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Main blurb (for internal use only - CHECK BEFORE USING IN PRINTED PUBLICITY): Hortense Spillers's THE IDEA OF BLACK CULTURE will consist of six chapters, described below, in some detail (she has supplied more detail than I give here). Her book exploits Eagleton's successful title, and like Eagleton's book, grounds its subject (but more thoroughly) in its history. The engagement here - the controversy, as to what can be meant by the term 'Black Culture' and the necessity to bear witness to history - will run through her several strands of argument. More obviously in her sights, in her concluding chapter, are those people (treasonable clerks), like Henry Louis Gates, Houston Baker, Cornel West, who, in her view - have used African-American/Black Studies to their own financial ends, usurping and exploiting their history in a cult of personality. Spillers is an eminent and adversarial figure, acquainted personally with many of the greats of African-American culture. Her work bears steady witness to the plight of African-Americans, to the full history of slavery, North (she has written in her latest book on the horrific breeding farms in Massachusetts) and South. 1) Black culture as a discursive field-in fact, of intersecting discursive fields-self-consciously pursues the question of origins, either explicitly or implicitly. Because the motive idea of black culture is advanced as an oppositional form, its theoreticians have had to decide not only what it excludes (is the logic of choice already decided in this case?), but what it must exclude, relative to an absolute "beginning," often embodied in a wide array of symbolic and figurative devices summed up as "Africa." It is important to insist on a distinction here between the massive geopolitical complex of the African continent, with particular reference to Subsaharan Africa, and the plethora of poetics attendant upon literary notions of "Africa," which frequencies are not only not synonymous and commensurate, but describe different orders of cases entirely; often enough, these realms of attention are elided as if they were twina. The question of genesis is by far the most prestigious problematic of scholarship and writing on the culture of black life-worlds, inasmuch as any given moment of social and political practice is predicated, even when implicitly emergent, on where the culture comes from; the current Afrocentric fashion in the United States, for example, is not new, though many of its tenets and tonalities have been redrafted as a contemporary response to the mid-century movements in Civil Rights and the Black Nationalist resurgence subsequent to it. Afrocentric theory has never dominated the field of cultural explanation, but it is fair to say that it has always been a contender, solidly poised against "integrationist/assimilationist" appeals on the one hand and "nationalist/separatist/essentialist" claims on the other. Much of the writing about the black culture problematic tends to poach on the ground of its nearest textual and contextual neighbors-history, politics, and economics-and can hardly be imagined without reference to "race" as theory, as interlinked material practices, as the bane or boon of public policy and address. In (more or less) monolingual communities, as in the United States and Great Britain, "culture" and "race" attend the same school, whereas the lines are drawn quite otherwise in multi- or bi-lingual national formations, as in the complicated instance of Canada, or in bilateral religious spheres, as in the case of Ireland. To say so is not to suggest that "race" does not appear in various interarticulations (with religious, linguistic, and national/nationalistic cartographies), neither is it to say that monolingual systems of language do not engender what Hazel Carby has called "differently oriented social interests within one and the same sign community." But juxtaposing "race/culture" does show how one of the lines of force might be described through a stage of heterogeneously poised cultural valences. While "race" for the most part marks the battleground in Diasporic African communities, it is the "it" that means different things in different black cultural regions; in certain Caribbean communities, for example, one is not black in Kingston, or Basse Terre, or Fort de France for the same reasons that she might be in St. Louis, or Atlanta, USA. In the former instance, "race" loses some of its pernicious evaluative force since the community operates by the social logic of the "same," while in the latter, the confrontation of heterogeneous subjects, contending for status, for superior talisman, designates "race" as an absolutely reified property, negatively weighted, in marked and unmarked positionings. Not too clearly, the taxonomies of marking, of stigmatizing, might be as ingeniously derived as a given situation demands, but the unseen trick is that the mark always follows an arbitrary path; "blackness," for instance, is not inherently remarkable as we can think of certain contexts in which it actually "disappears" as a strategy of discrimination. Conventionally, however, it is one of the master signs of difference. Where "race" pressures are aligned in binaristic display, Afrocentric theories of culture arise as the most impassioned counterclaim. But after all, Afrocentric views of culture and their competing conceptual narratives are situated within rhetorical systems of address that may be said to constitute