way to what's happening with
black people." Speaking in the presence of a group of
white onlookers, staring at us as though this
encounter was staged for their benefit, we engaged in a
passionate discussion about black experience.
Apparently, no one sympathized with my insistence that
racism is perpetuated when blackness is associated
solely with concrete gut level experience conceived
either as opposing or having no connection to abstract
thinking and the production of critical theory. The
idea that there is no meaningful connection between
black experience and critical thinking about aesthetics
or culture must be continually interrogated.
[2] My defense of postmodernism and its relevance to
black folks sounded good but I worried that I lacked
conviction, largely because I approach the subject
cautiously and with suspicion. Disturbed not so much
by the "sense" of postmodernism but by the conventional
language used when it is written or talked about and by
those who speak it, I find myself on the outside of the
discourse looking in. As a discursive practice it is
dominated primarily by the voices of white male
intellectuals and/or academic elites who speak to and
about one another with coded familiarity. Reading and
studying their writing to understand postmodernism in
its multiple manifestations, I appreciate it but feel
little inclination to ally myself with the academic
hierarchy and exclusivity pervasive in the movement
today.
[3] Critical of most writing on postmodernism, I
perhaps am more conscious of the way in which the focus
on "otherness and difference" that is often alluded to
in these works seems to have little concrete impact as
an analysis or standpoint that might change the nature
and direction of postmodernist theory. Since much of
this theory has been constructed in reaction to and
against high modernism, there is seldom any mention of
black experience or writings by black people in this
work, specifically black women (though in more recent
work one may see reference to Cornel West, the black
male scholar who has most engaged postmodernist
discourse). Even if an aspect of black culture is the
subject of postmodern critical writing the works cited
will usually be those of black men. A work that comes
immediately to mind is Andrew Ross' chapter "Hip, and
the Long Front of Color" in _No Respect: Intellectuals
and Popular Culture_; though an interesting reading, it
constructs black culture as though black women have had
no role in black cultural production. At the end of
Meaghan Morris' discussion of postmodernism included in
her collection of essays _The Pirate's Fiance: Feminism
and Postmodernism_, she provides a bibliography of
works by women, identifying them as important
contributions to a discourse on postmodernism that
offers new insight as well as challenging male
theoretical hegemony. Even though many of the works do
not directly address postmodernism, they address
similar concerns. There are no references to work by
black women.
[4] The failure to recognize a critical black presence
in the culture and in most scholarship and writing on
postmodernism compels a black reader, particularly a
black female reader, to interrogate her interest in a
subject where those who discuss and write about it seem
not to know black women exist or to even consider the
possibility that we might be somewhere writing or
saying something that should be listened to, or
producing art that should be seen, heard, approached
with intellectual seriousness. This is especially the
case with works that go on and on about the way in
which postmodernist discourse has opened up a
theoretical terrain where "difference and otherness"
can be considered legitimate issues in the academy.
Confronting both the lack of recognition of black
female presence that much postmodernist theory
reinscribes and the resistance on the part of most
black folks to hearing about real connections between
postmodernism and black experience, I enter a
discourse, a practice, where there may be no ready
audience for my words, no clear listener, uncertain,
then, that my voice can or will be heard.
[5] During the Sixties, black power movements were
influenced by perspectives that could be easily labeled
modernist. Certainly many of the ways black folks
addressed issues of identity conformed to a modernist
universalizing agenda. There was little critique among
black militants of patriarchy as a master narrative.
Despite the fact that black power ideology reflected a
modernist sensibility, these elements were soon
rendered irrelevant as militant protest was stifled by
a powerful repressive *postmodern* state. The period
directly after the black power movement was a time when
major news magazines carried articles with cocky
headlines like "what ever happened to Black America?"
This was an ironic reply to the aggressive unmet demand
by decentered, marginalized black subjects who had at
least for the moment successfully demanded a hearing,
who had made it possible for black liberation to be a
national political agenda. In the wake of the black
power movement, after so many rebels were slaughtered
and lost, many of these voices were silenced by a
repressive state and others became inarticulate; it has
become necessary to find new avenues for transmitting
the messages of black liberation struggle, new ways to
talk about racism and other politics of domination.
Radical postmodernist practice, most powerfully
conceptualized as a "politics of difference," should
incorporate the voices of displaced, marginalized,
exploited, and oppressed black people.
[6] It is sadly ironic that the contemporary discourse
which talks the most about heterogeneity, the
decentered subject, declaring breakthroughs that allow
recognition of otherness, still directs its critical
voice primarily to a specialized audience, one that
shares a common language rooted in the very master
narratives it claims to challenge. If radical
postmodernist thinking is to have a transformative
impact then a critical break with the notion of
"authority" as "mastery over" must not simply be a
rhetorical device, it must be reflected in habits of
being, including styles of writing as well as chosen
subject matter. Third-world scholars, especially
elites, and white critics who passively absorb white
supremacist thinking, and therefore never notice or
look at black people on the streets, at their jobs, who
render us invisible with their gaze in all areas of
daily life, are not likely to produce liberatory theory
that will challenge racist domination, or to promote a
breakdown in traditional ways of seeing and thinking
about reality, ways of constructing aesthetic theory
and practice. From a different standpoint Robert Storr
makes a similar critique in the global issue of _Art in
America_ when he asserts:
To be sure, much postmodernist critical inquiry
has centered precisely on the issues of
"difference" and "otherness." On the purely
theoretical plane the exploration of these
concepts has produced some important results, but
in the absence of any sustained research into what
artists of color and others outside the mainstream
might be up to, such discussions become rootless
instead of radical. Endless second guessing about
the latent imperialism of intruding upon other
cultures only compounded matters, preventing or
excusing these theorists from investigating what
black, Hispanic, Asian and Native American artists
were actually doing.
