American Cultural Criticism Research Articles

Minor China: Method, Materialisms, and the Aesthetic by Hentyle Yapp

Reviewed by: Minor China: Method, Materialisms, and the Aesthetic by Hentyle Yapp Kai Hang Cheang (bio) Minor China: Method, Materialisms, and the Aesthetic, by Hentyle Yapp. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. Xv + 271 pp. $25.60 paperback. ISBN: 9781478011552 Over the past few years, Asian/American cultural criticism has shown a renewed interest in China. Complicating the traditional interpretation of China as a geographical origin point for the Chinese diaspora, the Asian/American scholars behind this twenty-first-century turn to China–including Christopher B. Patterson and Y-Dang Troeung (2019), Nan Z. Da (2020), and Christopher Fan (2021)–attend to how the West's shifting significations of China and Chinese-ness in video games, science fictions, and memoirs reflect the world's imaginations of China's rise in the age of the new Cold War. Hentyle Yapp's monograph Minor China: Method, Materialisms, and the Aesthetic imparts further nuance to the topic of China by bringing Asian/ American cultural criticism and transpacific critiques, such as Lisa Lowe's "hesitant method" and Petrus Liu's "material Marxism," to bear on analyses of post-1989 Chinese art and cultural productions to make distinctions between multiple "Chinas." Not to be confused with the two Chinas in Petrus Liu's Queer Marxism in Two Chinas (namely, the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China), "minor China" is "a method that highlights the epistemological assumptions and ontological conditions [which] uphold the order of things, the major" (5), whereas, the major is the short hand for the "major narratives around resistance and romanticized notions of liberal free speech" (1). Per Yapp's characterization, Asian American studies and area studies are among the disciplines that propagate "major China," since they are driven by reading methods informed by liberal ideals like agency and subjectivity, interpretations that the critic argues flatten out subtle nuances in analyses of China. As a corrective, Yapp offers up "minor China," a "molecular" (15) interpretive method that employs fine-grained, affective, and aesthetic approaches which seek not to judge or criticize but to hesitate before, or pause and ask questions of, liberal logics of inclusion that too often value post-Tiananmen art as heroic efforts of aesthetic resistance in the face of authoritarianism. [End Page 111] Yapp exemplifies the problematic liberal logic in chapter 1 as he discusses the way China and Chinese artists were superficially included in Magiciens de la Terre (1989) despite the show's ostensible attention to China when it televised the concurrent Tiananmen Square protests. The chapter then goes on to show how the liberal logic of inclusion distracted Western curators and audiences from noticing the discursive criticisms made by Chinese artists. To make that case, Yapp turns to Cai Guo-Qiang's reproduction of Wang Guangyi's 1965 Rent Collection Courtyard for the 1999 Venice Biennale. Most critics at the Biennale focused on the grimaces on the faces of the workers and therefore framed the exhibition as a critique of socialism. Yapp argues that this understanding of Cai's piece misses a minor remedial detail: the display of the artists crafting the sculptures in front of the audience, an act that re-centers artistic labor in the installation and highlights the value of it under liberal capitalism. Chapter 2 extends the critique of the logic of inclusion by analyzing Ai Weiwei's art project Fairytale (2007). There, Yapp traces the effects of the hostility the group endured from racist Europeans and the anger that some of the tourists expressed (most memorably the Chinese woman who complained about the exclusion of her son from the tourist group because of some anti-police comments that he posted online). The "minor" here means anger and spite, which Yapp reads as affective exhortations that direct readers "to an ethics, practice and method that inquire who might been missing" (101). In chapter 3, Yapp studies Yan Xing's piece Kill (the) TV Set as well as Liu Ding, Carol Lu, and Su Wei's collective curation project Little Movement. Homing in on the "minor" (the dispassionate expression on the face of Yan in his embrace of Agu Anumudu) and ambiguous pieces like 1996.8.26, a work that shows...

