Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian novelist and poet, claims that in the process of articulating the plight of their people, in depicting the trauma produced by colonial domination, and in the attempt to redefine the direction of indigenous cultures, African writers have inevitably involved themselves in a dialectical polemic with Western cultures: “They have found themselves drawn irresistibly to writing about the fate of black people in a world progressively recreated by white men in their own image, to their glory and for their profit.”¹ However, this accurate description of the predicament of African as well as other Third World writers and artists only defines a small, if important area of the problem. Those of us who take Achebe's comments seriously enough to reflect upon them are faced with an enormous task of defining that ambivalent dialectic. For while we may wish desperately to be culturally independent, we are attracted to and enthralled by Western society. Even if we bracket the issue of European-American economic and military domination, we are left with a difficult job of mapping our own ambivalences, of analyzing the manner in which Western culture infiltrates and dominates other cultures, and of defining the various actual and ideal responses of Third World people. We need to identify and analyze the modes of cultural hegemony as well as the institutions and practices that are used in this subjugating process—ranging from the destruction of traditional values by commodity fetishism (a process brilliantly depicted in Achebe's No Longer at Ease) and the nature of cultural dominance inherent in technology (for example the fact that most Third World television companies are forced to broadcast “I Love Lucy” or “Dallas” because they cannot afford to produce their own programs) to aspects of the publishing and curricular policies that govern the production and study of Third World and minority literatures.

This entire problem requires careful and sustained analysis, but in this essay I shall focus on only a small part of this vast question: the relation between Western humanism and minority literature and its criticism. I privilege this area because it makes available to us the most conscious and self-aware facet of the dialectic. Western academic institutions, which ultimately mediate the production of minority literatures and criticism that are written in European languages, provide the context wherein the hegemonic process subconsciously attempts, usually successfully, to incorporate the Third World intellectual and to ensure the elimination of any oppositional or alien attitudes and tendencies. This is done through the presentation of Western humanism, whether defined rigorously or organized loosely as a set of values and assumptions, as a universal philosophy superior to the traditional world-views of Third World cultures. Thus in the realm of discursive ideology (as opposed to practical consciousness, which is formed by more material and concrete mundane practices) the university and humanism, which is most attractive where it is most secularized and “universalized,” respectively constitute the institution and “theory” that effectively mediate hegemonic control. In order to show the pernicious effects of this control on minority critical discourse I shall focus on a particular manifestation of humanism, the New Humanism of Babbitt, More, et al, and analyze, as a paradigmatic text, an anthology of essays entitled Black American Literature and Humanism.²

I have selected the New Humanist movement as a paradigm because it seems to me that its ultra conservative program better articulates its own assumptions and ideology as well as those of a vaguer, liberal humanism than does the latter. Even sympathetic critics like J. David Hoeveler, Jr. recognize the drastic limitations of the New Humanists: “Unfortunately, it was undoubtedly that perspective [i.e., the focus on romanticism and naturalism as the twin evils of the modern world] that made the [New] Humanists indifferent to the most fruitful academic achievements of the new University, the social science, for it was their concentrated focus on the higher self that blinded the Humanists to the value of studying human nature in its social, economic, and political interactions with the world.”³ Now whereas the liberal humanists, unlike the New Humanists, were willing to co-exist with the social sciences, until recently they were not willing to incorporate the social and particularly the political and economic side of human activities into their professional concerns and preoccupations. Whereas the dominant mode of humanism was more expansive and progressively inclusive and whereas it was willing to adapt the form of its ideology without changing its substance the New Humanists insisted on purity and exclusion and refused to compromise either form or substance. In fact New Humanism was more of an assault on the adaptibility of the dominant humanism than a reaction against a real enemy. Nevertheless, in the process of attacking this flexibility while valorizing purity and rigor, the New Humanist succinctly and clearly articulated the ideology of humanism at large.

I shall focus on the relation of Black American literature to humanism because it seems to me that the current predicament of Black American culture foreshadows the developing situation of many Third World cultures. To the extent that the latter's traditional aspects have not been entirely destroyed or discarded, Third World cultures still have some flexibility, at least in theory, in their attempts to combine Western and traditional cultures into new syncretic societies. Nevertheless, given the expansive and co-opting hegemony of the West, these cultures will be faced, sooner or later, with the prospect of succumbing completely to Western culture. Black Americans, shorn almost entirely from their traditional African cultures, are embattled within a historically racist hegemony that in theory offers equality and aspects of its “humanism” as models for emulation but in practice denies equality and blocks the access to “civilized” humanism through segregated education, economic exclusion, and so forth. Through this and other similar “double binds” Western societies seek to “include” and “retain” ethnic minorities and Third World societies as subordinate classes within the hegemony.

In this predicament, then, the attempt by minority and Third World critics to espouse “humanism” is more than an ironic anomaly. A scrutiny of such an attempt reveals the confused and painful position of these critics as the mediators between the implicit hegemonic imperatives and the ambivalent aspirations (antipathy/attraction) of their people. Black American Literature and Humanism, then, can be seen as a concentrated version of every minority critic's dilemma. It is by no means a unique text: similar problems are manifested in the vast majority of minority critical discourse even when it does not explicitly raise the issue of “humanism.” However, the text I have selected is a convenient example of the hegemonic process, particularly because it anthologizes the proceedings of a conference sponsored jointly in 1978 by the American Council of Learned Societies and the John C. Hodges Better English Fund and because its publication was partly sponsored by the latter foundation (BALH, VII).