the discursive field of black culture. In the opening chapter, then, we will attempt to lay out a conceptual scheme of instances of black culture's discursive field according to fours stress points: a) the hagiographical tendency, which posits black heroes in a mimetic tradition of writing and celebration that traces back to the lives of the Saints; decisively marked as an intellectual technology that replicates and re-enforces the mythic cult of the "leader," the hagiographical figure is manifest in divergent textual venues, form Negritude, to the "New Negro" of the Harlem Renaissance, to certain contemporary critical paradigms, even, to coeval Aftocentric postures; b) the teleological tendency, while related to a), projects a closural motive that opposes it: along this axis, black culture, liberated from the constraints that have paradoxically hemmed it in and defined it simultaneously, would sit, primus inter pares, at the great feast of world cultures. Whereas in the hagiographical outline, black culture follows a retroversive path, in the teleological, its coronation lies ahead. One points toward the past, the other toward an already fulfilled future; c) the sociological-historiographical figure, with its secular emphases, takes its name less from specific disciplinary interests within the social sciences than the general disposition to account for the cultural phenomena before it by way of the checks and measures of "reality" as well as the impact of historical cause and effect; this particular view places black culture squarely in the world of change and of the contingent. Perhaps it could be said in this case that there is "black culture" only insofar as it elaborates a "measurable" politics, a viable economics, and a soundly rationalized historical progression, often comparatively framed; d) the metacritical-theoretical figure shows little of a) and b), makes frequent raids on c), and might be thought of as the most "self-conscious" of these routes of rhetorical procedure. Its aim, refracting a gamut of post-modernist writing practices, is to bring "black culture" in communication, as a writing, with a "hermeneutics of suspicion"-in other words, with the ironical and paronomasic play of signs; much of the work in this discursive field is inhabited by academic critical projects on the arts, e.g., literature, music, dancing, and the plastic arts, as well as a newly concatenated cluster of objects (unspecified) that go by the collective name of "cultural studies." "Culture" here is not delimited as a fairly well defined category of alignments, but stretching out in amoebic unruliness, occupies the whole of the life-world, much like history and politics were perceived to do in the post-Second World War period. These lines of conduct, which I am designating here as kinds of rhetorical attitudes, may exist in combination, as well as discrete patterns of address, but each is advanced in the interest of attempting to penetrate its claim to the how of it, for running beneath the press of any rhetorical system, which either excludes or elides what would challenge it, lest its systematicity fall apart, is the key, I believe, to the modalities of cultural self-perception that play back over and over again. What all of these dispositions have in common is advocacy; perhaps we might put it down as a rule-in order to survive as a narrative about "black culture"-conceptual or otherwise-the maker must tell a good story, even when it is a critical one. To that degree, and the fabulists of black culture are not alone in this, culture, as discursive economy enacts defensive ends. It is warfare at the level of the scriptive. 2) As a field of material practices, black culture(s) makes a cut in Western time, creates its pockets and fissures, disabuses it of the illusion of "wholeness." We may be well justified in claiming that black culture gives the West its identity, or in short, a way to know what it is for in recognition of what it imagines it is against. In certain details of a binaristic staging,, opposition disappears as these forces in agonism become mutually framed and entangled. In a demonstration of this principle, I should like to examine in the work's second chapter various artistic and other cultural phenomena deployed on six cityscapes, anchored to a comparative reading: 1) Detroit, with Motown and the black church; 2) London with the Caribbean Artists' Movement (CAM); 3) Paris with Negritude and "Presence Africaine"; 4) Manhattan with black dance and jazz; 5) "Today": the moment in which we are located in Toronto with West Indian writing, and 6) Kingston at the table (or making Jamaican fried chicken in Berlin when you have to leave off the "poppin John" because you cannot find the black or red beans). These cuts across the times of representative spaces of the Western city are made in order to put flesh on the bones of an abstraction, but the sites themselves offer a rich vantage on developments in the unfolding saga of diasporic African peoples. Unsatisfactory because of its necessarily severe statistical limits and because it is confined to our just-closed "si?cle de fer," this repertory of choices, if successfully maneuvered, will permit permutation and addition (for example, the annual carnivals in Brazil and Trinidad, as well as black New Orleans' "Mardi Gras," or the "negrismo" movements of Cuban modernism) and will argue forcefully that "culture" is "movement" through a material scene (in that regard, "culture" is "acting"), and unlike