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Interrogating "Whiteness," Complicating "Blackness": Remapping American Culture Author(S): Shelley Fisher Fishkin Source: American Quarterly, Vol

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Interrogating Interrogating "Whiteness," Complicating "Blackness": Remapping American Culture Author(s): Shelley Fisher Fishkin Source: American Quarterly, Vol. 47, No. 3 (Sep., 1995), pp. 428-466 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2713296 Accessed: 09-06-2015 16:59 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Quarterly. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 128.83.205.78 on Tue, 09 Jun 2015 16:59:09 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Interrogating"Whiteness," Complicating"Blackness": RemappingAmerican Culture SHELLEY FISHER FISHKIN Universityof Texas This essay is dedicatedto the memoryof Ralph Ellison (1914-1994) IN 1958, RALPH ELLISON GENTLY CHIDED WHITE AMERICANSFOR BEING "so absurdlyself-deluded over the trueinterrelatedness of blacknessand whiteness."'It was a message neitherwhite nor black Americanswere ready to hear. So, for the next thirtyyears, they ignored it. When I interviewedEllison in thesummer of 1991, I sensedhis frustrationthat his criticalarguments had had so littleimpact on thecultural conversation. His excitementabout my own workon the "interrelatednessof blacknessand whiteness"meant the world to me, and his encouragementand support helpedspur me on. In 1993, whenmy book WasHuck Black? Mark Twain and African-AmericanVoices came out,I was aware of two or threebooks publishedthat same yearin the UnitedStates that tilled adjacent fields. I suspectedthat my workmight be partof a growingtrend. But how many isolatedacademic forays add up to a "trend?"Ten? Twenty?Thirty? In this essay I will providea briefoverview of over a hundredbooks and articles fromfields including literary criticism, history, cultural studies, anthropol- ogy, popular culture,communication studies, music history,art history, dance history,humor studies,philosophy, linguistics, and folklore,all publishedbetween 1990 and 1995 or forthcomingshortly. Taken together, I believe,they mark the early 1990s as a definingmoment in the studyof ShelleyFisher Fishkin is a professorof American studies and English at theUniversity ofTexas, Austin. Her mostrecent book is Was HuckBlack? Mark Twain and African- AmericanVoices (New York, 1993). An expanded version of this essay will appear in Criticismon the Color Line: DesegregatingAmerican Literary Studies, ed. Henry Wonham(New Brunswick, N.J., 1996). AmericanQuarterly, Vol. 47, No. 3 (September1995) ( 1995American Studies Association 428 This content downloaded from 128.83.205.78 on Tue, 09 Jun 2015 16:59:09 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions REMAPPING AMERICAN CULTURE 429 Americanculture. For in the early 1990s, our ideas of "whiteness"were interrogated,our ideas of "blackness"were complicated, and theterrain we call "Americahculture" began to be remapped.2 I. Interrogating"Whiteness" If you're white,you're all right. If you're brown, stick around. But if you're black, get back. -African-American folk saying To be whitein America is to be veryblack. If you don't know how black you are, you don't know how American you are. -Robert Farris Thompson, "The Kongo AtlanticTradition" Combatantsin the canon wars of the 1980s argued that writingby African Americans had been previouslyunjustly excluded from the curriculum.New coursesproliferated. But, as Dean Flowerobserved in the Hudson Review in 1994, the definition of "American" literaturedid not change. In the college classroom American literaturewas, and still mainly is, defined by the so- called "classic" texts and "major figures"-as if black writershad really made no differencein our literaryhistory until, say, Native Son. Look in any publisher's college catalogue. The canonized (white) writers,who represent "the American tradition,"are listed in one place, the African Americans appear in another. Students take courses on "Afro-American" writersor "Black Studies," almost always taught by persons of color, and they take courses in American literature,almost always taught by white persons in departmentsof English. The segregationcould not be more emphatic.3 A studypublished in January1990 foundthat college courses withsuch titles as "The Modern Novel" or "Modern Poetry" continuedto be dominatedby "worksalmost exclusively by elite whitemen."4 Nonethe- less, calling attentionto the "whiteness"of the curriculumwas still consideredbizarre and provocativebehavior. A professorwho called the standardAmerican