II

The prime strategy of the New Humanist project was to establish an ideological ascendency by privileging a particular aspect of the Western Cultural tradition. They saw themselves as advocating the adoption and cultivation of the essence of Western culture, which they felt was threatened simultaneously by “romanticism” and “naturalism.” However, this attempt to valorize “The Tradition” was in effect the advocacy of an intentionally selective version of the past, the adoption of which would preclude all other aspects and versions of history. This strategy, if accepted by Americans, would have given the New Humanists a virtual monopoly in discriminating the “usable” from the “unusable” past and would therefore have allowed them to determine the relative importance of present values and, by extension, future priorities as well. It was, in other words, a strategy implicitly designed to monopolize the formation of a contemporary social and cultural order, to impose firmly upon the present a controlling ideology. Given the polemical nature of their attack on a more liberal version of humanism and the tone of arrogance derived from their self-righteousness, the New Humanists clearly revealed their ideological project through their hyperbolic rhetoric.

The desire to control contemporary society is particularly evident in the prose of Paul Elmer More. Arguing that the “educated man” is the one who has learned to savor the “highest and most enduring pleasure which is derived from the few great books selected and approved by the verdict of tradition,” More goes on to define the benefits: “And in that power of enjoyment he will feel himself set free from his own petty limitations, and made a humble companion of those who share the heritage of time.” Should there be any doubt about the power and control being appropriated here through the distinction between the “petty limitations” of the ordinary man, fit only to become a “humble companion,” and those like More, who have a privileged access to the “heritage of time” and who are capable of properly appreciating that heritage, he obliges us with a further clarification in castigating the common man for his “self-conceit and the laziness coming from that self-conceit.” Invoking Matthew Arnold and others who have great “insight into human nature,” More arrogates to himself “the right to speak.” His own judgments are equated to those of “mankind,” and those individuals who advocate “the liberty of taste” are simply dismissed as being “in the main uneducated.” More's rhetoric also clearly reveals this desire to impose an exclusive tradition on his fellow men, who, he argues, are reluctant to accept “the reality of the higher and more permanent pleasure, until it has been forced upon their recognition by the experience of others. And just here is the function of tradition.”⁴ Education, according to More, was the cultivation of “the ability to judge,” and since the New Humanists were properly educated they had no doubts about their judgments or their desire to use the “continuity” of “the tradition” in order to create and establish an exclusive contemporary order: “The task of assimilating what is best in the past and present,” said Irving Babbitt, “and adopting it to one's own use and the use of others, so far from lacking in originality, calls for something akin to creation.”⁵

The remarkable fact about the New Humanist project is its clear articulation of its own ideological imperatives. In fact, the desire to appropriate a centralizing, defining position of power is so strong that it manifests itself as the crucial principle of centrality. At the individual level the imperative for centrality results in the dualistic theory wherein reason and emotion are constantly in conflict: reason tries to control, organize, and provide direction to the emotions and the impulses of desire which are constantly “drifting.” Struggling against the constant flux of experience, the reasonable “higher self” strives towards unity and completeness: consciousness of that still point in the turning world is the basis of “true liberation.” The foregrounding of the desire for “the central and the correct” (to use the terminology of the I Ching) defines in effect an essential feature of all ideologies: in spite of contradictions, conflicts, and confusions, those individuals who accept or who have been formed by a given hegemonic system will constantly try to align themselves as closely as possible with the center of that system, or conversely, if they rebel, with the center of an alternate hegemony. Among the New Humanists this imperative became a conscious and deliberate focus of their program. Thus in the social and cultural realms the goal of the New Humanists, as J. David Hoeveler, Jr. put it, “was to locate a ‘center of humanity’ that must function as an ideal norm and model of emulation for all persons. This ‘higher humanity’ must also determine each individual's check on his emotions and temperament; the universal in this sense must, in other words, function as a disciplining quality.”⁶ And naturally the New Humanists would control the definition of the “universal.”

The urgency of this desire for centrality and control can be measured by a fundamental contradiction within the New Humanist project. Some of the implications of the Darwinian revolution—the possibility that human intelligence was simply an adaptive device and not the product of some higher teleology, as well as the corollary that change was the ultimate reality—threatened the New Humanists and led them to emphasize the permanent, the traditional, and the universal aspects of human nature. However, in order to valorize permanence, they used a selective version of history, that is, of the record of change. This contradiction reached its pristine articulation in Robert M. Hutchins's great books program at the University of Chicago. According to him the “heart of any course of study designed for the whole people will be … the same at any time, in any place, under any political, social, or economic conditions.”⁷ If education could not adapt to rapidly changing economic, social, and political reality and if consequently man's response to that changing reality could not transform itself, then clearly the entire culture would remain static. In their attempt to halt any change the New Humanists were using their notion of “the tradition,” a selective version of historical development, in order to negate the very concept and possibility of history.