Response: Remaining Committed to Religious and Cultural Criticism

ABSTRACT Framed in the mode of an interview, this essay responds to questions surrounding the publication of Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay in African American Religious and Cultural Criticism (1995) in light of contemporary moves in Black studies, including Black religion and culture studies. The contemporary relevancy of the form of religious and cultural criticism presented in the book is the topic of the dialogue among contributors. My postmodern iconoclastic critique of Black essentialism—cultural, racial, or heroic—in favor of a grotesque aesthetic, which accents the comedic interplay of unresolved ambiguity and a Nietzschean robust pessimism filled with laughter, is rearticulated in light of the 21st century challenges and provocations of the religious situation discussed by the guest co-editors and contributors. Readers will discover a generous generational dialogue that models a commendable Black scholarly aesthetic.

A Black Feminist Study of Religion: Inheriting Victor Anderson’s Black Religious and Cultural Criticism

ABSTRACT In this article, I outline what Kristie Dotson refers to as an “inheritance map” for the epistemological insights and critical moves in Victor Anderson’s Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay on African American Religious and Cultural Criticism (1995). I establish that Beyond Ontological Blackness represents what Stuart Hall calls a significant break – “where old lines of thought are disrupted, older constellations displaced, and elements, old and new, are regrouped around a different set of premises and themes” 1 1 Hall, “Cultural Studies." – and thusly, a new direction in the study of black 2 2 In my current writing projects (post 2019) I use Black (rather than black) and white for political reasons. Full stop. I deploy a “b” when engaging oppression, however. Still, making distinctions in this essay between what should have a “B” (for example, Black women, church, students, presence, subject, religion, experience, etc.) and what should have a “b” (for example, antiblack, ontological blackness, symbolic blackness, black heroic cultural genius, black crisis, etc.) proved extremely difficult. Most challenging was turning my powerful “B” into a “b” throughout for clarity and consistency. religion and theology 3 3 This is not slippage. I distinguish between black theology and the study of black religion at length in Jezebel Unhinged: Loosing the Black Female Body in Religion and Culture (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2018). : black religion and culture studies. The latter of which makes room for a black feminist study of religion.

BOB’s Blues: A Reflection on the Legacy of Victor Anderson’s Beyond Ontological Blackness

ABSTRACT This essay celebrates Victor Anderson’s Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay on African American Religious and Cultural Criticism (BOB) by considering how it reads blackness as an open possibility for human flourishing. Through critical engagement with Anderson’s notion of the “grotesquery of blackness,” it reads blues as a site for considering the implications of Anderson’s contention that black theology must move beyond essentialist constructions of blackness. The reflection also highlights how Anderson’s work anticipates contemporary critiques of modernity within decolonial studies, especially in the work of Sylvia Wynter. Finally, this essay uses the insights of BOB to assess the grotesque genius of the blues by offering a brief analysis of blues singer Muddy Waters’s performance of “Hoochie Coochie Man.”

Grey or Nothing: Blackness and the Perils of Ontology Without Ethics

ABSTRACT This article examines the enduring relevance of Victor Anderson’s Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay in Religious and Cultural Criticism. Anderson rightly senses a close connection between the practice of African American cultural criticism and the ethical sensitivity required to do it well. He also recognizes the historical limits of ontological inquiry. I argue that these metaphilosophical assumptions afford more generative encounters with Black political and cultural life, especially its discursive ambiguities and practical incongruities. By engaging the writings of two contemporary critics, Tamura Lomax and Calvin Warren, I show the benefits of thinking alongside Anderson’s important text and the dangers of not doing so. Scholars of religion, African American studies, and cultural studies ignore Anderson’s work and the discourses it enjoins at their own peril.

