The Race for Theory Author(s): Barbara Christian Source: Feminist Studies, Vol. 14, No. 1, (Spring, 1988), pp. 67-79 Published by: Feminist Studies, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3177999 Accessed: 28/05/2008 01:47

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http://www.jstor.org THE RACE FOR THEORY

BARBARACHRISTIAN

I have seized this occasionto breakthe silence amongthose of us, critics, as we are now called, who have been intimidated,de- valued by what I call the racefor theory.I have become convinced that there has been a takeover in the literaryworld by Western philosophers from the old literary elite, the neutral humanists. Philosophershave been able to effect such a takeoverbecause so much of the literatureof the West has become pallid, laden with despair,self-indulgent, and disconnected.The New Philosophers, eager to understand a world that is today fast escaping their politicalcontrol, have redefinedliterature so that the distinctions implied by that term, that is, the distinctionsbetween everything written and those things written to evoke feeling as well as to ex- press thought, have been blurred. They have changed literary criticallanguage to suit their own purposes as philosophers,and they have reinventedthe meaning of theory. My first responseto this realizationwas to ignoreit. Perhaps,in spite of the egocentrismof this trend, some good might come of it. I had, I felt, more pressing and interestingthings to do, such as readingand studyingthe historyand literatureof black women, a history that had been totally ignored, a contemporaryliterature burstingwith originality,passion, insight,and beauty. But, unfor- tunately,it is difficultto ignorethis new takeover,because theory has become a commodity that helps determine whether we are hired or promoted in academic institutions-worse, whether we are heard at all. Due to this new orientation,works (a word that evokes labor)have become texts. Criticsare no longer concerned with literaturebut with other critics'texts, for the critic yearning for attentionhas displacedthe writerand has conceivedof herself or himself as the center. Interestingly,in the first part of this cen-

Reprinted with changes from Cultural Critique6 (Spring 1987): 51-63. 67 68 Barbara Christian