Just as they sought to use history to negate and control it, so they used a program for the welfare of “humanity” to deprive it of choice and self-determination. This negation was also accomplished by drawing exclusive boundaries between those who were unable to judge and the New Humanists who, because of their superior education, knew what was best for everyone. In literature, the field from which they derived their major inspirations, they drew rigid boundaries by using Matthew Arnold's notion of the highest sense of the permanent being derived from a deep and broad acquaintance with “the best that has been said and thought in the world.” But “the world,” of course, only meant, as it still does to a great extent, certain segments of Europe and America. Thus they held up the Puritans, whose self-discipline and restraint they admired, as a model of the most vital, progressive, and enriching human tradition.⁸ The New Humanists also privileged Emerson, Hawthorne, Whitman and Twain as the bases of new spiritual renaissance in America, and declared that the task of American literature, based on these writers, was to strive for a cultural unity, which would be achieved by illuminating the national character—particularly its profound moral idealism. This valorization was accompanied by a blanket negation of the experimental and varied literary endeavors of their contemporaries, particularly of naturalism, which, as it turned out, was practiced by the descendents of more recent migrants. According to Sherman, the “informing spirit,” of Theodore Dreiser's work “was naturalism rawly conceived—the crude ‘jungle’ philosophy,” which he felt could be better designated as “barbaric naturalism.” The critique does not confine itself to Dreiser's novels, but includes the man as well: “He specializes in the primary instincts. But he understands himself pretty well and he constructs his men and women out of parcels of himself.”⁹ This sharp distinction between those who are beacons of moral idealism and the rest who are informed only by a lamentable crude jungle philosophy would, of course, also exclude from “civilized” letters all Black American writing; there is no mention in Sherman's work of the Harlem Renaissance, and Black naturalist authors like Richard Wright would probably be condemned along with Dreiser. The assumption of a right to draw boundaries, which would exclude the vast majority of Americans from civilized society, reveals their urgent desires for power and control. The New Humanists did not “confuse literature and life,” as Hoeveler argues;¹⁰ rather they tried to use carefully selected literary texts in order to define and control life.

This anxiety to dominate and to exclude is most clearly evident in the New Humanist program for education, the control of which would in effect guarantee their dominance of subjective and social formation. In an essay entitled “Academic Leadership,” More argues that to cultivate the “higher imagination” and self-knowledge through a study of the tradition “is to be raised into the nobility of the intellect. To hold this knowledge in a mind trained to fine efficiency and confirmed by faithful comradeship is to take one's place with the rightful governors of the people.” Although he tries to disavow the “invidious exclusiveness” of such an aristocracy, he cannot help confirming it:

Yet, if not exclusive, an academic aristocracy must by its very nature be exceedingly jealous of any levelling process which would shape education to the needs of the intellectual proletariat and so diminish its own ranks. It cannot admit that, if education is once leveled downwards, the whole body of men will of themselves gradually raise the level to the higher range; for its creed declares that elevation must come from leadership rather than from self-motion of the mass. It will therefore be opposed to any scheme of studies which relaxes discipline or destroys intellectual solidarity. … It will set itself against any regular subjection of the “fierce spirit of liberty,” which is the breath of distinction and the very character of aristocracy, to the sullen spirit of equality, which proceeds from envy in the baser sort of democracy.¹¹

The language of jealousy, envy, subjection, etc., quite clearly delineates the proto-fascist anxiety to draw boundaries around the moral superiority of the “rightful governors of the people.” Given the contempt for the “intellectual proletariat,” it is not surprising that in the concern for the higher self of humanity there is no discussion about the fact that Blacks were systematically deprived of an adequate education or about racism in general. While the naturalists were implying in their novels that modern man was at the mercy of his environment and that the capitalist society had commodified him and thus alienated and deprived him of initiative, the New Humanists were in perfect congruence with such a society and were in fact articulating its fundamental hegemonic principle in their denial of the efficacy of the common man's initiative, his “self-motion.” This emasculation of the “intellectual proletariat” and the arrogation of telos to themselves show the New Humanist project to be a rather naive and quixotic attempt to garner power simply through definition and moral persuasion. Nevertheless, their theory was remarkably conscious of its own ideological imperatives; not only did they want to control education, but they also attempted to incorporate within that control its own reproduction. The goal of an appropriate education, again according to More, was to train the mind so that it was capable of “grasping in a single firm vision, so to speak, the long course of human history and of distinguishing what is essential therein from what is ephemeral,” and so, in other words, of reproducing the means of ideological production, “the tradition.”¹²

As one might expect, this imperative to define oneself in morally exclusive terms also manifests itself in a purer Manichean version. Ironically, the New Humanists found the evil alterity in the Germans, whom Sherman portrayed as the embodiment of vulgarity and militarism while he considered the Americans and Allies as the defenders of art, culture, and democracy. The latter, he claimed, were “fighting for the common interests of the whole family of civilized nations.” Even though Sherman was more open-minded than his colleagues and had defended educational reforms, he was just as blind as they were to the fact that the “civilized” status of America was being repeatedly contradicted by the series of brutal race riots against blacks in the 1910s and 20s. The New Humanists were not simply ignorant about actual social and economic conditions and aspirations of Americans; rather they deliberately chose to avoid the issues that tended to isolate “the student from the great inheritance of the past.” The “frequent habit of dragging [the student] through the slums of sociology,” More argued, “debauches his mind with a flabby, or inflames it with a fanatic, humanitarianism.”¹³

Although New Humanism may be unfashionable now, its fundamental sentiments still prevail in its more liberal version. The valorization by both humanisms of what they consider significant about the (Western) past is not substantially different—the great majority of contemporary humanists would not quarrel with the canon that Hutchins established at Chicago. But from an ideological viewpoint the most crucial and objectionable element of continuity between the two humanisms is their studious avoidance of questions of domination, exploitation, and manipulation that are inevitably involved in the formation of any culture. The only significant difference between New and liberal humanism is that the former attempted to draw distinct boundaries and to exclude the “intellectual proletariat” and its literature, whereas the latter tends to be far more tolerant, flexible, and inclusive. Thus in contrast to the success of liberal humanism, the failure of its more conservative avatar can be ascribed to its inability to understand the mechanisms of hegemony. Overly anxious to control and assert its moral superiority, New Humanism articulated far too explicitly its archaic program and thereby revealed its desire to establish an absolute and homogeneous subjectivity and to dominate through exclusion. Thus in terms of a Gramscian register New Humanism defined itself as dominant rather than hegemonic, that is, its anxiety required the passive and indirect, rather than active and direct, “consent” of the subordinated class. The failure of this strategy was produced by a fundamental contradiction between means and ends: New Humanism relied entirely on moral persuasion, without any recourse to economic coercion or force, in order to persuade the inferior masses to repress themselves and accede control to the few enlightened ones. Liberal humanism, on the other hand, has established an effective hegemony by being far more flexible and inclusive and thus winning a more active and direct “consent.” Through a dual inclusiveness, that is, by admitting Dreiser as well as minority writers to the canon and by extending education to the “intellectual proletariat,” liberal humanism has been able to advocate a set of values in such a way that they have saturated the entire culture. These values, which, by repressing the issues of domination, exploitation, and manipulation, allow all of us to situate ourselves at the moral center of a civilizing tradition, have permeated not only all economic, social, and political activity but also the very structures of knowledge, experience, and identity. Precisely because these values are experienced as “common sensical” and reciprocally confirming does liberal humanism enjoy a relatively undisturbed ascendency. And precisely because we are working against a background of racist exclusion that used to characterize blacks and other minorities as subhuman beings does the relatively new flexibility of humanism (dating back to the acceptance of Black culture in the middle sixties) paradoxically generate the minority's anxiety to be included. This anxiety, of which Black American Literature and Humanism is a symptom, has to be resisted as much as the New Humanist anxiety to exclude and the co-opting element in the tolerance of liberal humanism. But, of course, these strategies must be opposed for very different reasons.

III

The preface and introduction to Black American Literature and Humanism reveal simultaneously the fundamental contradiction within which minority critics are caught and the antagonistic historical pressures with which they have had to grapple repeatedly: on the one hand, there is a desire to define one's ethnic and cultural uniqueness against the pressures of the majority culture and on the other hand an equally strong, if not stronger, urge to abandon that uniqueness in order to conform to the hegemonic pressures of the liberal humanistic culture.

R. Baxter Miller, the organizer of the conference and the editor of the anthology, clearly recognizes the shortcomings of the New Humanist movement: he sees that it “distorted the high purpose of the philosophy into a conservativism which indirectly encouraged bigotry”; that, concerned entirely with tradition, it tended “to place humanness in the past, to reduce diachrony to synchrony”; that it “avoided talking about the lower classes”; and that its association of humanism with a particular class and its manners amounted to intolerance. Miller even links the intolerance of the southern agrarian poets with that of the New Humanists and admits that the “Modern Humanism of the United States has been shaped by the New Humanists of the 1930s.” Against this archaism, narrow class interests, and intolerance, he proposes to define the specificity of Black literature and criticism. The “essays collected here,” he argues, “suggest the possibility of freeing scholarship from Western culture's self-imposed restrictions. In the reopened range of human efforts, Black literature has dignity and meaning.” These essays are also significant for him because “they define humanism from an Afro-American perspective” and because they are able to define identity through “race and culture” (BALH, pp. 1-6).

This criticism of humanism and the assertion of Black literature and culture, however, are completely contradicted by a chilling attempt to comply with the dictates of New and liberal Humanism. The original intention of the conference was to examine how “scholars use Black American literature to train American humanists in the ‘classical sense.’ The professors attending would have to learn to minimize the discrepancy between human action and the highest values reflected in the arts.” In other words, the original intent was to conform exactly to the New Humanist project. However, realizing that this would subordinate Black literature to fixed and archaic values and norms, Miller retreats to an apparently safer position: “The final proposal to ACLS read ‘The purpose here is not to abolish diversity but to emphasize commonality.’” By this he seems to mean that in extending “the possibilities of Anglo-American literature, Black American writing ironically recreates and modifies the tradition” (BALH, pp. vii-viii). This shift from the original to the actual intention has in fact allowed Miller to move from a position where he was attempting to accommodate himself to the rigid demands of the New Humanism to an alliance with a more tolerant and inclusive liberal humanism. By defining Black literature as an extension, however ironic, of the main tradition, Miller denies all oppositional impulses of that literature and allows it to constitute its identity through the prevailing hegemonic terms, thus implicitly denying the uniqueness of Black literature. Historically, this anxiety to be included is far stronger than the need to stress the difference. The traditional narcissism of a dominant white culture—that is, the culture's ability only to recognize man in its own image and its refusal to recognize the substantial validity of any alterity—puts enormous pressure on Blacks and other minorities to recreate themselves and their culture as approximate versions of the Western humanist tradition, as images that “humanism” will recognize and understand. The power of this narcissism is verified by Miller's success in obtaining an ACLS grant; it is very difficult to imagine ACLS funding a conference dedicated to articulating the antagonistic relation between humanism and minority literature.