the tree felled in the forest, but no one heard it, only becomes the stuff of culture through witnesses. Culture is, therefore, a participatory forum, one way or another, "high," "low," "middle," and it proceeds by social contagion-the more, the merrier! By definition "popular," culture must eventually account for the relay of arrangements by which a given community of subjects translates the things of its ecosystem, the "supports" that "nature" provides, including the range of social precedents, into the tasks and devices of the spirit; culture in that regard perhaps renders a quintessential demonstration of the transmuted substance-from the seen, or the more-or-less ready-at-hand implement, to the unseen "building" not made by human hands, though it was. Culture, on this analogy, instantiates a paradox: that an ensemble of subjects, for example, in a coordinated banging on a flat surface, or a rhythmic scratching on one, or, yet a precisely choreographed leap across it, might effect alterations in another's coronary patterns, or caloric count, or even induce a confirmed bachelor to change his mind. 3) An "imagined community," which is inhabited by a grammar of attitudes and feelings, black culture is profoundly personal; in this light, it would not be wrong to say that its grammars properly belong to the psychoanalytic sphere; thinkers about the culture have been trying to name this dimension of it for quite a while now, but without exhausting the possibilities. In his study of the U.S. poetry movement of the black sixties, Stephen Henderson redirected the meaning of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's "mascon" to explain this marked saturation of elements that break over the cultural participants in a wash of recognition. Henderson argued that these cultural signatures, benchmarks, if you will, could be captured by the poet and that his doing so formalized an instance of black cultural protocol. Whatever we might nominate this "something within," we would have to acknowledge that "it" belongs to the imaginary, or that ensemble of objects of desire that appear only in symbolic displacement and significant misrecognition. Right away, one sees the problem: To talk about "black culture" as a community of belonging that transcends particularities of time, generation, space/place, is to slip quietly onto psychoanalytic ground, in which event we are talking about a composite person on the model of the "one." But can we speak about the culture without this "one"? This perfectly shaped, ideal actor/actant who is the same for my parents' generation of the great nonegenarians as for my own of the quintegenarians and my nieces and nephews of the quartegenarians? Not finding her/him/it is the equivalent of waiting for God/ot, whose failure to turn up (often enough) is translated as the disappointed revolutionary change; it is the lament that black folk ought to do some things better because they are "black" and "know" by dint of the suffering that their culture opens a special window onto. But what is it that "we" agelessly "know"? The third chapter here will be devoted to a reading of the fictional character of Langston Hughes's ageless "Jesse B. Simple" as a way to approach the undecidable "it's a black thang." Running across the decades as a feature of the old "Pittsburgh Courier," where I first encountered this priceless treasure as a beribboned school girl, the tales of "Simple" offer a perspective on black culture as a system of values and beliefs that are imagined to make up its bed-rock. 4) As one of the sites of creolization, black culture, like the West, establishes itself as an autochthonous regime, an unassimilable, an undivided alternative. But by way of that very logic, it shows itself everywhere porous to intervention. Processes of creolization most often refer to linguistic systems evolved in the Atlantic Slave Trade and to the genetic ensemble of elements parented by African-European conjunction; but if we could slide the scale of reference just a bit, we might be able to apply the concept to varied artistic phenomena, as in the impact of certain modernisms and post-modernisms on black cultural production, i.e., Elizabeth Catlett's sculptures, Romare Bearden's paintings, Keith Jarrett's exquisite noises, poised somewhere between J. S. Bach and A. Copland, but somehow neither, or even the influence of classical flamenco guitar on middle Miles Davis; in the fourth chapter, then, we will examine traffic in the "contact zone," firstly by rereading one of its most salient theoretical formulations, mounted in Ralph Ellison's "Little Man at Chehaw Station," then in an attempt to scrutinizing elements of a ritualistic syncretism as displayed in the public profile of the Nation of Islam, especially its 1996 "Million Man March." That this well publicized event was "mediated" by the "devil's" technological means shows the boomerang effect: That in its most strident oppositional stances, instances of black culture display must conjure with its putative Other. Whether or not, a million black men actually marched on the nation's capital became , predictably, a matter of dispute , and in a certain sense, the only thing that mattered was the powerful symbolic import of such a number, but for sure, thousands upon thousands were captured by cameras at the Washington Monument, as, moreover, thousands of others quite likely monitored U.S. television outlets that were, at least for a day, "all Farakhan." Narrated as the nation's latest avatar