tury, at least in Englandand America,the criticwas usuallyalso a writer of poetry, plays, or novels. But today, as a new generation of professionalsdevelops, she or he is increasinglyan academic. Activities such as teaching or writing one's response to specific works of literaturehave, among this group,become subordinated to one primarythrust-that moment when one creates a theory, thus fixinga constellationof ideas for a time at least, a fixingwhich no doubt will be replacedin another month or so by somebody else's competingtheory as the race accelerates.Perhaps because those who have effected the takeover have the power (although they deny it) first of all to be published,and thereby to determine the ideas that are deemed valuable,some of our most daringand potentiallyradical critics (andby our I mean black, women, Third World)have been influenced,even co-opted,into speakinga lan- guage and definingtheir discussionin terms alien to and opposed to our needs and orientation.At least so far, the creativewriters I study have resistedthis language. For people of color have always theorized-but in forms quite different from the Western form of abstractlogic. And I am in- clined to say that our theorizing(and I intentionallyuse the verb ratherthan the noun) is often in narrativeforms, in the storieswe create,in riddlesand proverbs,in the play with language,because dynamicrather than fixed ideas seem more to our liking.How else have we managedto survive with such spiritednessthe assaulton our bodies, social institutions,countries, our very humanity?And women, at least the women I grew up around, continuously speculatedabout the natureof life throughpithy languagethat un- maskedthe power relationsof their world. It is this language,and the graceand pleasurewith which they played with it, that I find celebrated,refined, critiqued in the works of writers like Toni Morrisonand Alice Walker.My folk, in other words, have always been a race for theory-though more in the form of the hiero- glyph, a written figure that is both sensual and abstract,both beautifuland communicative.In my own work I try to illuminate and explainthese hieroglyphs,which is, I think, an activityquite differentfrom the creatingof the hieroglyphsthemselves. As the Buddhistswould say, the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. In this discussion,however, I am more concernedwith the issue raisedby my first use of the term, the racefor theory,in relationto BarbaraChristian 69 its academic hegemony, and possibly of its inappropriatenessto the energeticemerging literatures in the world today. The perva- siveness of this academichegemony is an issue continuallyspoken about-but usually in hidden groups, lest we, who are disturbed by it, appearignorant to the reigningacademic elite. Among the folk who speak in muted tones are people of color, feminists, radical critics, creative writers, who have struggled for much longer than a decade to make their voices, their various voices, heard, and for whom literatureis not an occasion for discourse among critics but is necessary nourishmentfor their people and one way by which they come to understandtheir lives better. Cliched though this may be, it bears, I think, repeatinghere. The race for theory-with its linguisticjargon; its emphasis on quoting its prophets; its tendency toward '"biblical"exegesis; its refusaleven to mention specific works of creativewriters, far less contemporaryones; its preoccupationswith mechanicalanalyses of language,graphs, algebraic equations; its gross generalizations about culture- has silenced many of us to the extent that some of us feel we can no longer discuss our own literature,and others have developed intense writingblocks and are puzzled by the in- comprehensibilityof the language set adrift in literary circles. There have been, in the last year, any number of occasions on which I had to convince literarycritics who have pioneeredentire new areas of criticalinquiry that they did have somethingto say. Some of us are continuallyharassed to invent wholesale theories regardlessof the complexityof the literaturewe study. I, for one, am tired of being asked to producea black feministliterary theory as if I were a mechanical man. For I believe such theory is prescriptive-it ought to have some relationshipto practice. Be- cause I can count on one hand the numberof people attemptingto be black feminist literarycritics in the world today, I considerit presumptuousof me to invent a theory of how we oughtto read. Instead, I think we need to read the works of our writers in our variousways and remainopen to the intricaciesof the intersection of language,class, race, and genderin the literature.And it would help if we share our process, that is, our practice, as much as possible because, finally, our work is a collective endeavor. The insidiousquality of this race for theoryis symbolizedfor me by a term like "minoritydiscourse," a label that is borrowedfrom the reigningtheory of the day but which is untrueto the literatures 70 Barbara Christian being produced by our writers, for many of our literatures(cer- tainlyAfro-American literature) are central,not minor.I have used the passive voice in my last sentence construction,contrary to the rules of black English, which like all languageshas a particular value system, because I have not placed reponsibilityon any par- ticular person or group. But that is precisely because this new ideologyhas become so prevalentamong us that it behaves like so many of the other ideologieswith which we have had to contend. It appearsto have neitherhead nor center.At the least,though, we can say that the terms"minority" and "discourse"are locatedfirmly in a Westerndualistic or "binary"frame which sees the rest of the world as minorand tries to convince the rest of the world that it is major,usually through force and then throughlanguage, even as it claims many of the ideas that we, its "historical"other, have known and spoken about for so long. For many of us have never conceived of ourselves only as somebody'sother. Let me not give the impressionthat by objectingto the race for theory I ally myself with or agreewith the neutralhumanists who see literatureas pure expressionand will not admitto the obvious control of its production,value, and distributionby those who have power, who deny, in other words, that literature is, of necessity, political.I am studyingan entire body of literaturethat has been denigratedfor centuriesby such terms as political.For an entire century Afro-Americanwriters, from CharlesChestnutt in the nineteenthcentury throughRichard Wright in the 1930s, Im- amu Barakain the 1960s, Alice Walker in the 1970s, have pro- tested the literaryhierarchy of dominancewhich declares when literatureis literature,when literatureis great,depending on what it thinksis to its advantage.The blackarts movement of the 1960s, out of which black studies, the feminist literarymovement of the 1970s, and women's studies grew, articulated precisely those issues, which came not from the declarationsof the New Western Philosophersbut from these groups'reflections on their own lives. ThatWestern scholars have long believed their ideas to be univer- sal has been stronglyopposed by many such groups.Some of my colleaguesdo not see black criticalwriters of previousdecades as eloquent enough. Clearly they have not read RichardWright's "Blueprintfor Negro Writing,"Ralph Ellison'sShadow and Act, Charles Chesnutt's resignation from being a writer, or Alice Walker's"Search for ZoraNeale Hurston."There are two reasons Barbara Christian 71