The Fiction of Javier Payeras and the Neoliberal State

AbstractThis essay establishes parallels between sexual diversity and the neoliberal state, ultimately to demonstrate how queer and trans Guatemalans embody public urban space where they have been ostracized in the postwar period. The essay begins by situating queerness in the context of recent Latin American cultural criticism to subsequently provide a detailed genealogy of the mutual imbrications of queerness and neoliberalism in postwar Guatemala. Ultimately, I contend, emergent discourses of LGBTQ+ subjectivities as depicted in the novels Ruido de fondo (2003) and Días amarillos (2009) by Javier Payeras elucidate how queer and trans Guatemalans navigate the fragmented cityscape.

Nation, Diaspora, and Asian American Literature

AbstractRead together, Patricia Chu’s Where I have Never Been (2019), Jinah Kim’s Postcolonial Grief (2019), Sze Wei Ang’s The State of Race (2019), and Janna Odabas’s The Ghosts Within (2018) allow for a review of the state and meaning of diaspora and diasporic frames of analysis in Asian American literary and cultural criticism. Approaching these books through the 1990s debate on minority nationalism in Asian American studies shows one prominent direction that critical engagements with transnationalism have taken. While postcolonialism’s place in the 1990s debate on transnationalism and Asian America was tenuous at best, these books suggest that it has become a crucial part of envisioning the critical work diasporic Asian American culture can do. In these books, diasporic frames of analysis lead to recognizing Asian American culture as a site where the unresolved and unaccounted for violence of US nationalism and globalization surfaces and challenges to dominant ideas of race and nation appear. Both as method of inquiry and as historical understanding of twentieth-century US–Asian relations, postcolonialism in these books shows the critical potential of diaspora for Asian America.

A Tribute to Louise DeSalvo (1942–2018)

A Tribute to Louise DeSalvo (1942–2018)

The Unspeakable Speculative, Spoken

AbstractExploring various absences—what is or should not be represented in addition to the unspeakable in terms of racial representations—is the through line of three recent books about race and speculative fictions. Mark C. Jerng’s Racial Worldmaking: The Power of Popular Fiction (2018) argues racial worldmaking has been at the center of speculative fictions in the US. In Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination (2017), Kristen Lillvis takes one of the primary thematic concerns of black speculative fictions—the posthuman—and rereads some of the most canonical works in the black feminist literary canon through that lens. Lillvis addresses a traditional problem in the turn to discussions of the posthuman and nonhuman, namely, what does it mean to rethink black people’s humanity when they have traditionally been categorized as nonhuman? Sami Schalk’s Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (2018) speaks to the absence of a framework of disability in African American literature and cultural criticism. In addressing absence—or, perhaps silence—Schalk offers the most paradigm-shifting challenge to what is speakable and unspeakable: the problem of linking blackness with disability and how to reframe our treatment of these categories.

Post-sixties Narratives in Contemporary American Cultural Criticism

ABSTRACTAs a special type of criticism, post-sixties narratives represent a very important part of contemporary American cultural criticism. These narratives shape the American collective memory and the national mood – the structure of feeling of American society. Russell Jacoby’s post-sixties narrative, from-bohemia-to-academia, is a case in point. It posits Bohemia and Academia as two contrasting historical tropes, spatial tropes as well as political tropes, to represent contemporary American intellectual life. Such a “Bohemian narrative” offers the “against the grain” narrative tension in Jacoby’s post-sixties narrative. Examination of various post-sixties narratives may help us obtain a new perspective on contemporary American cultural criticism and, at the same time, deepen our understanding of contemporary American culture.

“Visions and Versions of America”: Greil Marcus’s Rock Journalism as Cultural Criticism

This article seeks to elucidate to what degree Greil Marcus’s rock journalism can be considered an American cultural criticism. Is it legitimate to advance the idea that his rock journalism is more than rock writing? And what role does America play in this context? When both early American rock journalism and the field of American studies try to answer the question “What is America?” it becomes obvious that the latter would profit from analyzing rock writing. This promising dialogue, however, exists only in rudimentary form. By discussing Marcus’s texts (especially Mystery Train and his writings on punk rock), this article offers one possibility of establishing this dialogue.