of the "Apostle of Hate," Minister Farakhan knows very well how media play the mythemes, those bits and bytes of image-message, interstitial with the commercial break, that rivet the public imagination. The "imagined community" never actually "sees" itself as its own empirical evidence, but the massive sociability of television enables the idea of the gathering. Precisely imitative of the "perceptual apparatus," the televisual means in this case metaphorized the notion in one's mind of what the "imagined community" might actually look like if it were possible to convoke it in a single unbroken sequence The picture that the subject carries in his brain experiences little moments of the realization of a massive ensemble that never appears when his eye pierces the surface of a well attended rally, or mass meeting. In that moment, "everyone" is present and accounted for, as television here gives the effect of a proliferating "presence" that throws an ideal image. 5) Because it is not possible to contemplate black culture without placing it squarely within the development narratives of the West, the fifth chapter will take up the question of the role of money-specifically its modern appearance-in the advancement of the African slave trade. The question here is how the progressive displacements of meaning and value, captured in the notion of the fetish, so dissembled the human and social desecration of African humanity in this case that the logic of property was made to prevail at all costs. How two key thinkers of the late nineteenth century-Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud-converged on the same object is a profoundly puzzling intellectual detail, but read in tandem on the fetish, this pairing might well show the psychoanalytic dimension of "home economics." But in any case, the problem is to "speak" this semiosis across the body of prototypical black culture formation. 6) The Black Studies Movement in the United States was never actually called a "movement," but in hindsight those earliest formations, arising, in part, by accident and contingency, seem to have been inducing movement, insofar as they appeared on predominantly white campuses like falling dominoes, or in tune with a spate of popular lyrics of the times, like a rolling stone. By the early to mid nineteen-seventies, what had been stumbled upon in a continuation of black political struggle by other means was becoming increasingly instaurated as a curricular object, a bureaucratic unit in a radically revisionist setting for the new Humanities, a thorn in the side of the Faculties, and the heaviest arm?r in the arsenal of the new University subject. The sixth and final chapter of Discriminations is devoted to an analysis of that moment which awaits theorization: when a political mandate, ordained by history, translates its objectives into its object. To this day, "Black Studies," mostly under other names-"African-American Studies" (from "Afro-American Studies"), "Africana Studies," "Pan-African Studies," and perhaps in the near future, African Diasporic Studies-shows the ambivalence of its historical moment. I believe that it is possible to situate the idea of "black culture" within this epistemological engagement and to suggest that as a cluster of critical inquiries, "black culture" now belongs to the academy in the West. This quite remarkable eventuality, for all its unevenness of development and for all the misfortune that might attend it in certain of its settings and manifestations, gives us the unusual occasion to witness the university itself as a living organism rather than a museum piece.
Main blurb (for internal use only - CHECK BEFORE USING IN PRINTED PUBLICITY): Hortense Spillers's THE IDEA OF BLACK CULTURE will consist of six chapters, described below, in some detail (she has supplied more detail than I give here). Her book exploits Eagleton's successful title, and like Eagleton's book, grounds its subject (but more thoroughly) in its history. The engagement here - the controversy, as to what can be meant by the term 'Black Culture' and the necessity to bear witness to history - will run through her several strands of argument. More obviously in her sights, in her concluding chapter, are those people (treasonable clerks), like Henry Louis Gates, Houston Baker, Cornel West, who, in her view - have used African-American/Black Studies to their own financial ends, usurping and exploiting their history in a cult of personality. Spillers is an eminent and adversarial figure, acquainted personally with many of the greats of African-American culture. Her work bears steady witness to the plight of African-Americans, to the full history of slavery, North (she has written in her latest book on the horrific breeding farms in Massachusetts) and South. 1) Black culture as a d
'.....Through an exhaustive investigation of black songs, folk tales, proverbs, aphorisms, verbal games and the long narrative oral poems known as 'toasts, ' Levine argues that the value system of Afro-Americans can only be understood through an analysis of Black culture....His work ranks among the best books written on the Afro-American experience in recent years.' Al-Tony Gilmore, The Washington Post
An account of the location of black intellectuals in the modern world following the end of racial slavery. The lives and writings of key African Americans such as Martin Delany, W.E.B. Dubois, Frederick Douglas and Richard Wright are examined in the light of their experiences in Europe and Africa.
