Writing in the Spaces Left

Abstract

The modern nation and its national narratives, those texts which authenticate cultural location, have become increasingly the source of contention. Evidence of such contention may be read in the persistent resistance of historically suppressed groups and individuals to accept subscription by such texts, to translate the absence and exclusion of such texts into metaphors for universality. Art, as powerful source of national narratives (and this should surprise no one), has become the ground on which many of the battles for control have been fought. Ishmael Reed in the early 1970s spoke to the necessity for resistance, likening the struggle over control of the national narrative to sexual competition. the beginning was The and The is the domain of the white patriarchy. Beware. Women and natives are not to tamper with The Word (n.pag.). This is the situation he describes in the introduction to 19 Necromancers from Now. His artistic project, described in When State Magicians Fail, is to appreciably curtail Judeo-Christian culture's domination of our senses, to stage bloodless coup by a cooperative of autonomous groups who are going to come up with new ways of making America work (qtd. in Gerald and Blecher 163). I would like to argue that our contemporary struggles with the primacy of official histories provides us with useful tool for reading back through cultural history and, by doing so, reconsidering the relationship of the voice of the suppressed to the canonical texts of the dominant. In 1882 Ernest Renan attempted definition of nation and the manner in which national narratives served to inscribe that nation. Such national nar