Carceral Lives Matter

Carceral Lives Matter Jeannine Marie DeLombard (bio) Jen Manion. Liberty’s Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Figures, appendices, notes, and index. $45.00. Austin Reed. The Life and Adventures of a Haunted Convict. Ed. Caleb Smith. New York: Random House, 2016. Figures, appendices, notes, and index. $30.00 (cloth); $18.00 (paper). Ava DuVernay’s 2016 Netflix documentary 13th, on the U.S. criminal justice system in the wake of the Thirteenth Amendment, is only the most recent example of the intensifying critical scrutiny of race and penality in both mainstream news sources and alternative media. In 2010, civil rights attorney Michelle Alexander published The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The 2012 New York Times bestseller recounts how the Reagan-era War on Drugs has gradually been institutionalized into “a new system of racialized social control.”1 The New Jim Crow may well have inspired black millennials to break ranks with their elders, as evidenced by protests holding 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton answerable for the devastating impact on communities of color of President Bill Clinton’s 1994 crime bill. (Both Clintons have issued apologies.) These protests attracted national attention to the Black Lives Matter movement, founded in response to George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the shooting death of unarmed African American teenager, Trayvon Martin. As the news of Zimmerman’s acquittal spread in the summer of 2013, U.S. movie theaters were screening Fruitvale Station (2013). The Sundance- and Cannes Award-winning film opens and closes with smartphone footage of the 2009 killing of Oscar Grant—also unarmed, also African American—by a Bay Area Rapid Transit officer. Over the next three years, the tragic scene would be restaged over and over again in a seemingly endless string of viral videos documenting brutal police attacks on Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, and other black and brown citizens. Noting the widespread tendency to focus on male victims of racial profiling, the African American Policy Forum (AAPF) [End Page 33] launched the #SayHerName campaign in February 2015 to promote intersectional social justice by exposing violence by officials against women of color. With all of these events unfolding under what sociologist and minister Michael Eric Dyson in a new book calls The Black Presidency (2016), African American cultural criticism has again become mainstream. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ New York Times bestseller, Between the World and Me (2015), won the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a 2016 Pulitzer Prize Finalist for General Non-Fiction. As the examples of Dyson and the AAPF suggest, those in the academy have not confined their voices to classrooms and peer-reviewed publications; with Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul (2016), Princeton Department of Religion Professor Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., may represent a new cohort of post-Ferguson black public intellectuals. As Liberty’s Prisoners and The Life and Adventures of a Haunted Convict remind us, however, incarceration as racialized social control has been constitutive of American politics and culture from the very beginning. Aptly, Jen Manion locates her study of early American carceral culture in late eighteenth-century Philadelphia. Manion’s welcome contribution is an intersectional analysis that considers the interplay of race, condition, class, gender, national origin, and sexuality in the development of the penitentiary system. In the process, however, she covers ground that has already been well trodden by prison historians David Rothman, Billy G. Smith, Thomas Dumm, Michael Meranze, Rebecca McLennan, Leslie Patrick-Stamp, Jack D. Marrietta and G. S. Rowe, as well as literary scholars like Peter Okun, Jodi Schorb, Caleb Smith, and myself. As the familiar images adorning and illustrating the book indicate, Liberty’s Prisoners once again takes us from Walnut Street Gaol (1776) and Walnut Street Prison (1790), to Eastern State Penitentiary (1829) and Philadelphia’s House of Refuge (1828). U.S. prison history is typically structured by the tandem development of Pennsylvania’s “separate system” of solitary confinement at Eastern State and New York’s “congregate” system of silent group incarceration. Appropriately, then, Caleb Smith provides an insider view of the alternate “congregate” worlds...

