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Chapter 7 ''A-World-in-Which-Race-Does-Not-Matter" InJune 1969, Negro Digest ran an advertisement entitled "Literature and the Black Aesthetic in Future Issues of Negro Digest." It announced that an emerging black writer, Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones), would "defme " the "Black Aesthetic" for readers. Indeed, three months later, Baraka made one of his first entrees into the discussion over the Black Aesthetic in the essay "The Black Aesthetic." At the outset, Baraka tackles the notion "What does aesthetic mean? A theory in the ether. Shdn't it mean for us Feelings about reality! The degrees of in to self registration Intuit. About REality. In to selves. Many levels of feeling comprehension. About reality."1 Such a statement, according to Phillip Brian Harper, "coin[s] alternate etymologies and manipulating typography to assert the essential groundedness of the Black Aesthetic."2 Baraka turned out to be one of the most influential figures in the Black Arts Movement and clung to the idea that the groundedness, or the pragmatism , of the Black Aesthetic was a core principle of Mrican American literature. He held this belief despite the evolution of his aesthetic and racial-political opinions over the two decades of the Black Arts Movement, the 1960s and the 1970s. Toni Morrison's only short story, "Recitatif," illustrates best an anomalous if postmodern defiance of racial-realist ideologies central to the Black Aesthetic. At the same time, it highlights for us the importance of gender and sexuality to constructions of black identity. It first appeared in Corifirmation: An Anthology qf AfricanAmerican J1.Vmen (1983), which Amiri Baraka coedited with his wife, Amina Baraka (formerly SylviaJones). The anthology proves that Baraka's vision of Mrican American literature remained relatively intact, despite the decline of the Black Arts Movement. The collection also represents a belated and failed attempt at gender-political diplomacy by the movement's former arbiter.3 The editorial categorization of black women writers in Corifirmation as pan-Mricanist, anticolonialist, and racially and politically activist cannot account for the nature and implications of Morrison's story.4 "Recitatif" 168 Chapter 7 unsettles the idea that race can be fixed in identity politics and that this solution should constitute the sole protocol for reading, writing, and defming Mrican American literature. The story's probing of the strong relationships between women also recalls Morrison's long-standing literary effort to accentuate the mutual interests and dependency of women in the face of masculinist, patriarchal, and heterosexual circumstances in American society. Although Morrison belongs to the generation of black women writing against the Black Aesthetic, "Recitatif" also raises issues about an academic field emerging at that historical juncture, namely, Mrican American literary theory. Practitioners in this field alleged that the Black Arts Movement perpetuated certain counterproductive assumptions about racial authenticity , essentialism, and realism. In particular, Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s notion of a "hermeneutical circle" of blackness had influenced the study of Mrican American literature in both academic and public settings. Briefly, Gates suggested that the aesthetic or ethical "value" of Mrican American literature corresponded with the degree to which the actual text approached or deviated from readers' initial imagination of the text's intellectual authenticity or the author's racial authenticity. Gates's hermeneutical circle of blackness thus described the tendency among critics to perpetuate this correspondence between text and what Gerard Genette has called paratexts, but which Gates calls "pretexts."5 Ironically, Gates's formulation reinscribes and exploits the assumptions that it pins to the Black Arts Movement. What is more, it suppresses crucial information about the hermeneutical circle's eighteenth-century origins in German philology and its modern-day development in American literary theory. The hermeneutical circle, it turns out, has customarily referred to the circular, variable, and almost paradoxical way in which understanding one part of a text presupposes understanding the whole text, and vice versa. Against this backdrop, I would argue not that all of us are drawn into the hermeneutical circle of Mrican American literature. Rather, Morrison demonstrates a most sophisticated attempt to break out of this circle, even if, at times, she is complicit in reinscribing it. In this chapter I intend to contribute to recent studies of the Black Arts Movement, which have come a long way since the early 1990s. At that time, David Lionel Smith published a visionary essay, "The Black Arts Movement and Its Critics," in which he bemoans the "paucity" of scholarship on the effiorescence of black culture, intellectualism, and politics...

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