Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual (review)

Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual. Ross Posnock. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998. Pp. 353. $35.00 (cloth).

Though neither William James nor pragmatism appears in the title of Ross Posnock's provocative book, Jamesian pragmatism underwrites Posnock's understanding and advocacy of the tradition of "anti-race race men and women" that is the focus of his study (5). The Jamesian influence comes as no surprise in discussions of W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke, whose Harvard Ph.D.s make a lingering pragmatism an almost unavoidable presupposition. It does make one pause, however, when pragmatism is deployed not so much as a formal philosophical position but as a defining habit of mind to link Du Bois and Locke with Pauline Hopkins, James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Samuel Delany, and Adrienne Kennedy. We find that Hopkins, in her novel Of One Blood (1903), directly borrows the title of her hero's just-published treatise, The Unclassified Residuum, from James; Ellison "flirts with a Jamesian dilemma"; Hurston demonstrates a "pragmatist esteem for the unbounded and residual"; and Baraka's "Beat aesthetic clearly has pragmatist affinities" (65, 206, 209, 246). The quietly aggressive assertion of Jamesian pragmatism is, at once, what makes the diverse black intellectuals of Posnock's book cohere in such remarkable ways and what will attract to the book scholars concerned not only with pragmatism but also with the conceptualization of race, culture, and cosmopolitanism.

That is not to say that the book forces us to come to terms with William James per se but rather with how an affinity with Jamesian pragmatism in the work of black intellectuals makes a strong case against the concept of "cultural identity," which in Posnock's view has promoted a destructively "atomized, essentialist politics" (3). Posnock's pragmatism offers itself as a more radical revision of the theory of identity than that offered by either postmodernism or cultural studies in its aim "not merely to make identity more fluid but to abolish its status as a grounding term" (186).

Taking Du Bois as a test case, we find that the pragmatist argument has the peculiar ability both to make him relevant to current theoretical interests and to serve as a unifying theory for the contradictory strands of his political and aesthetic strategies. Posnock's take places Du Bois in contexts that make him particularly current for discussions of cosmopolitanism and culture and also offers a satisfying resolution of many Du Boisian contradictions. Posnock can agree with and even admire the "intensity" of Shamoon Zamir's argument that Du Bois was a Hegelian idealist but then ask why he couldn't be a pragmatist, too, since pragmatism is "not a philosophy replete with doctrine but a method" (319 n. 15). Similarly, he can avoid Anthony Appiah's worries about Du Bois's "uncompleted argument" against racial essentialism by suggesting that Du Bois's occasional "retreat to biologism" is "an instance of his repeated destabilization . . . of the race concept . . . 'Something always escapes,' as William James was fond of noting" (123, 313 n. 15). ¹ Though prone to being too generous when reading Du Bois's apparent political missteps as pragmatist politics, Posnock's analysis convincingly suggests a common "habit" with which to make sense of the range of positions Du Bois adopted during his life.

Stanley Fish has suggested that "[i]f pragmatism is true, it has nothing to say to us; no politics follows from it or is blocked by it; no morality attaches to it or is enjoined by it." ² While admiring the reading of Du Bois, one wonders, then, about the political and theoretical charge of Posnock's pragmatism. Posnock abjures Adolph Reed's straightforward radicalism in favor of recuperating how pragmatism can "mediate between the aesthetic and the political"--a move that sounds rather unabashedly like...