Culture Wars

ELT 36:3 1993 Culture Wars Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. xix + 199 pp. $19.95 OF THE TEN PIECES collected here, eight have previously appeared in venues ranging from the New York Times Book Review to PMLA, from Newsweek to Dissent. Correspondingly they range in style and substance from jeu d'esprit ("Canon Confidential," a parody detective quest for the canon-makers) to programmatic statement ("Writing, Tiace' and the Difference It Makes"). The last named is the earliest to be published (1985); its tone contrasts with that of the closing essay (1991), in which the recent "routinized production of righteous indignation " is squarely faced. The author's own measure of responsibüity for that outcome is glancingly acknowledged ("success has spoüed us"), yet his important influence on the present condition of literary studies is best assessed not within moralistic but within intellectual categories. What has Gates to tell us about the evolution of the English canon, about the shape of African-American literature and about the practice of black criticism? (N. B. : Himself unable to keep up with shifting fashions, Gates employs a variety of group designations; I shall foUow his example without prejudice.) On the canon wars Gates avoids what Barbara Herrnstein Smith calls the weak argument, based on the changing demographics of the student body, while skirting her strong one, that our intellectual life is best served by paying heed to alternative points of view. Instead, his case is an ethical one: "We must engage in this canon deformation precisely because [Wüliam] Bennett is correct: the teaching of Uterature is the teaching of values;... it has become—the teaching of an aesthetic and political order, in which no women or people of color were ever able to discover the reflection or representation of their images" (35). Setting aside the casual exaggeration inevitably produced by righteous indignation (here, regarding women authors), the argument makes a ringing claim for redress of grievances: "my people were the subjugated, the voiceless, the invisible." This is undeniably impressive, but it doesn't hold out clear rewards for other people, beyond a temporary alleviation of their guilt feelings. I believe such rewards are available and would be considerable, but the rhetoric here does little to bolster this faith. In outlining an expanded canon that includes African-American literature, Gates is under another self-imposed constraint. He is a 382 BOOK REVIEWS cultural pluralist and has many brave and incisive things to say about the cultural nationalists who draw even more attention to themselves than he has done. But his liberal paradigm requires that he relegate the physical-anthropological concept of race (and the evidence assembled under it) to the status of a "trope," whüe denouncing speech about "racial difference" as "a pernicious act of language" (49). What, then, are the parameters of the community whose literature he heralds? One searches long for more than anecdotal characterization of the black community in the United States (some of the anecdotes are, however, among the more precious contents of this volume). Almost in passing, we are told: "Above all else, we are a people who were constructed as members of a new Pan-African ethnicity" (126). Although (or because) I'm no expert on the history and sociology of American blacks, this strikes me as an original and potentially productive way of thinking about them—and about other Americans—but it isn't pursued here. In compensation, Gates urges a view of black literary scholarship which all should be prepared to echo: "African-American Studies should be the home of free inquiry into the very complexity of being of African descent in the world, rather than a place where we seek to essentialize our cultural selves into stasis, and to drown our critical inquiry" (127). The free inquiry recommended by Gates adduces a critical pluralism to his cultural pluralism and it is likely to put him in bad odor among ideologues otherwise happy to have him on board. He is welcoming toward aU the new theoretical currents, yet upholds the value of formalist attention to the special features of African-American...