Cultural Sites of Critical Insight: Philosophy, Aesthetics, and African American and Native American Women's Writings

1. On the “Res” and in the “Hood”: Making Cultures, Leaving Legacies

1 On the “Res” and in the “Hood” Making Cultures, Leaving Legacies ANGELA L. COTTEN Research in aesthetics and philosophy has generated insightful and thought-provoking criticism of literature as a site of aesthetic innovation , philosophical critique, and consciousness-raising. Yet, there is a noticeable dearth of criticism on the writings of African American and Native American women in these fields. These women’s cultural productions and social activism reflect carefully reasoned perspectives on dilemmas of the human condition, knowledge and truth, structure and agency, history, and ethics. They often draw on and rework philosophical systems and literary genres to convey fresh, new perspectives on art and beauty, truth, justice, community, and the making of a good and happy life. This anthology features essays that use interdisciplinary, feminist, and comparative methods to make works by (both contemporary and historical) African American and Native American women writers more accessible for critical consideration in aesthetics and philosophy . While the works of many writers featured here have been analyzed in other critical contexts, in this volume their productions are treated for innovations in aesthetics, philosophy, and critical theory. It is a matter of extending the scope of issues and interests treated in other critical fields and thus broadening our understanding of aesthetic and philosophical formations in Native American and African American women’s literary traditions. This compilation of essays provides multiple openings for exploring the interplay between artistic values and social, political, and moral concerns that are mediated by sensitivity to the historical and cultural contexts of aesthetic values production. Some essays specifically provide a natural segue for discussions of value theory in aesthetics as they explore the continuities between cultural 3 production and social and political theory. All contributors, moreover, make connections between aesthetic experience in everyday life and analyses of art and artistic appreciation in ways that facilitate discussions of aesthetic agency as it applies broadly to lived experience. The critical thrust of these women’s cultural productions engenders irony in challenging the western tradition’s most revered philosophies , as they deploy the same tools (discourse/language and artistic imagination) used by whites historically to rationalize the removal, enslavement, and extermination of Indians and Africans. Such resistance stands as a challenge to the claims of seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury philosophers and scientists such as Immanuel Kant, George W. F. Hegel, David Hume, and Francis Bacon, who argued that the indigenous peoples of Africa and the Americas lacked any capacity for rational thought and aesthetic ingenuity. To white Europeans and Americans this meant that blacks and Indians were less than human—primitives , savages, or subhuman links between whites and animals in the Chain of Being—and thus exploitable as chattel slaves. Subsequent eugenics and social Darwinist discourses in the nineteenth century reinforced these mythologies of blacks and Indians and served to legitimize social policies of segregating them in ghettos and reservations and of sterilizing the women of childbearing age. The rise of Hollywood and the emergence of “salvage” anthropology in the early twentieth century spawned new racial images, including the “extinct” or “dying primitive ,” to accompany the old racial mythologies in the American cultural imagination. It is within these discursive minefields of racialized negation that Africans, Indians, and their descendants have had to navigate and manipulate the written word in expressing their knowledge, spiritualities , and visions of beauty, truth, and eco-humanistic possibility. Native American and African American writings share a literary history of critical intervention in these discourses in ways that are insightful, ironic, playful, and transformative—for themselves, their communities, and the cultural traditions with which they engage. AFRICAN NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CROSSBLOOD AESTHETICS This collection encourages comparative investigations of African American and Native American literature to explore aesthetic similarities and intersections between both cultures. In fact, evidence reveals that the contact and shared histories of these groups led to the generation of a 4 CULTURAL SITES OF CRITICAL INSIGHT third, syncretic culture of African Native Americans, whose very existence poses problems and challenges for those seeking to study strictly one culture or the other. To read the essays gathered in this book is to begin to recognize what might be called crossblood literary aesthetics. The indigenous populations of the Americas and the Africans brought to America in the slave trade shared experiences of cultural dislocation and dispossession, enslavement, and exploitation. Together, many found common cause in resisting western imperialism. This led to the development of what have...