literature survey she taught"White Male Writers"was held up to ridiculeby Timemagazine.5 Evidently the editors subscribed to the idea (as George Lipsitz puts it in his essay in thisissue of American Quarterly)that "whitenessnever has to speak its name, never has to acknowledgeits role as an organizingprinciple in social and cultural This content downloaded from 128.83.205.78 on Tue, 09 Jun 2015 16:59:09 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 430 AMERICAN QUARTERLY relations."Time's behavior reflectedthe widely held assumptionsthat Americanculture is obviouslywhite culture and thatstating the obvious is superfluous,irritating, and perverse. While the idea of the social constructionof "blackness"was increas- inglydiscussed in the 1980s,the idea of "whiteness"as a constructdid not receivewidespread attention until the 1990s. In the 1990s, scholarsasked withincreased frequency how theimaginative construction of "whiteness" had shaped American literatureand American history.Some of our culture'smost familiar (and canonical) textsand artifactsturned out to be less "white,"on closer look, thanwe may have thought;the "whiteness" thathad previouslybeen largelyinvisible in the storieswe told aboutwho we were suddenlytook center stage as the site wherepower and privilege converged and conspired to sabotage ideals of justice, equality,and democracy. Withthe 1992 publicationof herbook Playingin theDark: Whiteness and the LiteraryImagination, Toni Morrisonlaunched an eloquent and provocativechallenge to theprivileged, naturalized "whiteness" of Ameri- can literature.Expanding on her earliergroundbreaking Michigan Quar- terlyarticle, Morrison rejected the assumptionthat "traditional, canonical American literatureis free of, uninformed,and unshaped by the four- hundred-year-oldpresence of, first,Africans and thenAfrican Americans in the UnitedStates." She made explicitthat which had been implicitin Americanliterary study from the start."There seems to be a moreor less tacit agreementamong literaryscholars," Morrison wrote, that, because Americanliterature has been clearlythe preserve"of whitemale views, genius,and power,those views, genius and powerare withoutrelationship to and are removedfrom the overwhelming presence of black people in the United States. .." "The contemplation of this black presence," Morrison argued,"is centralto any understandingof our national literatureand should not be permittedto hoverat the marginsof the literaryimagina- tion."Analyzing works by Poe, Hawthorne,Melville, Twain,Cather, and Hemingway,among others,Playing in the Dark challengedscholars to examine"whiteness" as an imaginative,social, and literaryconstruction, to explorethe ways in which "embeddedassumptions of racial (not racist) language workin the literaryenterprise that hopes and sometimesclaims to be 'humanistic."'6Playing in theDark put the constructionof "white- ness" on the table to be investigated,analyzed, punctured', and probed. Morrison'sbook offereda set of questionsand an agenda forresearch that This content downloaded from 128.83.205.78 on Tue, 09 Jun 2015 16:59:09 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions REMAPPINGAMERICAN CULTURE 431 resonatedwith a numberof projectsalready under way (includingmy own) and thatalso helpedspark myriad new publications. The importanceof this approach,however, was far fromuniversally recognized.As Eric J.Sundquist observed in 1993 in To Wakethe Nations: Race in theMaking of American Literature, "it remainsdifficult for many readersto overcometheir fundamental conception of 'American'literature as solelyAnglo-European in inspirationand authorship,to whichmay then be added an appropriatenumber of valuable 'ethnic'or 'minority'texts."7 Morrison,Sundquist, and I were suggestingthat these divisionsfailed to do justice to thecomplex roots of Americanculture. This argumentdid notburst onto the scene full-blownin the 1990s. As I have noted, as early as 1958, Ralph Ellison had commentedon the "interrelatedessof blacknessand whiteness,"and, in 1987, Toni Morrison laid importantgroundwork in "UnspeakableThings Unspoken." Sundquist helpedprepare the way as well in thelate 1980s withhis own publications on Twainand Faulknerand theessay collection on Stowethat he edited.8In a 1986 essay (in Sundquist's Stowe anthology)entitled "Sharing the Thunder:The LiteraryExchanges of HarrietBeecher Stowe,Henry Bibb, and FrederickDouglass," RobertStepto demonstrated the importanceof investigatingthe African-American roots of canonicalAmerican fiction, a move that scholars would soon make with increasingfrequency.9
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