"Race" and Hermeneutics: Paradigm Shift--From Scientific to Hermeneutic Understanding of Race

Abstract

As concept, is plurisemous. Its referents are not limited to visible morphological markers of difference. Social behavior, psychological profiles, economic activities, aesthetic forms - these are some of many indicators by which racial identities are assigned or withheld, claimed or rejected, celebrated or deprecated. In racialized nation states (the United States, Canada),(1) can be quite hazardous. Participation in or exclusion from various sectors of national life - economy, politics, education, recreation, arts - may depend on racial identity assumed by or even assigned to individuals or groups of individuals. To speak, therefore, of in contexts such as these is not merely to address oneself to an abstract concept. Rather, it is to intervene actively in discursive field that is highly charged by sense not only of past and ongoing grievances but also of present investments. In following pages, I shall examine those investments as they pertain to theories of interpretation. Beginning with premise that is one of communities of existing |out there' in world, and that its effectivity in production and interpretation of culture belongs in the province . . . of hermeneutic I will argue that, as systems of understanding, hermeneutic theories also stand in need of interrogation from point of view of ideology of and practices of racial discrimination (Appiah, 21-37). I will also argue that, contrary to Henry Louis Gates's position, African peoples have several systems of interpretation; that, though each may have certain similarities to others, they are not same; and, finally, that any comparison between these systems and European model must point not only features of similarity or equivalence but also those of contrast, contradiction, and difference. Studies which restrict themselves to pointing similarities between strategies of deconstruction, say, and Yorubaderived New World Signifying overlook ideology of race. Even after we have disposed of melanin, we cannot dispose of ideology. ideology of may or may not, in its operations, rely on biology. But, as experience of our daily lives shows, and as examples from interpretation theories (Mailloux; Gates, Signifying; Gadamer), essays on curricular change in post-independence Kenya (Ngugi) and literary criticism reveal, it does its presence felt. I have derived premise outlined above - i.e., that it is in ideology rather than in biology that we may find meaning of - from Kwame Anthony Appiah's essay The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and Illusion of Race. essay's objective, Appiah writes, is to discuss the way in which . . . Du Bois . . . came gradually, though never completely, to assimilate unbiological nature of races. (22) phrase gradually, though never completely, to assimilate is signpost to conclusion Appiah intends to draw, by end of his essay, from Du Bois's work: that races are unbiological. To arrive at this conclusion, Appiah undertakes systematic and critical explication of Du Bois's thoughts on as recorded in The Conservation of (1897), Races (1911) and Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of Race Concept (1940). evidence, he contends, points to reluctance on Du Bois's part to dispose entirely of belief that is an essence of (34). Du Bois's work was a pretext for adumbrating argument he never quite managed to make (35): truth is that are no races . . . . Talk of race is particularly distressing for those of us who take culture seriously. For, where works . . . it works as an attempt at metonym for culture; and it does so only at price of biologizing what is culture, or ideology. . . . What exists out there in world - communities of meaning, shading variously into each other in rich structure of social world - is province not of biology but of hermeneutic understanding. …