Minority Theory, Re-Visited

I would like to begin this essay with an autobiographical anecdote and a promise to the reader that I will try and get some thematic mileage out of the anecdote. Almost 20 years ago my essay "Ethnic Identity and Post-Structuralist Differance" was published in the special issue of Cultural Critique on "The nature and context of minority discourse," edited by Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd¹ (Radhakrishnan 1987). That essay, I am grateful to say even now, received considerable attention from fellow critics and theorists. The responses for the most part were intensely polarized: there were those who thought it was one heck of a piece and others who did not care for it; there were those who found it pretentious, ostentatious, and jargon-ridden, and another group who thought that the essay was guilty of bad or poor theory.

I also remember that the piece was rejected by a prestigious theoretical journal. I can relive the chagrin, even now, and the reason offered by the referees was that my essay was (1) in some sense a vulgarization of theory, and (2) that in not problematizing the category of "ethnicity," it had erred grievously on the side of essentializing and/or naturalizing ethnicity. I had, in other words, failed to perform the metafunction of theory and had, consequently, become complicit in the politics of an un-self-reflexive politics. Theory had been yanked erroneously and indecorously into the pieties of representational thinking. Rather than be allowed to experience and historicize itself as its own autonomous constituency, theory had been meretriciously instrumentalized to serve a pre-existing cause. In radical theory, causes do not preexist except in a state of false consciousness.

While the pure theorists were saying this, the pre-post-structuralist ethnic scholars and critics did not see why, to make the point that I did make about the Rainbow Coalition and coalition politics in general, I had to bring in Derrida, and differance. To them, my theoretical moves seemed precious, excessive, exorbitant, narcissistic, and quite superfluous. There was also a sense of indignation that I was saying nothing that had not been articulated already by them, and yet I was claiming originality in the name of theory. This was a classic case of poaching by theory that would not do the hard work or participate, but would blithely usurp credit in the name of its unsituated and unsituatable "avant-garde-ness." It was as if theory had found a sneaky and dishonorable way of going beyond representation, on the one hand, and shoring up its insights as its very own, on the other. The question being raised was, Isn't ethnicity a complex and theoretical issue in itself? Where was the need to theorize about it from without, from elsewhere, particularly when the elsewhere pointed toward canonical European thought? How was Derridean differance organic to ethnicity anyway? Two concerns get interbraided here. The first has to do with the question, What is theory? As Barbara Christian (1990) would argue in her important essay "The Race for Theory," originally published in the same special volume of Cultural Critique, what is being valorized as theory in contemporary metropolitan discourse could very well be present and operative in another guise or form in another discourse: signifying in African American literature, or the trickster figure or that of the griot in African culture.² The question that Christian raises in her intervention is, What is at stake in something being called "theory"? Why should/could theory by any other name not be equally precious and avant-garde?

The second anxiety has to do with the European provenance of theory. If the European experience is not organic to the ethnic experience of the African American in the United States, how then, through a subtle sleight of hand, does European theory become integral and necessary to the project of understanding ethnicity in the American context? It may well be that theory has achieved an autonomous, epistemological status within the West; but this achievement cannot make it obligatory that such a provincially Eurocentric...