Una ruina habitada desde el presente: vestigios del horror, la resistencia y el duelo. A propósito de La Ilíada de Teatro de los Andes (2000)

This paper describes and analyses Teatro de los Andes’ La Iliada (2000). This play critically interprets the recent past of the civic-military dictatorships and the neoliberal present of Bolivia and Latin America by bringing Homer’s text into this context. This is possible thanks to a complex discursive, visual, linguistic – both Quechuan and Spanish – and musical architecture – local and European traditions –, which re-elaborates numerous and varied intertexts. Once this plays presents itself as the memory of a traumatic past-present from which we must learn, the present paper examines the forms of representation of mourning and violence, as well as the resistance and mourning practices. In order to do so, we found support in Latin American Cultural Criticism and Memory Studies, and consider the social and historical period the plays discusses.

Techno-orientalism: imagining Asia in speculative Fiction, History, and Media ed. by David s. Roh, Betsy Huang, and Greta A. Niu (review)

Reviewed by: Techno-orientalism: imagining Asia in speculative Fiction, History, and Media ed. by David s. Roh, Betsy Huang, and Greta A. Niu John Cheng (bio) Techno-orientalism: imagining Asia in speculative Fiction, History, and Media, edited by David s. Roh, Betsy Huang, and Greta A. Niu. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2015. x + 260 pp. $34.95 paper. ISBN: 978-0-8135-7063-1. This anthology usefully introduces an emergent area of Asian American literary and cultural criticism that seeks to bridge what are often separate realms and discourses of analysis: Asian American studies and critical race studies on the one hand and speculative fiction studies and media studies on the other. Its editors explore aspects of what they, drawing from a 1995 David Morley and Kevin Robins essay, call techno-Orientalism: “the phenomenon of imagining Asia and Asians in hypo- or hypertechnological terms in cultural productions and political discourse” (2). This formulation extends Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism to the technological modern and how Asia, for the West, contains and configures its associated anxieties. While “Orientalism arrests Asia in traditional, and often premodern imagery,” the editors explain, “techno-Orientalism presents a broader, dynamic, and often contradictory spectrum of images, [End Page 382] constructed by the East and West alike, of an ‘Orient’ undergoing rapid economic and cultural transformations” (3). With its particular concern to imagine future possibility and temporal alternative, speculative fiction (or sf, as it is abbreviated) richly expresses these tensions in several media and forms; still, the editors argue, much of sf’s critical tradition has not applied Orientalism’s lens to technology’s sublime. This volume seeks to redress that critical vacuum. The collection’s two sections parallel the editors’ dual aims: “Iterations and Instantiations” charts examples and aspects of techno-Orientalism “over time and across genres” (16), while “Reappropriations and Recuperations” offers opportunities for “critical reappropriations in texts that self-referentially engage with Asian images” (7). With an introduction, conclusion, and fifteen contributor essays within two hundred twenty-five pages, most of its pieces are brief; consequently, some are largely descriptive. Many of the essays are, nevertheless, useful interventions. Several authors chart new, less obvious territory connecting the technological and the Asian/Orient. Aimee Bahng explores the “cruel optimism”—using Lauren Berlant’s notion—of Asian futures forecast through an economics founded on neoliberal financial speculation in Sonny Liew’s graphic novel Malinky Robot. Warren Liu counterposes the technological order of clocks and automata with the natural evolutionary order of geologic strata to excavate the “queer” futures and asynchronous dynamics that Asian racial traces reveal within the apparent temporal stability of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s foundational steampunk novel The Difference Engine. Other contributors recover historical examples of this same linkage: Kenneth Hough on the sublime combination of war, engines, and the modern in the formation of turn-of-the-twentieth-century fears of Japanese invasion; Jason Crum on authoritative knowledge about the Orient and its industrial production for mass audiences in late 1930s Mercury Theatre Company radio broadcasts. Still others examine Orientalist themes within emergent technological entertainment. Steve Choe and Se Young Kim consider their presence in discourses about video gaming and gamer culture, specifically the real-time strategy (RTS) game StarCraft, that connect Asian “gamer death” to broader assumptions about what constitutes “fair play”; Dylan Yeats delves into the militaristic link of Asian subjects/objects within Hollywood films, first-person shooter (FPS) video games, and actual military recruitment. While individual pieces assay the subject and concerns the editors introduce, as a whole the collection does not fully achieve their expressed aims. In actual geographic coverage, the “Asia” imagined from its subtitle defaults to East Asia. The editors mention India and South Asians in their introduction and conclusion, but none of the contributors take South or Southeast Asia—with the exception of Bahng and brief references to sites of American conflict—or authors from those regions as their subjects. How might they have considered [End Page 383] the reappropriately imagined Philippines, Viet Nam, and India in the sf of Charles Tan, Vu Kim Dung, or Amitav Ghosh, for instance? Similarly the essays might have more directly engaged scholarship in...

