Getting (The) Man Off (Our) Eyeball: White Critical Discourse and African-American Literature

Jeannine DeLombard Getting (The) Man Off (Our) Eyeball: White Critical Discourse and African-American Literature (on William J. Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism between the Wars [New York: Columbia University Press, 1999] and Kenneth Mostern, Autobiography and Black Identity Politics: Racialization in Twentieth-Century America [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999]) Still, it is like Shug say, You have to git man off your eyeball, before you can see anything a'tall. —Alice Walker, The Color Purple At the turn of the twentieth century, the institutional establishment of African-American studies and the emergence of whiteness studies are converging with the notoriously dismal academic job market and the increasing appearance of anti-affirmative action initiatives to focus scholarly attention on the question of (sometimes questionable) white contributions to the field of African-American studies. In a much-needed May 1998 PMLA article, Nellie Y McKay does an excellent job of "Naming the Problem that Led to the Question 'Who Shall Teach African-American Literature?'" Tracing the institutional history of African-American literary studies, McKay argues that over the past thirty years an ongoing reluctance by "white institutions" to encourage the study ofAfrican-American literature, despite the overall flourishing ofAfrican-American studies as a field, has led to "three critical problems that . . . hold African-American literature hostage: the insufficiency of the black PhD pipeline, the efforts to discourage white graduate students from exploring black literature, and untrained white scholars' undertaking of scholarship in black literature" (363). This state of affairs, as many of us in the field know all too well, has created a situation where "the same institutions grapple over the tinypool ofstar [African-American] scholars ," "the most-qualified nonblack candidates are turned away," "many positions go unfulfilled" (363), and, as a result, "important work is left undone, and the crisis is allowed to continue unabated" (364). Elsewhere, Anne DuCiIIe has analyzed the discursive antics of non-black (as well as male) critics who seek to legitimize their study of black women's literature and culture through confessional narratives which, intended to authenticate their scholarly endeavors , only end up demeaning their putative black female subjects. By 342 the minnesota review naming—and analyzing—a problem that has long been the source of considerable professional tension, DuCiIIe and McKay help us to theorize and articulate the scholarly and political implications of white participation in black studies. The discussion, however, is far from over. Indeed, two recent books, William J. Maxwell's Neiv Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism between the Wars and Kenneth Mostern's Autobiography and Black Identity Politics: Racialization in TwentiethCentury America, encourage us for very different reasons to return to the question of what is at stake when white intellectuals attempt to think critically about black culture. The issue is central to Maxwell's lively reexamination of the politics of the Harlem Renaissance , which significantly deepens our understanding of this crucial moment in African-American culture by placing black authors and activists like Andy Razaf, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Louise Thompson, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright in conversation with white leftist fellow-travelers like Mike Gold and Nelson Algren. Acknowledging the tendency, especially after the Cold War-era canonization of Native Son and Invisible Man, to see the relationship between modern black literature and Communism as "a dire scene of white connivance and black self-cancellation" (1), Maxwell shows us instead "a spectrum of exchanges between black and white authors, genres, theories, and cultural institutions," a series of "Red interracialisms of word and deed... [that] opened two-way channels between radical Harlem and Soviet Moscow, between the New Negro Renaissance and proletarian literature" (1). The dual focus of Maxwell's study is crucial here. Drawing on Mark Naison's characterization of African American-Communist interaction as one of "manipulation, disillusionment, and betrayal" (qtd. in Maxwell 3), Maxwell persuasively argues that not only does such a narrative indicate "the long intellectual reach of cold war anti-Communism," but it also participates in the profoundly American (critical) activity of denying the political agency of AfricanAmerican activists. Although Maxwell stresses that inter-war Communism offered unusual support for black artistic and political endeavors...