As analyses of specific literary texts or as statements by writers about their own work, all the essays in this anthology are informative and interesting. But in their approach to humanism the essays fall into three categories: an essay about “Cultural Formalism” as a critical method; a series of essays that avoid the antagonism/inclusion contradiction through cursory and vague references to humanism; and essays that seriously attempt to articulate the unique characteristics of Black literature but that are ultimately hindered by the contradiction. Chester J. Fontenot, Jr.'s essay on “Cultural Formalism” argues that the criticism of Black literature should avoid the two extremes of literary analysis: the text as a purely formal object and the text as political rhetoric. No one will quarrel with this wish to combine formal and cultural analysis, but in his consideration of “culture” he entirely omits the unique and unavoidable aspects of the Black predicament within American culture: the ever present experience of domination and racism. In order to avoid these problematic and embarrassing areas he is forced to define the “humanistic” preoccupations of cultural formalism in the most general way possible: “Literary study is distinguished by its concern for human beings, their interest, themes, and social organizations. In relation to literature and literary criticism, humanists must deal with the dialectic between human beings and their activity, between literary characters and their contextual situations” (BALH, pp. 34-35). However, to the extent that all criticism more or less fits this definition, Fontenot's notion of humanism becomes tautological.

A more interesting version of this tautological exercise is found in the essay about Langston Hughes by Richard K. Barkesdale, a good example of the second category. The essay begins with an adequate appreciation of Hughes's struggle against the prevailing Black literary tradition that was dominated by “protest literature,” which was addressed to a liberal white audience and was seeking its charitable benevolence. Barkesdale appreciates the stifling quality of such a tradition that has no space in it for “the celebration of the Black lifestyle for its own sake,” and he applauds Hughes's rejection of his white patron, Mrs. R. Osgood Mason, who would have restricted him to the cult of “primitive” poetry. However, having stressed the historical and biographical aspects of Hughes's struggle against the prevailing tradition, Barkesdale completely fails to recognize the literary manifestations of the poet's antagonistic stances because he is too preoccupied with fitting Hughes into the humanistic tradition. Thus “Lover's Return” is considered a humanist poem because in it Hughes “suggests that the vulnerable, dilemma-ridden, anti-heroic persona truly counts in the larger human equation” (BALH, p. 16). Similarly, irony becomes a “humanistic technique,” and human “failures and defeats are actually the mark of … humanity,” as are “disappointment and disillusionment” (BALH, pp. 17-19). According to these criteria we are all part of a happy (if at times fallible, etc.) human family. Unfortunately, the anxiety to be included leads to a major problem. Like “protest literature” this kind of criticism negates the celebration of Black or minority life in order to seek racial integration through criticism and “humanism”—an integration that was denied in most other aspects of life. Such criticism in effect entirely annihilates Barkesdale's own appreciation of Hughes's historic and biographic struggle to celebrate Black culture.

Such a negation is most clearly evident in Barkesdale's discussion of “Trumpet Player: 52nd Street.” In this poem which depicts the function of music and the conditions of its production in Black culture, Barkesdale once again finds Hughes humanizing “the function of art and music,” but, more interestingly, he also sees it as affirming a Wordsworthian view of the creation of poetry: Hughes's musician has “found the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions that the youthful Wordsworth was in search of and actually never found …” (BALH, p. 24). However, a closer scrutiny of the poem shows that Hughes's view of artistic production is exactly the opposite. The poem begins with the trumpet player nursing “the smoldering memory / Of slave ships” and “the crack of whips / About his thighs,” and goes on to show that this music “Is ecstasy / Distilled from old desire.”¹⁴ Hughes then introduces a stanza that deliberately dissociates the production of music from the pastoral myth.

Desire
That is longing for the moon
Where the moonlight's but a spotlight
In his eyes,
Desire
That is longing for the sea
Where the sea's a bar-glass
Sucker size.

Then playing upon the use of drugs by musicians and music as a narcotic, Hughes concludes with a stanza about pain as the source of blues and jazz: the trumpeter

Does not know
Upon what riff the music slips
Its hypodermic needle
To his soul—
But softly
As the tune comes from his throat
Trouble
Mellows to a golden note.

It seems quite clear that in contrasting images of the urban ghetto nightclub to those of a pastoral myth Hughes is defining the constraints and controls, the impossible odds, against which jazz is created. For Hughes, music is not the product of an “overflow,” of a surfeit—the luxury of surplus value; rather it is the result of a “distillation,” of a deficit—poverty, suffering, and pain. Hughes is describing the tenacity that can turn pain, in spite of itself, into music; he is celebrating the power of the marginalized, oppressed man not only to survive but also to create a beautiful culture.

This is not the place to demonstrate systematically how the antagonistic stance of Hughes's poetry is founded on a definition and a celebration of marginality, but a discussion of two brief poems, “Me and the Mule” and “Still Here” will illustrate the essence of his stance:

My old mule,
He's got a grin on his face.
He's been a mule so long
He's forgot about his race.
I'm like that old mule—
Black—and don't give a damn!
You got to take me
Like I am.

