The African American Male, Writing, and Difference: A Polycentric Approach to African American Literature, Criticism, and History

Preface

Preface The narrative of the African American sociopolitical mission of racial uplift and its subsequent mainstream American support are dominant in the lives of African Americans, especially the middle class. The narrative advocates certain mainstream values such as middle-class respectability, the Enlightenment idea of progress, the Protestant work ethic, a certain purity in values, patriarchal political culture, and patriarchal gender conventions. In striving for these values and ideas, the black middle class hopes to show how African Americans can practice these values and thereby prove to white people their worthiness of respect and social equality. According to the racial uplift mission, when one African American proves that he can speak and dress, be intelligent, and show intelligence, culture, and education in ways sanctioned and respected by the dominant society , he brings honor, respectability, and pride to the race. The writing of one’s autobiography is the best way that a successful African American can demonstrate his achievements. The hope is that white people will accept him. At this stage in my life and career, I am told by the racial uplift narrative that I should write my memoir. I have graduate degrees from some of the United States’ most prestigious universities. I have published two major critical texts, and I am a tenured, full professor at an urban Research 1 university. Because I am successful, argues the narrative of racial uplift, I should tell my story to show how I succeeded and to prove to white Americans, again, how another African American has become successful by their standards and criteria. Then, hopefully, they will accept/validate me and eventually all African Americans as worthy of social equality. But writing my memoir seems inapproporiate for me for a number of reasons . First, I am still very young, and my life and career still feel as though they are on the ascent. Second, by my own philosophical and cultural standards, my life is rather uneventful. I have taken a rather traditional approach to life, only taking risks and pushing boundaries within the accepted norms. But third and more important, in the last ten years I have developed some serious issues with the racial uplift narrative, especially its objective of constructing a monolithic representation of African America, thereby repressing and subordinating African America’s polyvalent nature. I have profound problems with the narrative’s inability or refusal to engage issues of class and difference within African American communities. It covers over the African American as the Same as the middle class white American norm. ix Therefore, rather than write another black autobiography, one of the staples of the canon of African American literature, that chronicles yet another African American’s particular successes and achievements, and therefore, reinforces the status quo, I have decided to break with tradition and the narrative of racial uplift and write a critical book discussing the white/black binary and how the African American middle class and the sociopolitical mission of racial uplift have colonized African American life, literature, criticism, and history. I want to present a more inclusive representation of African America. In The African American Male, Writing, and Difference, I use African American male writers of the twentieth century to explore the issues of class, gender, devalued otherness, victimization , and difference, and to celebrate the polyvalent nature of African American literature, criticism, and history. Until recently, but still quite prevalent today, mainstream American social reality was/is defined by the white/black binary of signification that defines whites as normative and superior, and that represents blacks as inferior, as a victim , as devalued Other, or, more recently, as the Same. The narrative of the sociopolitical mission of racial uplift reinforces this binary system and the representation of the African American as a victim. To reconfigure the African American as a non-victim, as a subject with agency who is different but equal, I examine historically from whence this binary comes. My research led me to the European Renaissance and to the rise of European colonialism, modernity, and capital. Then, I deconstruct/disrupt the binary. Using postcolonial theory, I examine the manifestation of the white/black binary on African American literature, criticism, and history. I scrutinize closely the mission of racial uplift, particularly its literary arm, the canon of African American literature, and its version of American/African American history, showing how this mission actually reproduces the white/black binary in the canon of African American literature, African American history, and African American inferiority/victimization. The African...