The Revolution, "In Theory"

Negrophobia and Reasonable Racism: The Hidden Costs of Being Black in America, By Jody David Armour, New York University Press, 1997

Blackness and Value: Seeing Double, By Lindon Barrett, Cambridge University Press, 1999

Race Men, By Hazel V. Carby, Harvard University Press, 1998

1. The Revolution, The Primal Scene

In the winter of 1987 there was a revolution that should have been televised (unlike Gil Scott-Heron's mid-seventies "revolution"). This particular winter of our discontent evinced a heated conversation between Joyce Ann Joyce, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Houston A. Baker, Jr. on the role of "theory" in African-American literary criticism. The New Literary History exchange rages for some 50 pages and begins with Joyce objecting to the rise of poststructuralism's influence in African-American critical theory by stating that "their [read Gates and Baker] pseudoscientific language is distant and sterile. These writers evince their powers of ratiocination with an overwhelming denial of most, if not at all, the senses. Ironically, they challenge the intellect, 'dulling' themselves to the realities of the sensual, communicative function of language" (339-40). As is expected, Gates and Baker are put on the defensive and respond with all guns loaded, citing factual errors, theoretical misreadings, and personal inadequacies in Joyce's critique. Gates reminds Joyce that "simply because I have attacked an error in logic in the work of certain Black Aestheticians does not mean that I am antiblack, or that I do not love black art or music, or that I feel alienated from black people, or that I am trying to pass like some poststructual ex-colored man" (358). In the midst of the debate however, both Gates and Baker seem to overlook one of Joyce's most startling assumptions:

A mere glance at the representative works from the Black literary canon chosen by any means of selection reveals that the most predominant, recurring, persistent, and obvious theme in Black American literature is that of liberation from the oppressive economic, social, political, and psychological strictures imposed on the Black man by white America. (338; emphasis added)

For Joyce, the model for theorizing about "Black American literature" is based on the experience of black men in contact with white America. The irony of Joyce's chosen paradigm is that it allows Gates and Baker to perform their own connection to African-American criticism from the vantage point of being entitled to speak for it; this posture therefore allows both male scholars to cloak sexist remarks as necessary to the task of defending a growing canon. Moreover, Joyce's site for the production of black literature is the relationship of black male subjects to their white counterparts. Understanding African-American literature in this way assumes that the social always speaks (for) "black" theory. Moreover, it implies that the basis of this literary production is always dependent upon the binary of black/white--without it there would be no "black" literature produced in the Americas. That the debate in the pages of New Literary History is just as gendered as it is raced never occurs to any of its participants. While this 1987 argument over the body of African-American literary criticism appeared as a contemporary rehashing of the use of "white forms" in Harlem Renaissance and black arts debate during the 1920s and early 1970s respectively, it was also evidence of the continuing unspeakable gender divide in the critical camps of mainstream African-American criticism and its black feminist counterpart. ¹

Two years later, black feminist critics Barbara Christian and Michael Awkward would continue this debate in the pages of Linda Kauffman's Gender and Theory: Dialogues on Feminist Criticism (1989). Although neither Christian's now famous "The Race for Theory" (1989) nor Awkward's response is specific to African-American criticism, the two pieces mark an even greater distance between the men and the women on the question of theory. In this head-on collision, Christian is careful not to posit...