Beyond the Binary

Scholars of American/African American literature and culture face a perennial problem: how to engage African American writers on their own terms without either subordinating them to the cultural dominant of white literary production or ignoring its profound effects. This problem is the literary manifestation of a much broader white-black binary that represents whites as normal and blacks as deviant throughout the history of American culture. While it may not manifest today as plainly as it once did when Thomas Jefferson exclaimed that even religion could not make Phillis Wheatley a poet, the white-black binary continues to shape how African Americans imagine themselves in works of art. The history of African American literature is, to some extent, the history of trying to think beyond this binary.

W. Lawrence Hogue’s most recent book, Postmodernism, Traditional Cultural Forms, and African American Narratives thinks beyond the binary and identifies some novels that do so as well. Over the course of a career that now spans thirty years, Hogue has built a significant and impressive catalog of scholarship devoted to interrogating the ways in which black writers in the United States have worked to escape the totalizing logic of the middle-class, puritan, white norm. With five books to his credit, he is among the most accomplished scholars of twentieth and twenty-first century African American literature and culture. What makes this latest book unique is its devotion to the possibilities of a distinctive African American subjectivity that is neither subordinated to the white-black binary nor naïve to its historical effects.

As with his previous book, Postmodern American Literature and Its Other (2009), Hogue relies on Enrique Dussel’s theory of Eurocentrism to explain the white-black binary in terms of a center and a periphery. But where the last book focuses on how postmodern American literature’s challenge to modernity depends on Eurocentrism, this new study sets out to demonstrate how the formal and philosophical features of literary postmodernism provide the materials out of which black writers can begin to construct narratives that imagine an African American subject “that escapes the violence and repression of rational, linear, Eurocentric Enlightenment reason.” Between the innovations of postmodernism and the strength of traditional cultural forms, such as the blues and jazz, African American writers can create works of art that embrace difference rather than reproduce the binary. They can re-constellate the galaxy and expand our vision so that we can see that what we once thought was the center is, in fact, the periphery of a much larger system.

In his lengthy introduction, Hogue examines assimilation and separatism as the two most prominent responses to the white-black binary. Assimilation seeks to redress the marginalization of African Americans by making them like whites, lifting them up to the position of white folks. The problem with this approach is that it necessarily maintains the foundation of the binary. Whites remain the norm and blacks remain deviant. There is no way the two will ever actually be equal. “What emerges,” Hogue explains, “is an African American experience that is, to use the words of Hélène Cixous, ‘inside without being inside.’” Separatism is not much better as it obscures the ways in which Western culture has, in fact, formed African American subjectivity. In other words, by representing African American cultural forms as transcendent, repressing their polyvalence, ignoring class and excluding all kinds of internal differences, separatist approaches to the binary render themselves impotent to redress the problems that attend it.

Hogue seeks to avoid both the assimilationist and separatist frameworks in his own approach through the frame-breaking logic of postmodernism. Postmodernism, Hogue argues, provides a theoretical commitment to difference that allows for the construction of African American subjectivity as neither assimilationist nor separatist because it does not accept the terms of the binary in the first place. Difference can challenge the authority of Eurocentrism while engaging the diverse cultural forms of capitalism, classism, heteropatriarchy, the blues, and jazz that have been produced within it...