The Cultural Territories of Race makes an important contribution to current policy debates by amplifying muted voices that have too often been ignored by other social scientists.
A surprising and fascinating look at how Black culture has been leveraged by corporate America. Open the brochure for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and you'll see logos for corporations like American Express. Visit the website for the Apollo Theater, and you'll notice acknowledgments to corporations like Coca Cola and Citibank. The Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial and the National Museum of African American History and Culture, owe their very existence to large corporate donations from companies like General Motors. And while we can easily make sense of the need for such funding to keep cultural spaces afloat, less obvious are the reasons that corporations give to them. In Black Culture, Inc., Patricia A. Banks interrogates the notion that such giving is completely altruistic, and argues for a deeper understanding of the hidden transactions being conducted that render corporate America dependent on Black culture. Drawing on a range of sources, such as public relations and advertising texts on corporate cultural patronage and observations at sponsored cultural events, Banks argues that Black cultural patronage profits firms by signaling that they value diversity, equity, and inclusion. By functioning in this manner, support of Black cultural initiatives affords these companies something called "diversity capital," an increasingly valuable commodity in today's business landscape. While this does not necessarily detract from the social good that cultural patronage does, it reveals its secret cost: ethnic community support may serve to obscure an otherwise poor track record with social justice. Banks deftly weaves innovative theory with detailed observations and a discerning critical gaze at the various agendas infiltrating memorials, museums, and music festivals meant to celebrate Black culture. At a time when accusations of discriminatory practices are met with immediate legal and social condemnation, the insights offered here are urgent and necessary.
By examining the unique problems that 'blackness' signifies in Moby-Dick, Pierre, 'Benito Cereno' and 'The Encantadas', Christopher Freeburg analyzes how Herman Melville grapples with the social realities of racial difference in nineteenth-century America. Where Melville's critics typically read blackness as either a metaphor for the haunting power of slavery or an allegory of moral evil, Freeburg asserts that blackness functions as the site where Melville correlates the sociopolitical challenges of transatlantic slavery and US colonial expansion with philosophical concerns about mastery. By focusing on Melville's iconic interracial encounters, Freeburg reveals the important role blackness plays in Melville's portrayal of characters' arduous attempts to seize their own destiny, amass scientific knowledge and perfect themselves. A valuable resource for scholars and graduate students in American literature, this text will also appeal to those working in American, African American and postcolonial studies.
Within the history of African American struggle against racist oppression that often verges on dystopia, a hidden tradition has depicted a transfigured world. Daring to speculate on a future beyond white supremacy, black utopian artists and thinkers offer powerful visions of ways of being that are built on radical concepts of justice and freedom. They imagine a new black citizen who would inhabit a world that soars above all existing notions of the possible. In Black Utopia, Alex Zamalin offers a groundbreaking examination of African American visions of social transformation and their counterutopian counterparts. Considering figures associated with racial separatism, postracialism, anticolonialism, Pan-Africanism, and Afrofuturism, he argues that the black utopian tradition continues to challenge American political thought and culture. Black Utopia spans black nationalist visions of an ideal Africa, the fiction of W. E. B. Du Bois, and Sun Ra’s cosmic mythology of alien abduction. Zamalin casts Samuel R. Delany and Octavia E. Butler as political theorists and reflects on the antiutopian challenges of George S. Schuyler and Richard Wright. Their thought proves that utopianism, rather than being politically immature or dangerous, can invigorate political imagination. Both an inspiring intellectual history and a critique of present power relations, this book suggests that, with democracy under siege across the globe, the black utopian tradition may be our best hope for combating injustice.
The New York Times best-selling book exploring the counterproductive reactions white people have when their assumptions about race are challenged, and how these reactions maintain racial inequality. In this “vital, necessary, and beautiful book” (Michael Eric Dyson), antiracist educator Robin DiAngelo deftly illuminates the phenomenon of white fragility and “allows us to understand racism as a practice not restricted to ‘bad people’ (Claudia Rankine). Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration, DiAngelo examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively.