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  • Still Reading Henry James?
  • Kenneth Warren

By way of beginning I might point out that Ross Posnock’s “blunt” question to Sara Blair is, despite its bluntness, ambiguous. “Is The American Scene a brief against racism, and if not, why not?” might mean, “Did The American Scene serve as a brief against racism when it was published, and if not why not?” Or it might mean, “Can we credibly read The American Scene as a brief against racism even if it was not read that way at the time of its publication?” The first question is more traditionally historical, in asking what role, if any, James’s work played in the consolidation of white supremacy in the U.S. around the turn of the century. The second discussion, though it requires that we situate James’s text historically, is more centrally textual and concerns the way in which the representational logic of James’s texts confirm, develop, question, contradict, complicate, or revise the representational logics of white racial domination as they are played out in other texts. Although this second discussion often assumes that an individual text’s representational logic necessarily plays a role in shaping its historical moment, one of the claims I made in Black and White Strangers was that the two questions are sometimes only imperfectly related. Textual strategies that challenge a social logic can sometimes through historical contingencies contribute to rather than undermine the very ideology they seek to challenge, or vice versa.

With this in mind one can see that Posnock may be asking Blair to answer the more historical question while she is chiefly interested in the textual one. That is, when Blair asserts that James “positions himself so as to contest less productive modes of reproducing America” she is comparing and contrasting the representational strategies of The American Scene with those of other documentary [End Page 282] practices and is not telling us what effect James’s contesting actually had on its historical moment. Even if James’s contestations yielded no apparent political result, we might still find his textual maneuvers intellectually and aesthetically interesting. Accordingly Blair tells us that James “explores,” “theorizes,” “performs,” and “rehearses,” this nation’s “racial logic,” but she stops short of making her argument depend on whether or not anyone at the time particularly cared that he did so. So that when Posnock confronts her with my charge in Black and White Strangers that The American Scene “falls dreadfully short of the clear denunciations of lynching and mob violence that prevailing conditions called for” (113), Blair might legitimately say that the charge is irrelevant to her project—she is merely showing us how James’s strategies of documentation differed from other contemporary strategies. I suspect, however, that Blair would nonetheless want the issue that Posnock raises to be centrally relevant to her argument, a point which I will take up momentarily.

But first it is important to see why pragmatism is so resonant for Posnock’s position—it offers a way of bridging the textual and historical discussions I’ve described above. If Posnock is right, pragmatism simultaneously opened up for W. E. B. Du Bois and Henry James a reservoir of intellectual attitudes that, in the case of Du Bois, may indeed have figured crucially in his intellectual and political opposition to Booker T. Washington’s accommodationist political programme. One wants and needs to see more by way of this argument. But for now, suffice it to say that in Posnock’s estimation, pragmatism may have importantly outfitted both writers with a certain “political courage” in the face of “the capitalist fetish of efficiency and utility.”

By finding “political courage” in The American Scene, however, Posnock, has come back around (albeit through a different route) to a point near that of Blair’s. That is, while Blair’s argument, as I suggested above, might legitimately rest content with its exposition of James’s documentary techniques, it seems to want to do more—to claim something for James akin to what Posnock terms pragmatism’s mode of “turn[ing] aesthetics from contemplation to action.” Both Blair and Posnock appear to want to turn their readings of James to...

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