Not only is this poem a confident and calm affirmation of the Black self, but in its positive comparison of a Black to an animal it deliberately subverts the racist strategy of denigrating the Black man by comparison with animals; and in this subversion Hughes also implicitly rejects the Blacks' reliance on white definitions, including, one must assume, “humanism.” In “Still Here” Hughes celebrates the determination and tenacity of an oppressed minority:

I've been scarred and battered.
My hopes the wind done scattered.
Snow has friz me, sun has baked me.
                    Looks like between 'em
                    They done tried to make me
Stop laughin', stop lovin', stop livin'—
                              But I don't care!
                              I'm still here!

It would seem that in the face of adversity Hughes does not protest or attempt to find hope in some notion of common humanity. Rather he seems to rely on a simple but firm existential assertion of self. However, in the context of Hughes's abundant and brilliant use of the Black folk tradition, of the blues and jazz forms, it is clear that his assertion is in fact an affirmation of an alternate tradition and, in its celebration of marginality, it points toward an alternate hegemony.

A good example of the third group of essays, Trudier Harris's examination of the writings of Sarah E. Wright, Alice Walker, and Paula Marshall stresses the use of Black folk tradition as an alternate culture and a source of Black identity. In spite of her accurate appreciation of the sources of an alternate hegemony in the works of these three writers (in fact she has clearly chosen these writers because their novels possess this characteristic), Harris's essay illustrates the pressures from the prevailing hegemony which prevent her from developing her insights to their logical conclusion. If one feature of ideology can be defined (negatively) as that which, by forestalling the release of contradictions within the subject, helps to secure the existence of the dominant social relations of production, then this essay provides an interesting example of such ideological closure.

Trudier Harris begins by observing quite accurately that due to enforced illiteracy Blacks were obliged to define themselves through folk or oral cultures, which in fact became an alternate culture. She cites Ralph Ellison's succinct summation of this fact: folk culture “describes those boundaries of feeling, thought and action which that particular group has found to be the limitation of the human condition. It projects this wisdom in symbols which express the group's will to survive; it embodies those values by which the group lives and dies.” Black folklore, “evolving within a larger culture which regarded it as inferior, was an especially courageous expression. It announced the Negro's willingness to trust his own experience, his own sensibilities as the definition of reality, rather than allow his masters to define these crucial matters for him.”¹⁵ Ellison valorizes a specific version of “the human condition,” the specificity of which is marked, first, by the experiences of racism, slavery, and prolonged exclusion from and oppression by the dominant culture and, second, by the corresponding development of perseverance, the will to survive, and the celebration of the marginal human condition. If these features are ignored, the specificity of Black culture and literature evaporates. Harris's essay not only appreciates this specificity but also clearly demonstrates that in Wright's This Child's Gonna Live, Walker's The Third Life of Grange Copeland, and Marshall's The Chosen Place, The Timeless People the protagonists who are all trapped and oppressed by racism eventually reject Christianity and find some form of salvation or liberation through the Black folk culture. Harris elucidates the heroic tenacity and purpose of Wright's heroine and the historical function of resistance to domination as a symbol for later generations in Marshall's novel. She argues persuasively that the alternate culture is predicated on resistance in the latter novel, and she properly privileges the fact that “self-determination necessarily has self-definition as its basis” (BALH, pp. 66-67). However, the importance of self-definition, of rejecting the master's definition is, in the final analysis, undermined in Harris's essay by her acceptance of “humanism” as a valid set of criteria.

This contradiction is most apparent in Harris's analysis of Alice Walker's novel. Her appraisal of racial politics in the novel is quite accurate on the whole. She is thoroughly lucid about the fact that the “subhuman” status of Copeland is a result of his acceptance and internalization of his complete rejection by white racist society: he becomes aware of his condition when a white woman, whom he tries to rescue, prefers to drown rather than be saved by a “nigger.” Harris accurately ascribes the liberation of Copeland to his coming-to-consciousness about the depth of his previous subordination to white society and his subsequent acceptance of responsibility for himself and others. Copeland realizes that his subjugation and isolation were due to his inability to distinguish the “cracker's will from his [own],” and he knows that by accepting responsibility for others he can become a social, communal being for the first time in his life. However, Harris's analysis is subverted at this point by her “humanistic” preoccupations. She argues that his acceptance of responsibility demonstrates “a morality that goes not only beyond Christianity but beyond racial considerations” (BALH, p. 63, italics added). This interpretation of the novel as a transcendence of racial politics does injustice to the novel. Copeland maintains that in order to be liberated “you must hold tight a place in you where they [whites] can't come.”¹⁶ For Copeland this is neither simple rhetoric nor a “merely” abstract awareness of his condition. His commitment to preserving the sanctity of that “place” manifests itself in his attempt to save his grand-daughter from the kind of racist subjectification that has distorted him and his son. In order to protect her he eventually dies in a shoot-out with white policemen who have been sent by the court to retrieve her. As he is dying in a barn surrounded by policemen, he cries to himself because he needs to hear a human voice and he rocks himself “in his own arms to a final sleep.”¹⁷ Copeland's isolation and death symbolize that inviolable “place” that must be protected from racist contamination at all costs. Thus the novel does not transcend “racial considerations”; rather it confirms them and shows that in a racist society liberation can be achieved by working through, rather than avoiding, racial antagonism. Harris's hasty desire to transcend racial issues results not in liberation but in a capitulation to a more subtle and seductive hegemonic domination. She relies on Peter Faulkner's Humanism and the English Novel for her definition of humanism.¹⁸ But that definition (BALH, p. 54), based on “human happiness,” “mutual responsibility,” a “flexible and undogmatic” spirit, avoidance of “rigid orthodoxy,” and so on, is designed precisely to exclude the issue of the politics of economic, social, and cultural domination, exploitation, and manipulation—all the factors, in other words, that are responsible for slavery and racism. And the fact that Harris succumbs to the humanist definitions in spite of her awareness of the importance of self-definition demonstrates the ideological power of humanism to foreclose certain “sensitive” areas of critical discourse in order to repress contradictions.