for this generalignorance of what our writer-criticshave said. One is that black writing has been generallyignored in this country. Becausewe, as Toni Morrisonhas put it, are seen as a discredited people, it is no surprise, then, that our creations are also discredited. But this is also due to the fact that, until recently, dominant critics in the Western world have also been creative writerswho have had access to the upper-middle-classinstitutions of education,and, until recently,our writershave decidedlybeen excluded from these institutionsand in fact have often been op- posed to them. Becauseof the academicworld's general ignorance about the literatureof black people, and of women, whose work too has been discredited,it is not surprisingthat so many of our critics think that the position arguing that literatureis political begins with these New Philosophers.Unfortunately, many of our young critics do not investigate the reasons why that state- ment - literature is political -is now acceptable when before it was not; nor do we look to our own antecedentsfor the sophisticated arguments upon which we can build in order to change the tendency of any establishedWestern idea to become hegemonic. For I feel that the new emphasis on literarycritical theory is as hegemonic as the world it attacks.I see the languageit creates as one that mystifies rather than clarifies our condition, making it possible for a few people who know that particularlanguage to control the critical scene. That language surfaced, interestingly enough,just when the literatureof peoples of color,black women, LatinAmericans, and Africansbegan to move to "thecenter." Such words as centerand periphery are themselvesinstructive. Discourse, canon, texts, words as Latinateas the traditionfrom which they come, are quite familiarto me. Because I went to a Catholicmis- sion school in the West IndiesI must confess that I cannothear the word "canon"without smelling incense, that the word "text"im- mediately brings back agonizingmemories of biblical exegesis, that "discourse"reeks for me of metaphysics forced down my throatin those coursesthat tracedworld philosophy from Aristotle through Aquinas to Heidegger."Periphery" too is a word I heard throughoutmy childhood,for if anythingwas seen as being at the periphery,it was those small Caribbeanislands that had neither land mass nor militarypower. Still I noted how intensely impor- tant this periphery was, for U.S. troups were continually invading one island or another if any change in political control ever seemed 72 Barbara Christian to be occurring.As I lived amongfolk for whom languagewas an absolutelynecessary way of validatingour existence,I was told that the minds of the world lived only in the small continentof Europe. The metaphysicallanguage of the New Philosophy,then, I must ad- mit, is repulsive to me and is one reason why I raced from philosophyto literature,because the latterseemed to me to have the possibilitiesof renderingthe world as largeand as complicated as I experiencedit, as sensual as I knew it was. In literatureI sensed the possibilityof the integrationof feeling/knowledge,rather than the split between the abstractand the emotionalin which Westernphilosophy inevitably indulged. Now I am being told that philosophersare the ones who write literature;that authorsare dead, irrelevant,mere vessels through which their narrativesooze; that they do not work nor have they the faintest idea what they are doing- rather,they produce texts as disembodied as the angels. I am frankly astonished that scholars who call themselves Marxists or post-Marxistscould seriouslyuse such metaphysicallanguage even as they attemptto deconstructthe philosophicaltradition from which their language comes. And as a student of literature,I am appalledby the sheer ugliness of the language,its lack of clarity,its unnecessarilycom- plicated sentence constructions,its lack of pleasurableness,its alienatingquality. It is the kind of writingfor which composition teachers would give a first-yearstudent a resoundingF. Because I am a curiousperson, however, I postponedreadings of black women writers I was working on and read some of the prophets of this new literaryorientation. These writers did an- nounce their dissatisfactionwith some of the cornerstoneideas of their own tradition,a dissatisfactionwith which I was born. But in their attempt to change the orientationof Western scholarship, they, as usual, concentratedon themselves and were not in the slightestinterested in the worlds they had ignoredor controlled. Again I was supposedto know them,while they were not at all in- terested in knowing me. Instead,they sought to "deconstruct"the tradition to which they belonged even as they used the same forms, style, and languageof that tradition,forms that necessarily embody its values. And increasinglyas I read them and saw their substitution of their philosophicalwritings for literary ones, I began to have the uneasy feeling that their folk were not produc- ing any literature worth mentioning. For they always harkened BarbaraChristian 73 back to the masterpiecesof the past, again reifyingthe very texts they said they were deconstructing.Increasingly, as theirway, their terms, theirapproaches remained central and became the means by which one defined literarycritics, many of my own peers who had previouslybeen concentratingon dealingwith the other side of the equation-the reclamationand discussion of past and pres- ent Third World literatures- were diverted into continuallydis- cussing the new literarytheory. From my point of view as a critic of contemporaryAfro-Amer- ican women'swriting, this orientationis extremelyproblematic. In attemptingto find the deep structuresin the literarytradition, a majorpreoccupation of the new New Criticism,many of us have become obsessedwith the natureof readingitself to the extentthat we have stopped writing about literaturebeing written today. Since I am slightly paranoid,it has begun to occur to me that the literaturebeing producedis preciselyone of the reasonswhy this new philosophical-literary-criticaltheory of relativityis so promi- nent. In other words, the literatureof blacks, women of South America and Africa, and so forth, as overtly "political"literature was being preempted by a new Western concept which pro- claimedthat realitydoes not exist, that everythingis relative,and that every text is silent about something-which indeed it must necessarilybe. There is, of course, much to be learnedfrom exploringhow we know what we know, how we read what we read, an exploration which, of necessity, can have no end. But there also has to be a "what,"and that "what,"when it is even mentioned by the New Philosophers,are texts of the past, primarilyWestern male texts, whose norms are again being transferredonto Third World and female texts as theories of readingproliferate. Inevitably a hier- archy has now developed between what is called theoreticalcriti- cism and practicalcriticism, as mind is deemed superiorto matter. I have no quarrelwith those who wish to philosophizeabout how we know what we know. But I do resent the fact that this par- ticularorientation is so privileged,and has divertedso many of us from doing the first readingsof the literaturebeing written today as well as of past works about which nothing has been written. I note, for example,that there is little work done on GloriaNaylor, that most of Alice Walker's works have not been commented on - despite the rage around The Color Purple-that there has yet to be 74 Barbara Christian

