Canon Wars and Marxist Cultural Studies: The Work of Lillian S. Robinson

Rachel Riedner Canon Wars and Marxist Cultural Studies: The Work of Lillian S. Robinson (on Lillian S. Robinson, In the Canon's Mouth: Dispatchesfrom the Culture Wars [Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1997] and, with Ryan Bishop, Night Market: Sexual Cultures and the Thai Economic Miracle [New York: Routledge, 1998]) Lillian Robinson's intellectual and academic career, which began in the late 1960s, has paralleled many of the changes in academic discourse and scholarship over the past thirty years. She began her career when feminist studies challenged and politicized the omission of texts by women and minority writers from university curriculum and the limitation of scholarship to male authors. In Robinson's work in literary criticism and theory, as well in her latest work co-authored with an anthropologist, Robinson has used feminism as a powerful critique of conservative discourse and politics. Robinson's interest in feminism, as she describes it in an Iris interview , was an "inevitable connection ... of issues of race and gender" (Sutton 30) from her involvement in the Black freedom movement, anti-Vietnam war activism, and leftist activity in the 1960s. Her involvement in political activism led to the development of herpolitical consciousness; like many other feminist academics of this era, she translated her politics into academic work, participating in new developments in feminist theory, helping to found women's studies programs , and challenging university curricula. However, unlike mainstream feminist activists and scholars of this era who were interested in equal-opportunity or liberal feminism, Robinson was one of the first feminist scholars to explore connections between Marxism and feminism, and her early work was germinal in the development of Marxist-feminist Uterary criticism. While Robinson's scholarly work represents important feminist scholarship of this period, her career has been an anomalous one, especially compared to many of her contemporaries. Robinson left a tenured position at SUNY-Buffalo in 1976 to pursue her research at the Sorbonne and elsewhere; however, afterwards she was unable to find a permanent academic position for fourteen years. She alternated between visiting positions (including some prestigous named chairs) and fellowships, and unemployment, collecting unemployment benefits and frequently going without health insurance. 244 the minnesota review In her first coUection of essays, Sex, Class, and Culture, published in 1978, Robinson engages in unabashed Marxist analysis. She explores how feminist literary criticism can examine connections between gender , class, and race. Her consideration of which (male) authors are included in curricula offers Robinson an important connection between feminist theory and bourgeois hegemony: The ruling class is materially sustained and reinforced by the circulation of certain ideas. But in admitting this cultural hegemony, one must consider the diffusion, the audience, and the influence of the forms and levels of culture. Since the bourgeoisie is the class in power, the dominant ideas are the ideas of that class. A corollary of this is that if one wishes to fight the ruling class, one must be able to fight its ideas. . . . Now, academics tend to believe that high culture is the central locus of ideas and forms. Radicalized academics, who identify the social origins and nature of those ideas, still see their occurrence in high culture as a key experience . Knowing that Lawrence remains a widely read and influential novelist , they do not investigate what this description means. Widely read by whom? Influential upon whom? If one recognizes the almost rhetorical character of these questions, one sees the difference between a novelist's being the darling of intellectuals and his being objectively influential . It should be possible to acknowledge that the choices that intellectuals make have a disproportionate weight inour culture, withoutswallowing the entire myth about their power and "responsibility." (49) This avowedly Marxist version of feminist literary criticism, Robinson says, has hurt her career more than her feminist interests. As she puts it, "some kinds of feminism are more readily integrated into the academy than others, and my kind of left-feminism wasn't" (Robinson, E). Robinson's tenuous employment status ended when she took a fuU professorship in 1995. Now that she's back full-time in the academy, Robinson has recently published two new books: In the Canon's Mouth: Dispatchesfrom the Culture Wars and Night...