The essays in Black American Literature and Humanism, none of which reject the humanist programs or definitions, collectively constitute what Raymond Williams calls a “formation,” that is, a conscious and more or less coherent articulation of a wider, more diffused, and subconscious anxiety to be included and “normalized.” By subordinating their analyses of Black literature to the terms of “humanism,” which is itself an important formation of the current hegemony, these critics in effect provide an active and direct “consent” to the hegemonic culture, and thereby strengthen it. Their self-identification with the hegemonic system not only frees the repressive and coercive apparatuses of the system so that they can be better used elsewhere, but it also reinforces the “inclusive” practice of the system and thereby paradoxically allows it to reaffirm its moral and political centrality. It thus helps to maintain the illusory continuity of a redeeming and transcending tradition. Capitulation to the most generalizing definition of humanism also leads to commodification at the cultural level; it accedes to the cultural equivalent of exchange value, to a currency which can collapse non-identical, singular beings, experiences, and achievements into commensurable and identical ones. A minority critical discourse that succumbs so easily to humanism permits the hegemonic system to select and define meanings and values, to socialize future generations as it sees fit, and ultimately, if it wishes, to deny once again, through a process of creative selection, minority cultures and histories.

IV

In order to guard against either a recuperation and a neutralization or a renewed negation of minority literature by the dominant culture, we need to define the fundamental features of that literature which must not only be protected from hegemonic co-option but also cultivated, and indeed celebrated. As Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have recently argued, the three fundamental characteristics of a “minor” literatures are: 1) its persistent urge to deterritorialize the dominant language which is simultaneously its imposed and chosen medium; 2) its experience and representation of the world as thoroughly politicized; and 3) its tendency to articulate the collective consciousness.¹⁹ Even though Deleuze's theory about the deterritorialization of the dominant language is extremely suggestive and quite accurate in its generality, it tends to be problematic in its specific application because it is based entirely on his analysis of Kafka's texts. It sets a complex task which I will take up later. Here I would like to elaborate the second and third aspects of his definition.

The political nature of minority literature must be stressed, particularly in view of the deliberate and systematic, if unspoken attempt of various humanisms to repress the political characteristics of literature. As I have shown in detail elsewhere,²⁰ the very process of internal (i.e., slavery) and external colonization (which includes the negation and destruction of indigenous cultural and material practices as well as the forceful appropriation of material resources) is entirely political, as is the process of pseudo-emancipation. Even “education,” the very means through which the minority writer learns the dominant language (and culture) is thoroughly politicized. Because the writer and his or her community are steeped in the politics of domination and subordination and because humanism has not (yet) completely depoliticized him, politics is a major and inescapable ingredient of his psychic and social formation. Thus works of minority writers are linked by the imperative to negate, in various ways, the prior negation of his culture by the dominators. Even though such an imperative may be initially entirely negative, it implies an affirmative search for an alternative that is yet unarticulated. Occasionally, as in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's A Grain of Wheat, the writer may go on to delineate an alternative social formation which will be equally political.

The “communal” characteristic of minority literature is due not to the “scarcity of talent,” as Deleuze argues, but, at least in Third World literature, to the fact that the minority writer, whose social formation is not yet adequately controlled by Western bourgeois culture, has not sufficiently internalized the fiction of the autonomous subject. In the ontological and cultural continuum of tension between the experience of the self-as-an-individual and the self-as-a-social-being the experience of the Third World writer tends to be at the collective end of the spectrum. Furthermore, the tendency of the dominant culture to characterize and treat him as a categorical, generic being, rather than an individual, ultimately confirms his sense of solidarity with his community. Thus Deleuze is absolutely correct in insisting on the importance of politics and communality in minority literature and on the primary socio-political function of such literature: “… exactly because the collective or national consciousness is ‘often unrealized in public life and tending to disintegrate,’ it is literature which comes to be charged positively with the role and function of collective, even revolutionary utterance: it is literature which produces an active solidarity, in spite of scepticism. …”²¹ In fact to the extent that such a collective cannot be considered fully existent and functional until it comes-to-consciousness about itself, literature has the important function of bringing the nature of collectivity to consciousness, and even, as in the novels of the South African writer Alex La Guma, of bringing to consciousness the fundamental necessity of coming-to-consciousness.

