Starting Over: Feminism and the Politics of Cultural Critique

Learning Not to Curse; or, Feminist Predicaments in Cultural Criticism by Men: Our Movie Date with James Cliffor and Stephen Greenblatt - with Judith Stacey

Learning Not to Curse; or, Feminist Predicaments in Cultural Criticism by Men: Our Movie Date with James Clifford and Stephen Greenblatt With Judith Stacey Portrait of Man with a Book As Dances with Wolves, Kevin Costner's wildly celebrated film, reaches its emotional climax, Smiles a Lot, his proud, young face glistening with reverential tears, returns to Lt. John Dunbar the damaged leatherbound journal in which the latter has recorded fieldnotes on the Lakota tribe, from which he and Stands with a Fist, his newly acquired wife, are about to take their poignant departure. Novice film critics, we scribble scarcely legible notes about the musical crescendo and heavenly light that mark this pivotal return of the book from a Native American boy to a white man, noting how the white man's gratitude is mirrored and magnified in a close-up image of his wife's beatified expression. All three-white woman, native boy, and white man-seem gratified by the restoration of this white man's words. Two Men and Their Books Our path to this celluloid wilderness had been blazed by other images of natives and of white men with books. During the 1991 season of Costnermania the authors of this essay had been reading the work ofJames Clifford and Stephen Greenblatt in preparation for a collabo149 150 Starting Over rative study of the politics of contemporary cultural criticism by U.S. men. The former, director of the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a historian of ethnography, is a metatheorist of what others have termed the "new," or "postmodern ," ethnography; the latter, a founding editor of Representations and a literary critic in Renaissance studies, is generally recognized as the central fashioner of an approach to cultural criticism called "new historicism." Both are widely cited as important figures on the frontiers of U.S. cultural studies, that increasingly favored site of discourse in the embattled academy, now frequently identified with the renewed political relevance and multicultural commitments of Leftlliberal academics.1 It was in Clifford's and Greenblatt's books, The Predicament of Culture (1988) and Learning to Curse (1990), both of which sport cover photos of white men with their books,2 that we found treatments of Native Americans that piqued our curiosity about other white male representations of America's first colonial victims. Although generally wary of westerns as a field for male dreams, we took our versions of Clifford's and Greenblatt's modes of cultural critique to the movies , where they served as valuable, inspiring, but also, at times, troubling film companions in our critical reception of this Oscar-winning artifact of popular culture, an artifact both touted and condemned , in our local newspapers, as an exercise in the "new politics" of multiculturalism (Grenier 1991; Jacobs 1991; and Baltake 1991). Viewing Dances with Wolves through our attempt to simulate Clifford 's and Greenblatt's sensibilities, we could produce what we regarded as insightful but also disappointing readings of the film, readings marked by the kinds of insights and disappointments we have often found in Clifford's and Greenblatt's work. Their work, for example , prompted us to readings of the film as a redemptive Western allegory of the kind Clifford finds in the ethnographies that he subjects to his incisive, influential form of cultural critique and as a form of linguistic colonialism of the kind that Greenblatt explores in his complex and likewise influential analyses of Renaissance culture. In a move that the authors of both texts might appreciate their cultural critique also helped us to read them. Through the lens of our enhanced analysis of Costner's film we were sensitized to ways in which their own work might be said to reinscribe some of the aIlego- Learning Not to Curse 151 rizing and colonizing strategies that they had already enabled us to perceive in Dances with Wolves. Clifford's and Greenblatt's work, however, contributed little to our analysis of the film as a masculine allegory in which, as in much of the cultural criticism they have published so far, gender politics are accommodated but also marginalized and/or contained. This move in relation to gender politics, we will suggest, is complexly related to the racial politics in Clifford and Greenblatt, just as it is in Costner's fIlm. Read in relation to one another, indeed, Costner's fIlm, Clifford's and Greenblatt's...