an in-depthstudy of FrancesHarper, the nineteenth-centuryaboli- tionist poet and novelist. If our emphasis on theoreticalcriticism continues,critics of the futuremay have to reclaimthe writerswe are now ignoring,that is, if they are even awarethese artistsexist. I am particularlyperturbed by the movementto exalt theory, as well, because of my own adult history.I was an active memberof the black arts movement of the sixties and know how dangerous theory can become. Manytoday may not be awareof this, but the black arts movement tried to create black literarytheory and in doing so became prescriptive.My fear is that when theory is not rooted in practice,it becomes prescriptive,exclusive, elitish. An example of this prescriptivenessis the approachthe black arts movement took towardlanguage. For it, blacknessresided in the use of blacktalk which they definedas hip urbanlanguage. So that when Nikki Giovanni reviewed Paule Marshall'sChosen Place, TimelessPeople, she criticizedthe novel on the groundsthat it was not black, for the language was too elegant, too white. Blacks, she said, did not speak that way. Having come from the West Indieswhere we do, some of the time, speakthat way, I was amazedby the narrownessof her vision. The emphasison one way to be black resultedin the works of Southernwriters being seen as nonblackbecause the blacktalk of Georgiadoes not sound like the black talk of Philadelphia.Because the ideologues, like Baraka, came from the urbancenters, they tendedto privilegetheir way of speaking,thinking, writing, and to condemnother kinds of writing as not beingblack enough. Whole areas of the canon were assessed accordingto the dictum of the black arts nationalistpoint of view, as in Addison Gayle's The Way of the New World,and other works were ignoredbecause they did not fit the scheme of culturalna- tionalism. Older writers like Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin were condemnedbecause they saw that the intersectionof West- ern and African influences resulted in a new Afro-American culture, a position with which many of the black nationalist idealogues disagreed.Writers were told that writing love poems was not being black. Furtherexamples abound. It is true that the black arts movement resultedin a necessary and importantcritique both of previousAfro-American literature and of the white-establishedliterary world. But in attemptingto take over power, it, as Ishmael Reed satirizesso well in Mumbo Jumbo,became much like its opponent,monolithic and downright repressive. BarbaraChristian 75

