Postmodernism, Traditional Cultural Forms, and African American Narratives

Chapter 8: Conclusion

297 — 8 — Conclusion Ibegan Postmodernism, Traditional Cultural Forms, and African American Narratives with a historical survey of African American scholars, social and political movements, and cultural forms such as the civil rights movement, the Black Power movement, the blues, and jazz, examining how they have historically resisted or countered the dominant American society’s historical representation of the African American as “deviant” or as devalued Other. My intention was not to get involved in a long and drawn-out discussion about blacks being victims of racial oppression, the white norm, or the Eurocentric gaze, although all of these issues are valid and necessary areas of research endeavors. Instead, I wanted to examine African American theorists, educators, historians, sociologists, and writers who not only resisted the West’s negative definition of the African American but also dealt with the African American in terms of his or her own agency, logic, complex history, and distinct subjectivity. I wanted to ferret out an African American subjectivity that knows the law of the Other, of difference, that can co­ exist with subjects of different but equal worth, thereby challenging and marginalizing the dominant Eurocentric gaze and striving for an American/African American elsewhere. First, to get to this other place, this elsewhere, I used current postmodern, poststructural, postcolonial, African American cultural as well as current psychoanalytical theories and feminist theories to reread and rethink certain African American scholars, educators, sociologists, 298 chapter 8 and historians such as Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles Johnson, Carter G. Woodson, and E. Franklin Frazier , liberating their potentialities from restrictive and erroneous interpretations, dramatizing latencies in their works, and allowing them to speak to the contemporary, cosmopolitan , multicultural American moment. To my surprise, these African American scholars, as theorists and visionaries , reconfigure and remap the American symbolic order, making the African American an integral part of that order. In addition, in constructing African American subjectivities , these scholars offer plural subjectivities that are not deviant or devalued but instead are comfortable in their existential, hybrid existences and can empathize with and know the Other. This is a place where African American subjectivities are most alive, providing models of subjectivities for a multicultural, cosmopolitan American society. Second and more important, I explored how certain canonical and noncanonical African American texts reposition /plug into African and African American cultural and religious forms such as the blues, jazz, spirituals, the African American trickster figure, Yoruba gods, and African belief systems—which are spaces that still retain a wildness , that have not been completely colonized by normative American society—to speak to contemporary issues in American/African American life. As with the scholars, historians, and sociologists mentioned above, these texts, in drawing on American, African, and African American cultural forms and belief systems, construct the African American as a complex entity with his or her own potency, agency, history, wildness, and distinct subjectivity, leaving but not completely escaping the Eurocentric gaze. Wanting three male and three female writers to be the focus of my study and to explore how each deals with the Other, I settled on Wideman’s Philadelphia Fire, Everett’s Erasure, Morrison’s Jazz, Greer’s Hanging by Her Teeth, Major’s Reflex and Bone Structure, and Cartiér’s Muse-Echo Blues, reading them along an axis, which moves away from Enlightenment reason, heteropatriarchy, the Eurocentric gaze, and Freudian subjectivity and toward less hierarchical forms of reason, to plural subjectivities that can “take the Conclusion 299 risk of other, of difference, without feeling threatened by the existence of an otherness” (Cixous and Clément, Newly Born Woman 78). In focusing on Wideman’s Cudjoe in Philadelphia Fire and Everett’s Monk in Erasure, who bring difference to African American male subjectivity, I was able to capture African American males escaping but not completely leaving Western heteropatriarchy. Certainly, they challenge the West’s construction of the African American male as primitive or devalued Other. With Joe and Violet in Morrison’s Jazz, I illustrated how Morrison’s text demonstrates how common urban African American subjects reconnect to their rural past and the improvisational aspects of jazz music/aesthetic and transform their lives, opening themselves to nature and Others. In this instance, Morrison redefines the African American outside the Eurocentric gaze. And with Lorraine in Greer’s Hanging by Her Teeth and Kat in Cartiér’s Muse-Echo Blues, I was able to show how...