However, this definition of the “collective” characteristic of minority literature is ambiguous and can be misleading if it is taken to imply that minority experience of culture, society, economic life, etc., is full, well-rounded, and adequately satisfying, that it is “central and correct” in its own way. On the contrary, the “collective” or individual experience represented in minority literature is one of dehumanization and abject marginality. In fact we must insist that the fourth fundamental characteristic of minority literature is its representation of marginality; paradoxically, marginality is the “universal” of minority literature. It is surely central to Kafka's oeuvre, to the vast bulk of Black American literature—from the earliest slave narratives to the contemporary novels of Alice Walker—and to Third World literatures written in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. The marginality of diverse minority cultures is emblematized by the Black American culture, which has been most systematically shorn of its original African heritage and most ruthlessly subjugated, but which at the same time has been forced to develop itself within the most minimal margins of the dominant and repressive culture. Within this emblematic literature the paradigmatic text of marginality is, surely, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, which focuses on the politics of hegemony and marginality. The unnamed narrator/protagonist of the novel is constantly propelled by the desire to identify himself by achieving some kind of centrality, but he is repeatedly betrayed and remarginalized until he learns to celebrate his invisibility and to define himself through it.

In its relentless exploration of marginality, Invisible Man also indicates the direction for an apposite criticism of minority literature. The struggle against the hegemonic system can take many different forms that may not be overtly recognizable as political or economic. If, as Deleuze argues, the struggle must be carried on through literature before it becomes explicitly political or economic, then clearly criticism must also be involved in this struggle. In fact, the essays in Black American Literature and Humanism provide a perfect illustration of how the insights of a minority literature can be easily occluded by a criticism that, in its anxiety to be centralized, has succumbed to hegemonic pressures. Thus we must insist that criticism, whether we like it or not, is a field marked by constant struggle over definitions of individual and social formation. Until recently, minority literatures were effectively excluded from adequate critical consideration; however, now that they have been admitted into the margins of the canon, minority criticism must resist the hegemonic pressures which seek to neutralize them by repressing their political nature. In fact a viable counter-hegemonic discourse must consist of minority literary texts and a criticism that can further articulate the challenge of the texts; if apolitical humanistic definitions are allowed to emasculate minority critical discourse, then the challenge of minority literature can be easily neutralized or ignored. If minority literature repeatedly explores the political, collective, and marginal aspects of human experience, then minority criticism must also systematically avoid the temptation of a seductively inclusive, apolitical humanism: it must articulate and help to bring to consciousness those elements of minority literature that oppose, subvert, or negate the power of hegemonic culture, and it must learn to celebrate marginality in its specific manifestations without fetishizing or reifying it. Minority texts, like all literary texts, exist simultaneously as determinate objects and as rhetorical practices. In their former capacity they will preserve forever the oppositional elements of minority cultures that they have encoded. However, in the context of the neutralizing hegemonic pressures, they will never become effective rhetorical practices until a minority critical discourse articulates them as such. The initial task, then, is to define and comprehend the rhetorical context, which is constituted not only by the political use of literary images, definition, and self-definitions of minorities in hegemonic and counter-hegemonic texts but also by the economic, political, and social formations and interests that are intimately linked with the literary and critical struggles. This must be accompanied by the articulation of specific minority literary histories through the recovery of texts that have been discarded and repressed by hegemonic canons, through the redress of selective, reductive, distorting, and incorporating interpretations, and, most importantly, through a judicious avoidance of those elements of hegemonic terminologies, definitions, and analytic methods that would in effect emasculate minority discourses. Finally, the recuperated texts have to be linked to form an alternate tradition: unless the texts are organized in a historical pattern of changing but essentially connected and accumulative modes of opposition, the recovered elements will remain fragmented. In the Black American context such an articulation is well under way, for instance in studies such as Addison Gayle Jr.'s The Way of the New World,²² but the criticism of anglophone African and Indian literature is still firmly under the control of an apolitical humanism.

Notes

1. Chinua Achebe, “The Black Writer's Burden,” Présence Africaine, 31, no. 59 (1966), 135.

2. R. Baxter Miller, ed., Black American Literature and Humanism (Lexington: The Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1981), hereafter cited in the text as BALH.

3. J. David Hoeveler, Jr., The New Humanism: A Critique of Modern America, 1900-1940 (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1977), p. 123.

4. Paul Elmer More, The Demon of the Absolute (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1928), pp. 26-28.

5. Irving Babbitt, Literature and the American College (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1908), p. 101.

6. Hoeveler, The New Humanism, p. 37.

7. Robert Maynard Hutchins, The Higher Learning in America (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1936), p. 73.

8. See, for instance, Stuart P. Sherman's The Genius of America (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1923).

9. Stuart P. Sherman, The Main Stream (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1927), pp. 138-39.

10. Hoeveler, The New Humanism, p. 25.

11. Paul Elmer More, Aristocracy and Justice (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915), pp. 58-59.

12. More, Aristocracy and Justice, p. 36.

13. More, Aristocracy and Justice, p. 37.

14. Langston Hughes, Selected Poems (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), pp. 114-15.

15. Cited by Harris, BALH, p. 51. For the original see Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Signet, 1966). Other Black writers such as Langston Hughes and Richard Wright have also stressed the importance of this source.

16. Alice Walker, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (New York: Avon, 1971), p. 216.

17. Walker, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, p. 255.

18. Peter Faulkner, Humanism in the English Novel (New York: Harper and Row, 1967).

19. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, trans. Robert Brinkley, “What is a Minor Literature?” Mississippi Review, 11 (Spring 1983), 13-33.

20. Although my analysis in Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa (Amherst: The Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1983), is limited to anglophone African writers, I think the conclusions are applicable to other Third World writers.

21. Deleuze, “What is a Minor Literature,” p. 3, I have modified Brinkley's translation.

22. Addison Gayle, Jr., The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America (Garden City: Anchor Press, 1975).