It is this tendency toward the monolithic,monotheistic, and so on, that worries me about the race for theory. Constructslike the centerand the peripheryreveal that tendency to want to make the world less complex by organizingit accordingto one principle,to fix it throughan idea which is really an ideal. Many of us are par- ticularly sensitive to monolithismbecause one major element of ideologies of dominance, such as sexism and racism, is to de- humanize people by stereotypingthem, by denying them their variousness and complexity. Inevitably,monolithism becomes a metasystem, in which there is a controllingideal, especially in relation to pleasure. Languageas one form of pleasure is im- mediately restricted and becomes heavy, abstract, prescriptive, monotonous. Variety, multiplicity, eroticism are difficult to control. And it may very well be that these are the reasonswhy writersare often seen as personanon grata by political states, whatever form they take, because writers/artistshave a tendency to refuse to give up their way of seeing the world and of playingwith possibilities;in fact, their very expressionrelies on that insistence.Perhaps that is why creative literature,even when written by politically reac- tionary people, can be so freeing, for in having to embody ideas and recreatethe world, writerscannot merely produce"one way." The characteristicsof the black arts movement are, I am afraid, being repeatedagain today, certainlyin the other area to which I am especially tuned. In the race for theory, feminists, eager to enter the halls of power, have attemptedtheir own prescriptions. So often I have read books on feminist literarytheory that restrict the definitionof what feministmeans and overgeneralizeabout so much of the world that most women as well as men are excluded. And seldom do feministtheorists take into accountthe complexity of life-that women are of many races and ethnic backgrounds with different histories and cultures and that as a rule women belong to differentclasses that have differentconcerns. Seldom do they note these distinctions,because if they did they could not ar- ticulate a theory. Often as a way of clearingthemselves they do acknowledgethat women of color, for example, do exist, then go on to do what they were going to do anyway, which is to invent a theory that has little relevance for us. That tendency toward monolithismis precisely how I see the Frenchfeminist theorists. They concentrateon the female body as 76 BarbaraChristian the means to creatinga female language,because language,they say, is male and necessarilyconceives of woman as other. Clearly many of them have been irritatedby the theories of Lacan for whom languageis phallic. But suppose there are peoples in the world whose language was invented primarily in relation to women, who afterall are the ones who relateto childrenand teach language. Some native American languages, for example, use female pronounswhen speakingabout non-gender-specificactivi- ty. Who knows who, accordingto gender,created languages. Fur- ther, by positing the body as the source of everything, French feminists return to the old myth that biology determinesevery- thing and ignore the fact that gender is a social rather than a biologicalconstruct. I could go on critiquingthe positions of French feminists who are themselves more variousin their points of view than the label used to describethem, but that is not my point. What I am con- cerned about is the authority this school now has in feminist scholarship-the way it has become authoritativediscourse, monologic,which occurs preciselybecause it does have access to the means of promulgatingits ideas. The blackarts movement was able to do this for a time because of the politicalmovements of the 1960s-so too with the Frenchfeminists who could not be invent- ing "theory"if a space had not been createdby the women'smove- ment. In both cases, both groups posited a theory that excluded many of the people who made that space possible. Hence, one of the reasonsfor the surge of Afro-Americanwomen's writing dur- ing the 1970s and its emphasison sexism in the black community is preciselythat when the ideologuesof the 1960s said black,they meant blackmale. I and many of my sistersdo not see the world as being so simple. And perhaps that is why we have not rushed to create abstract theories.For we know there are countlesswomen of color,both in Americaand in the rest of the world, to whom our singularideas would be applied.There is, therefore,a cautionwe feel aboutpro- nouncing black feminist theory that might be seen as a decisive statementabout Third World women. This is not to say we are not theorizing.Certainly our literatureis an indicationof the ways in which our theorizing,of necessity, is based on our multiplicityof experiences. There is at least one other lesson I learned from the black arts BarbaraChristian 77 movement. One reasonfor its monolithicapproach had to do with its desire to destroythe power that controlledblack people, but it was a power that many of its ideologueswished to achieve. The natureof our contexttoday is such that an approachwhich desires power single-mindedlymust of necessity become like that which it wishes to destroy. Ratherthan wanting to change the whole model, many of us want to