African American acafandom and other strangers: New genealogies of fan studies

Because scholars have paid insufficient attention to race in fan studies, a new genealogy of fan studies is needed, one that includes different kinds of primary and secondary texts that have explored responses of black fans. There is a rich history of black fan criticism and acafandom that has never been seen as such but that both complements and complicates current definitions and paradigms in fan studies. Discussions of fan otherness, antifandom, and fan ambivalence explore the difference that the inclusion of African American cultural criticism would make to both canonical scholarship and more recently published work in the field.

Writing in the Air: Heterogeneity and the Persistence of Oral Tradition in Andean Literatures by Antonio Cornejo Polar (review)

Reviewed by: Writing in the Air: Heterogeneity and the Persistence of Oral Tradition in Andean Literatures by Antonio Cornejo Polar Estelle Tarica Antonio Cornejo Polar, Lynda J. Jentsch, Estelle Tarica, Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Andes, Literature, Orality, Latin America Cornejo Polar, Antonio. Writing in the Air: Heterogeneity and the Persistence of Oral Tradition in Andean Literatures. Trans. Lynda J. Jentsch. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2013. 212pp. The appearance of an English translation of Antonio Cornejo Polar’s seminal Escribir en el aire: ensayo sobre la heterogeneidad socio-cultural en las literaturas andinas provides a wonderful opportunity to reencounter this tremendous literary critic, whose influence on contemporary Latin American criticism is immeasurable, and also to reflect on the continued relevance of this text. The work was first [End Page 110] published by the Centro de Estudios Peruanos in 1994, three years before the author’s death, with a second edition appearing in 2003 under the imprint of the Centro de Estudios Literarios “Antonio Cornejo Polar” (CELACP), an organization founded to honor his legacy as a teacher and scholar. Those readers who have not had sustained access to his thinking until now, with this first translation of a book-length work (some of his articles had been previously translated into English), will find a scholar of impressive erudition whose pluralist sensibilities offer a powerfully compelling perspective on Andean literature. One question that arises when contemplating a translation concerns market and audience. What kind of new reader can we foresee? To whom will this work be of interest? Jean Franco, in her brief and insightful foreword to the English translation, frames this book as an “initiation” into a realm beyond the Western literary canon. Franco alludes here not only to the peripheral positioning of Latin American literature vis-à-vis European literature and to the desire by many readers to venture out beyond the Western canon; she also highlights, if elliptically, a major theme of Cornejo Polar’s study, namely, the relationship—he calls it a “conflictive dialogue”—between Western and non-Western cultures in the Americas. The newcomer’s initiation to this field will be complicated by the fact that some of the texts that Cornejo discusses in Writing in the Air lack complete published translations into English. This is a not entirely insignificant problem, considering that Cornejo cites liberally from these, forcing his translator, Lynda Jentsch, to fill in substantive gaps with her own translations. But this is perhaps a minor point. Duke University Press, the publisher, is marketing the book less as an introduction to Andean literatures than as a pointed intervention into Latin American cultural criticism, and as the purveyor of a concept—heterogeneity—that only now, in English, will be able to reach a truly global audience, thereby presumably augmenting the value of this concept for all concerned. To my mind, this understanding of Cornejo’s “heterogeneity” runs the risk of reifying it and undermining the spirit of demystification that runs through all his work. In fact, I would urge readers of this work to resist the temptation to be guided by the editorial decision to frame the book as a rebuttal of concepts of hybridity circulating in Latin American cultural criticism. A cynic might wonder if the decision wasn’t guided by Duke’s recent publication of an English translation of Angel Rama’s Transculturación narrativa en América Latina, the unnamed antagonist in this largely invented polemic that perhaps, not coincidentally, allows the press to market both books at once. Although Cornejo published two late and exceedingly brief articles criticizing Rama’s use of “transculturation” as a metaphor for literature, none of this can be found in Writing in the Air, whose unspoken antagonist is entirely other: the nationalist ideology of mestizaje embraced by the military populists who ruled in 1970s Peru. [End Page 111] Writing in the Air grapples with what Cornejo terms the “destabilizing hybridity of Latin American literature” (4). What makes heterogeneity forceful as a concept is its emphasis on the modifier “destabilizing.” In this, as in his previous work, Cornejo seeks to demonstrate that the continuing legacy of colonial injustice produces a disjuncture within modern Andean nations, which are marked by the “conflictive co...

