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  • Bakhtin in African American Literary Theory
  • Dorothy J. Hale

The strident, moral voice of the former slave recounting, exposing, appealing, apostrophizing and above all remembering his ordeal in bondage is the single most impressive feature of a slave narrative. This voice is striking because of what it relates, but even more so because the slave’s acquisition of that voice is quite possibly his only permanent achievement once he escapes and casts himself upon a new and larger landscape.

— Robert B. Stepto 1

Rather than a rigidly personalized form, the blues offer a phylogenetic recapitulation — a nonlinear, freely associative, nonsequential meditation — of species experience. What emerges is not a filled subject, but an anonymous (nameless) voice issuing from the black (w)hole.

— Houston A. Baker, Jr. 2

While the rest of us in the room struggled to find our voices, Alice Walker rose and claimed hers, insisting passionately that women did not have to speak when men thought they should, that they would choose when and where they wish to speak because while many women had found their own voices, they also knew when it was better not to use it.

— Mary Helen Washington 3

What do we call a subject who is both more and less than an individual and stronger and weaker than a free agent? For all three of the authors I have quoted, and for many cultural critics over the past two decades, the answer is a “voice.” Voice has become the metaphor that best accommodates the conflicting desires of critics and theorists who want to have their cultural subject and de-essentialize it, too. Fluid and evanescent yet also substantial and distinct, voice appeals to scholars as a critical term because it seems to provide a way of eliding the paralyzing dualisms that plague philosophical accounts of subjectivity. Thanks to its metaphoric flexibility, the term can describe human identity as unproblematically both self-selected and socially determined, both individual and collective, natural and cultural, corporeal and mental, oral and [End Page 445] textual. In this essay I want to begin to theorize the conceptual role played by voice in recent cultural criticism by focusing on a line of argumentation that has its origin in African American studies but whose claims are currently influencing work in ethnic and gender studies generally: the move to make Du Boisian “double consciousness” synonymous with Bakhtinian “double voice.”

W. E. B. Du Bois’s theory that African Americans possess a “double” consciousness is the point of origin for much contemporary criticism of African American literature. 4 According to Bernard W. Bell, for example, the African American novel has

from its inception... been concerned with illuminating the meaning of the black American experience and the complex double-consciousness, socialized ambivalence, and double vision which is the special burden and blessing of Afro-American identity. 5

Yet if Du Boisian double consciousness has been hailed as the central theme of African American literature, another term and another theorist have often been invoked to explain how African American literature represents this theme. To a quite extraordinary extent, that is, African Americanists have glossed Du Bois by way of M. M. Bakhtin, and argued that double consciousness is most powerfully represented in African American literature by the Bakhtinian technique of “double voice.” Michael Awkward, for example, has called “double voicedness” the “discursive corollary” to the Du Boisian model of African American identity. 6 He discusses the role of double voice in texts like Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God as a Bakhtinian “narrative strategy” for representing each author’s revised version of Du Boisian double consciousness. 7 Henry Louis Gates, Jr. declares double voice to be a “verbal analogue” for “double experience.” 8 So central is Bakhtin to Gates’s own theoretical project that he prefaces his introduction to “Race,” Writing and Difference with a quotation from “Discourse in the Novel”; The Signifying Monkey opens with two epigraphs, one from Frederick Douglass and another from Bakhtin. And Gates defines the key term of this later work, the African American activity of “signification,” by quoting Bakhtin’s definition of a “double-voiced word.” 9

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