be at the center. It is this point of view that writerslike JuneJordan and AudreLorde continually critique even as they call for empowerment,as they emphasizethe fear of difference among us and our need for leaders rather than a relianceon ourselves. For one must distinguishthe desire for power from the need to become empowered-that is, seeing oneself as capableof and hav- ing the rightto determineone's life. Such empowermentis partial- ly derivedfrom a knowledgeof history.The black arts movement did result in the creationof Afro-Americanstudies as a concept, thus giving it a place in the universitywhere one might engagein the reclamationof Afro-Americanhistory and cultureand pass it on to others. I am particularlyconcerned that institutionssuch as black studies and women'sstudies, foughtfor with such vigor and at some sacrifice,are not often seen as importantby many of our black or women scholars precisely because the old hierarchyof traditionaldepartments is seen as superior to these "marginal" groups. Yet, it is in this context that many others of us are discoveringthe extent of our complexity,the interrelationshipsof different areas of knowledge in relation to a distinctly Afro- Americanor female experience. Ratherthan having to view our world as subordinateto others, or ratherthan havingto work as if we were hybrids, we can pursue ourselves as subjects. My majorobjection to the race for theory, as some readershave probably guessed by now, really hinges on the question, "For whom are we doing what we are doing when we do literary criticismT'It is, I think, the centralquestion today, especiallyfor the few of us who have infiltratedthe academy enough to be wooed by it. The answerto that questiondetermines what orienta- tion we take in our work, the languagewe use, the purposesfor which it is intended. I can only speak for myself. But what I write and how I write is done in order to save my own life. And I mean that literally.For me, literatureis a way of knowingthat I am not hallucinating,that 78 Barbara Christian whatever I feel/know is. It is an affirmationthat sensualityis in- telligence,that sensual languageis languagethat makes sense. My response,then, is directedto those who write what I read and to those who read what I read-put concretely-to Toni Morrison and to people who read Toni Morrison(among whom I would count few academics).That number is increasing,as is the reader- ship of Alice Walker and Paule Marshall.But in no way is the literatureMorrison, Marshall, or Walkercreate supportedby the academicworld. And, given the politicalcontext of our society, I do not expect that to change soon. For there is no reason, given who controlsthese institutions,for them to be anythingother than threatenedby these writers. My readingsdo presupposea need, a desire among folk who, like me, also want to save their own lives. My concern,then, is a passionateone, for the literatureof people who are not in power has always been in danger of extinction or of co-optation,not because we do not theorize but because what we can even im- agine, far less who we can reach, is constantlylimited by societal structures. For me, literary criticism is promotion as well as understanding,a responseto the writerto whom there is often no response, to folk who need the writing as much as they need anything. I know, from literaryhistory, that writing disappears unless there is a responseto it. BecauseI write about writerswho are now writing,I hope to help ensurethat their traditionhas con- tinuity and survives. So my "method,"to use a new "lit.crit." word, is not fixed but relatesto what I read and to the historicalcontext of the writersI read and to the many critical activities in which I am engaged, which may or may not involve writing. It is a learningfrom the languageof creative writers, which is one of surprise, so that I might discover what language I might use. For my language is very much based on what I read and how it affectsme, that is, on the surprisethat comes from readingsomething that compels you to read differently,as I believe literaturedoes. I, therefore,have no set method, anotherprerequisite of the new theory, since for me every work suggests a new approach.As risky as that might seem, it is, I believe, what intelligencemeans-a tuned sensitivity to that which is alive and thereforecannot be known until it is known. Audre Lorde puts it in a far more succinct and sensual way in her essay, "PoetryIs Not a Luxury." Barbara Christian 79

As they become known to and accepted by us, our feelings and the honest ex- ploration of them become sanctuaries and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas. They become a safe-house for that difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action. Right now, I could name at least ten ideas I would have found intolerable or incom- prehensible and frightening, except as they came after dreams and poems. This is not idle fantasy, but a disciplined attention to the true meaning of "it feels right to me." We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into a language so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.'

NOTES

1. Audre Lorde, "Poetry Is Not a Luxury," in Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (Trumansburg,N.Y.: CrossingPress, 1984), 37.