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Chapter Eleven Conclusion As I have discussed in detail in the previous chapters, in the United States, until the 1960s, the white/black binary, the African American sociopolitical mission of racial uplift, the historical emancipatory African American narrative, and the canon of African American literature defined African American social reality. Because they are middle-class, Christian, and center-oriented, they repress and exclude African American differences. They reduce the polyvalent nature, the plurality and heterogeneity of American/African American history, literature, criticism, and life to sets of apprehensible units that can be ordered. In examining how mainstream Americans and elite/middle-class Christian African Americans —who have a monopoly on the construction of African American literary, cultural, and social reality—construct African American social reality, we can discern how it is modeled on the Western, Hegelian notions of linearity, closure, and progress. We can discern how it would be middle class and Christian. This social reality renders secondary and marginal those African American differences—texts, individuals, and images—that deviate from their norm. It ignores other vital African American issues/lives and devalues desires, behaviors, and value systems that are different. This social reality is tainted at birth by its historical roots in the systematic inequalities of conquest, slavery, and exploitation. I do not for a minute want to criticize anyone for engaging the issues of conquest , slavery, racism, and exploitation. In chapters 2 and 3, I discuss at length the brutal history of racial oppression, showing how even at the turn of the century structural discrimination and otherization still exist for all African Americans.The struggle by African Americans for full equality in America has been and continues to be a major priority for all sectors of African American life and for the liberal sector of mainstream American society. I am also willing to admit that the struggle for social equality is an important item on the agenda. But that struggle has become who we are. It has shaped/constructed our image/representation of the African American until the 1960s, and it is a narrow representation. Given the economic, social, and intellectual changes that have happened since the 1960s, I have to conclude that constructing African American life, history, criticism, and 253 literature according to social equality exclusively—according to the journey from the African American subaltern to the values of mainstream America, or according to some unified, mythic African past—ignores and represses much of that history, life, criticism, and literature. And within this repression, there are all kinds of violence. In exposing the white/black binary as a construct, rather than a metaphysical certainty, and in taking a polycentric approach to African American literature , criticism, and history, thereby engaging differences in African American life, literature, criticism, and history, I have been able to disrupt, deconstruct, and de-territorialize the white/black binary system and re-territorialize and reconstitute a social space in which the positionality of the African American is one of differences. In my polycentric construction, I have repositioned the racial uplift literary tradition, of which James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography is considered archetypal, and the sociopolitical mission of racial uplift in which they become two of many literary and historical vantage points for representing the African American, rather than centers/norms. If we recognize that the modern , working-class blues man Manfred Banks in Clarence Major’s Dirty Bird Blues; the existential, sexually fluid, caring and giving, and racially mixed jazz man Charles Stevenson in Charles Wright’s The Messenger; the urban, nonChristian subaltern, patriarchal Hip in Nathan Heard’s Howard Street; the middle -class, compulsorily heterosexual, patriarchal, and Christian ex-coloured man in Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man; the gay-identified, middle -class Christian Mitchell Crawford and the sexually fluid, non-middle-class, non-Protestant work ethic, and non-Christian b-boys in James Earl Hardy’s BBoy Blues; the Voodoo, hungan, and capitalist Daddy Poole in Don Belton’s Almost Midnight; the radical Thoreauvian, postcolonial, individualist Tucker Caliban in William Melvin Kelley’s A Different Drummer; along with other images and representations of the African American that I have excluded, all represent limited populations of African American subjects under some limited sets of conditions, we have no other choice but to represent the African American and African American literature as ones of differences. Each of these African American subjects and literature is a member of “shifting [American and African American] communities, each of which establishes , for each of...

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