Looking at the Overexposed: Visuality and Race in Harnett’s Attention Company!

Looking at the OverexposedVisuality and Race in Harnett’s Attention Company! Christopher J. Lukasik (bio) The last twenty years has seen a number of cultural critics investigating the relationship between race and visuality.1 Michelle Wallace, for example, closed the 1992 Black Popular Culture collection by addressing “the problem of visuality in African American culture” (335). Wallace attributes this problem—what she calls “the history of a mostly invisible black visuality” (335)—to the institutional limitations of a white-dominated art world that restrict or prohibit both the production of and discourse on black visuality. She finds it difficult, for instance, to imagine an African American’s relation to visual practice either as an artist or as a critic, if nearly all the depictions are negative. The historical legacy of negative images (African Americans as objects) plus the historical absence of positive images (African Americans as subjects), contributes to an absence of visual producers which, in turn, produces an absence of critical discourse on the visual.2 Thus, the existence of a mostly invisible black visuality, ironically enough, has little to do with a lack of exposure. In fact, Wallace finds the negative image of the black to be thoroughly overexposed.3 Consequently, she believes that one of the goals of contemporary cultural criticism should be to “begin to understand how regimes of visuality enforce racism, how they literally hold it in place” (Wallace, “Afterword” 344). Like Wallace, Henry Louis Gates also discusses the problem of African American visuality in his introductions to two recent museum exhibition catalogues (“The Face” 11–14). But for Gates, the problem of African American visuality is more about the past than the present. Gates contends that “the hegemony of racist images that dominated the popular arts and infiltrated the fine arts” during the nineteenth century prompted the New Negro movement to use words, and “not the tactics of visual representation, as the tools … used to assert their self-image” (“The Face” xliv). Here, the negative visual representations of African Americans have not only stifled visual production, but they have literally generated textual bodies to take their place. In his introduction to the Black Male catalogue, Gates maintains that “tragically, every African American male who walks down any street in America carries with him the hidden heritage of this negative cultural and psychological legacy, the burden of being perceived through what … Barbara Johnson calls a stereotype—’an already-read text’—the already read text of debasedness and animality” (Preface 13). Like Wallace, Gates draws virtually the same conclusion: African American visuality is problematic largely because of the historical legacy of centuries of negative images. Where Wallace locates “the problem” in the cultural institutions that regulate and maintain the production of visual practice, Gates locates “the problem” in [End Page 723] the historical effects of a cultural conflation between the stereotyped images and the actual people they seek to reductively display. Yet, as both Wallace and Gates discuss the enduring legacy of the production of negative images, and the vexed status that it has subsequently created for the relationship between African American discourse and visuality, there is scarcely any attention paid to how these images themselves might actually participate in the problem outside of their status as an already-read text. In fact, it remains unclear if the representational modalities of images have any bearing whatsoever on what Wallace claims as a “vital” problem for African American discourse. While Wallace hopes to address this problem, her notion of visuality seems confined to “who produces and reproduces vision,” and oddly leaves out interrogating the very material condition for the production of vision in the first place: the image. Similarly, Gates reduces almost the entire history of the relationship between race and representation in American art (1710–1940) to the steady production of images that by and large always exist as “already-read” texts. Although the iconoclasm implicit within such criticism is understandable given the vast corpus of stereotypical images of African Americans within American culture, the implications and limitations of this iconoclasm on African American cultural criticism’s relationship to the problem it seeks to understand warrants further thought as to how African American visuality might...