Without adequate concrete knowledge of and contact with
the non-white "other," white theorists may move in
discursive theoretical directions that are threatening
to and potentially disruptive of that critical practice
which would support radical liberation struggle.
[7] The postmodern critique of "identity," though
relevant for renewed black liberation struggle, is
often posed in ways that are problematic. Given a
pervasive politic of white supremacy which seeks to
prevent the formation of radical black subjectivity, we
cannot cavalierly dismiss a concern with identity
politics. Any critic exploring the radical potential
of postmodernism as it relates to racial difference and
racial domination would need to consider the
implications of a critique of identity for oppressed
groups. Many of us are struggling to find new
strategies of resistance. We must engage
decolonization as a critical practice if we are to have
meaningful chances of survival even as we must
simultaneously cope with the loss of political
grounding which made radical activism more possible. I
am thinking here about the postmodernist critique of
essentialism as it pertains to the construction of
"identity" as one example.
[8] Postmodern theory that is not seeking to simply
appropriate the experience of "otherness" in order to
enhance its discourse or to be radically chic should
not separate the "politics of difference" from the
politics of racism. To take racism seriously one must
consider the plight of underclass people of color, a
vast majority of whom are black. For African-Americans
our collective condition prior to the advent of
postmodernism and perhaps more tragically expressed
under current postmodern conditions has been and is
characterized by continued displacement, profound
alienation and despair. Writing about blacks and
postmodernism, Cornel West describes our collective
plight:
There is increasing class division and
differentiation, creating on the one hand a
significant black middle-class, highly anxiety-
ridden, insecure, willing to be co-opted and
incorporated into the powers that be, concerned
with racism to the degree that it poses
constraints on upward social mobility; and, on the
other, a vast and growing black underclass, an
underclass that embodies a kind of walking
nihilism of pervasive drug addiction, pervasive
alcoholism, pervasive homicide, and an exponential
rise in suicide. 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.
[9] "Yearning" is the word that best describes a
common psychological state shared by many of us,
cutting across boundaries of race, class, gender, and
sexual practice. Specifically in relation to the
postmodernist deconstruction of "master" narratives,
the yearning that wells in the hearts and minds of
those whom such narratives have silenced is the longing
for critical voice. It is no accident that "rap" has
usurped the primary position of R&B music among young
black folks as the most desired sound, or that it began
as a form of "testimony" for the underclass. It has
enabled underclass black youth to develop a critical
voice, as a group of young black men told me, a "common
literacy." Rap projects a critical voice, explaining,
demanding, urging. Working with this insight in his
essay "Putting the Pop Back into Postmodernism,"
Lawrence Grossberg comments:
The postmodern sensibility appropriates practices
as boasts that announce their own--and
consequently our own--existence, like a rap song
boasting of the imaginary (or real--it makes no
difference) accomplishments of the rapper. They
offer forms of empowerment not only in the face of
nihilism but precisely through the forms of
nihilism itself: an empowering nihilism, a moment
of positivity through the production and
structuring of affective relations.
Considering that it is as a subject that one comes to
voice, then the postmodernist focus on the critique of
identity appears, at first glance, to threaten and
close down the possibility that this discourse and
practice will allow those who have suffered the
crippling effects of colonization and domination to
gain or regain a hearing. Even if this sense of threat
and the fear it evokes are based on a misunderstanding
of the postmodernist political project, they
nevertheless shape responses. It never surprises me
when black folk respond to the critique of
essentialism, especially when it denies the validity of
identity politics, by saying "yeah, it's easy to give
up identity, when you got one." Though an apt and
oftentimes appropriate comeback, this does not really
intervene in the discourse in a way that alters and
transforms. 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.
[10] 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.
[11] Employing a critique of essentialism allows
African-Americans to acknowledge the way in which class
mobility has altered collective black experience so
that racism does not necessarily have the same impact
on our lives. Such a critique allows us to affirm
multiple black identities, varied black experience. It
also challenges colonial imperialist paradigms of black
identity which represent blackness one-dimensionally in
ways that reinforce and sustain white supremacy. This
discourse created the idea of the "primitive" and
promoted the notion of an "authentic" experience,
seeing as "natural" those expressions of black life
which conformed to a pre-existing pattern or
stereotype. Abandoning essentialist notions would be a
serious challenge to racism. Contemporary African-
American resistance struggle must be rooted in a
process of decolonization that continually opposes
reinscribing notions of "authentic" black identity.
