Theorizing Signifying(g) and the Role of the Reader: Possible Directions for African-American Literary Criticism

Abstract

African-American literary criticism has radically critiqued notions of literary phenomena held to be universal, canonical, or in mainstream by problematizing these very terms and boundaries they inevitably construct. This relatively young movement has forcefully entered into current debates concerning canons: undergraduate curricula, course syllabuses, and literature anthologies are being revised to include more texts by black writers historically relegated to margins of discipline. Further, its questioning of traditional exclusivity of literary studies has had reverberating effects and has been affected by other marginalized discourses-those of women, gay, and nonWestern writers, for instance-who have brought their own unique forms of signification to ever increasing polemically charged critical arena. Though black writer of antebellum period was understandably, as Richard Yarborough points out, obsessed with self-authentication, convincing white readers that blacks were not only human but fully endowed with traits and abilities necessary for them to meet or surpass standards used to adjudge acceptability into white, bourgeois American mainstream, contemporary AfricanAmerican criticism is presently concerned with a self-authentication of a different sort (111). Inveighing against acceptance of a relationship of discursive indenture by wearing mask of Western literary theory and speaking its language, Henry Louis Gates challenges black studies to critique these relations of power by developing theories of criticism indigenous to black literature rather than simply mastering only canons of criticism and imitating and applying these to African-American texts (Canon-Formation 24-25). African critic Anthony Appiah has named unreflective imitation of Western theory and criticism the Naipaul fallacy, a post-colonial inferiority complex whereby blacks feel compelled to explain Africa or valorize black texts by showing a resemblance to European literature or culture (146). This sort of borrowing, it is argued, does little to authenticate unique significations of black discourse and perpetuates relationship of indenture to white Western epistemologies. William J. Spurlin is an assistant professor of English at Illinois State University. Having published several articles on reader reception theory, he is currently co-editing a volume exploring continuities between contemporary literary theory and New Criticism and is writing a book on ideologies of reading.