The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy and Character and Opinion in the United States

This book brings together two seminal works by George Santayana, one of significant philosophers of twentieth century: Character and Opinion in United States, which stands with Tocqueville's Democracy in as one insightful works of American cultural criticism ever written, and The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy, a landmark text of both philosophical analysis and cultural criticism. An introduction by James Seaton situates Santayana in intellectual and cultural context of his own time. Four additional essays include John Lachs on ways Santayana's understanding of the soul of America help explain relative peace among nationalities and ethnic groups in United States; Wilfred M. McClay on Santayana's life of mind as it relates to dominant trends in American culture; Roger Kimball on Santayana's most uncommon benefice, common sense; and James Seaton on Santayana's distinction between English liberty and fierce liberty. All essays serve to highlight relevance of Santayana's ideas to current issues in American culture, including education, immigration, and civil rights.

Not Their Masters’ Voice: Latin American Nonfiction

recent Latin American writers are reviving and occasionally surpassing their canonical earlier counterparts, especially those associated with the “Boom.” That movement will be half a century old by 2013, and, since its apogee, digital media have contributed substantially to a swift, constant awareness of the new writers. Many of them have their own blogs and a larger presence in journalism, thereby contributing in diverse ways to new views of world literature. One still reads biweekly columns by the recent Nobel Prize–winner Mario Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes; their canonicity is unquestioned, aided and abetted by their presence in world media. Yet numerous Spanish-language dailies are devoting exceptional attention to several new writers’ every move, even providing some (not always the most accomplished) with columns or blogs to express their epiphanies and predispositions for assailing orthodoxies. The recent publication of Roberto Bolano’s Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998–2003 (2011), in a prodigious translation by Natasha Wimmer of the 2004 original, may launch a repositioning in the larger republic of letters of the importance of the essay and its avatars as a foundation for understanding Latin America and its cultures. The Chilean’s generic hybrids are bluntly honest, frequently trenchant and hilarious, feisty, insightful, aesthetic-centered, sometimes decadent in taste, naive in the estimation of literary value, yet always inspired. Bolano’s nonfiction reminds one of American cultural critics who publish visceral critiques, while arbitrarily exaggerating the merits of some of their friends; above from left

‘Latin American Modernity, and Yet …’1

The article examines two ‘postmodern’ critiques of modernity: a general history that argues that it was never solely Western, and a work of Latin American cultural criticism that petitions for the region to leave behind a modernity seen as Eurocentric. It argues that to understand the modern elements of Latin America entails keeping present the European, and in part pre-nineteenth-century, genealogy of modernity. This is in order to grasp that both the pitfalls of claiming modernity is a common project (colonialism vanishes) and the difficulty of going beyond it (European modernity bequeathed the language of breaks and dialectical incorporations). The piece identifies the rhetorical choreography involved when the limits of the critique of Western modernity become apparent.