This critique 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. 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.
[12] When black folks critique essentialism, we are
empowered to recognize multiple experiences of black
identity that are the lived conditions which make
diverse cultural productions possible. When this
diversity is ignored, it is easy to see black folks as
falling into two categories--nationalist or
assimilationist, black-identified or white-identified.
Coming to terms with the impact of postmodernism for
black experience, particularly as it changes our sense
of identity, means that we must and can rearticulate
the basis for collective bonding. Given the various
crises facing African-Americans (economic, spiritual,
escalating racial violence, etc.) we are compelled by
circumstance to reassess our relationship to popular
culture and resistance struggle. Many of us are as
reluctant to face this task as many non-black
postmodern thinkers who focus theoretically on the
issue of "difference" are to confront the issue of race
and racism.
[13] Music is the cultural product created by African-
Americans that has most attracted postmodern theorists.
It is rarely acknowledged that there is far greater
censorship and restriction of other forms of cultural
production by black folks--beginning with literary and
critical writing. Attempts on the part of editors and
publishing houses to control and manipulate the
representation of black culture, as well as their
desire to promote the creation of products which will
attract the widest audience, limit in a crippling and
stifling way the kind of work many black folks feel we
can do and still receive recognition. Using myself as
an example, that creative writing I do which I consider
to be most reflective of a postmodern oppositional
sensibility--work that is abstract, fragmented,
non-linear narrative--is constantly rejected by editors
and publishers who tell me it does not conform to the
type of writing they think black women should be doing
or the type of writing they believe will sell.
Certainly I do not think I am the only black person
engaged in forms of cultural production, especially
experimental ones, who is constrained by the lack of an
audience for certain kinds of work. It is important
for postmodern thinkers and theorists to constitute
themselves as an audience for such work. To do this
they must assert power and privilege within the space
of critical writing to open up the field so that it
will be more inclusive. To change the exclusionary
practice of postmodern critical discourse is to enact a
postmodernism of resistance. Part of this intervention
entails black intellectual participation in the
discourse.
[14] In his essay "Postmodernism and Black America,"
Cornel West suggests that black intellectuals "are
marginal--usually languishing at the interface of Black
and white cultures or thoroughly ensconced in Euro-
American settings" and he cannot see this group as
potential producers of radical postmodernist thought.
While I generally agree with this assessment, black
intellectuals must proceed with the understanding that
we are not condemned to the margins. The way we work
and what we do can determine whether or not what we
produce will be meaningful to a wider audience, one
that includes all classes of black people. West
suggests that black intellectuals lack "any organic
link with most of Black life" and that this "diminishes
their value to Black resistance." This statement bears
traces of essentialism. Perhaps we need to focus more
on those black intellectuals, however rare our
presence, who do not feel this lack and whose work is
primarily directed towards the enhancement of black
critical consciousness and the strengthening of our
collective capacity to engage in meaningful resistance
struggle. Theoretical ideas and critical thinking need
not be transmitted solely in the academy. While I work
in a predominantly white institution, I remain
intimately and passionately engaged with black
communities. It's not like I'm going to talk about
writing and thinking about postmodernism with other
academics and/or intellectuals and not discuss these
ideas with underclass non-academic black folks who are
family, friends, and comrades. Since I have not broken
the ties that bind me to underclass poor black
community, I have seen that knowledge, especially that
which enhances daily life and strengthens our capacity
to survive, can be shared. It means that critics,
writers, academics have to give the same critical
attention to nurturing and cultivating our ties to
black communities that we give to writing articles,
teaching, and lecturing. Here again I am really
talking about cultivating habits of being that
reinforce awareness that knowledge can be disseminated
and shared on a number of fronts, and the extent to
which it is made available and accessible depends on
the nature of one's political commitments.
[15] Postmodern culture with its decentered subject can
be the space where ties are severed or it can provide
the occasion for new and varied forms of bonding. To
some extent ruptures, surfaces, contextuality and a
host of other happenings create gaps that make space
for oppositional practices which no longer require
intellectuals to be confined to narrow, separate
spheres with no meaningful connection to the world of
every day. Much postmodern engagement with culture
emerges from the yearning to do intellectual work that
connects with habits of being, forms of artistic
expression and aesthetics, that inform the daily life
of a mass population as well as writers and scholars.
On the terrain of culture, one can participate in
critical dialogue with the uneducated poor, the black
underclass who are thinking about aesthetics. One can
talk about what we are seeing, thinking, or listening
to; a space is there for critical exchange. It's
exciting to think, write, talk about, and create art
that reflects passionate engagement with popular
culture, because this may very well be "the" central
future location of resistance struggle, a meeting
place where new and radical happenings can occur.
***
hey, did that!
umoja
Only when lions have historians will hunters cease being heroes. African Proverb
Without struggle there is no progress. Frederick Douglass
The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed. Steven Biko
yours in the struggle
Rodney D. Coates
Director of Black World Studies
Associate Professor of Sociology
Miami University
Oxford, Ohio 45056
513 529-1235
email: coatesrd@casmail.muohio.edu