Protestant Discourse Research Articles

Re-(W)righting Black Male Subjectivity: The Communal Poetics of Ernest Gaines's A Gathering of Old Men

Re-(W)righting Black Male Subjectivity: The Communal Poetics of Ernest Gaines’s A Gathering of Old Men Keith Clark (bio) When I think of Gaines, I think of voice and story. . . . I think of a person talking to me. I think of men and women talking to me. I think of voices that carry through time. I think of history and personal life memory. —Gayl Jones, Interview with Michael Harper It’s not between the character and the writer. It’s the voice, not the person himself, but the voice. . . . When I come to the omniscient point of view and I create a character, a narrator who’s much like myself, I do too much thinking. I don’t have the freedom. That’s one of the things I criticize Invisible Man about. There’s too much thinking going on all the time. There’s thinking in every goddamned sentence. You don’t think. Let the thing flow. Let it go. —Ernest Gaines The collective writings of Ernest Gaines have challenged and critiqued literary and cultural constructions of the black male subject. As the epigraphic “reading” of Ralph Ellison suggests, Gaines is not satisfied with earlier “blueprints” for “Negro” men’s writing 1 : throughout his career, he has foregrounded the differences between his work and that of his literary forebrothers, most notably Richard Wright and Ellison. By centering the experiences of black men within a certain cultural context, Gaines’s novels and short stories reveal a consanguineous if not harmonious relationship between his and Wright’s writings, which revolved around a debilitated male subject—one rendered disabled and disfigured by the scourges of racism and classism. Indeed, most of Gaines’s fiction (the notable exception being his 1973 novel The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman) charts black men’s attempts to re-situate themselves as subjects—a liberating domain where they attain some degree of agency, self-definition, and authority amidst an abnegating southern environment. Because he and Wright share common geographic place, the different fictive spaces they configure are made even more marked. From early works such as Bloodline (1968) to his latest novel A Lesson Before Dying (1993), the author has embarked upon a re-figuring of the black male literary subject: his protagonists depart substantially from the psychologically and culturally mutilated Bigger Thomas of Wright’s 1940 classic Native Son. [End Page 195] I Of course, any discussion of black men’s literary discourse that examines protest writing and subsequent artists’ critique of it must take into consideration social and cultural dynamics. Wright’s insistence on a deformed black male subject reflected what he considered the cultural evisceration of black men; his introduction to Native Son, “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” lays the groundwork for the maimed male subject that permeates his fiction. However, what is so intriguing about the work of Ernest Gaines generally, and his 1984 novel A Gathering of Old Men specifically, is its radical insistence on black men challenging and interrupting their seemingly inexorable victimhood. Though many critics have discussed Gaines’s centering of male rituals and the integral role storytelling and voice play in his fiction, 2 I posit that Gaines’s artistic accomplishments have even more salient implications vis-à-vis the protest tradition, which Wright epitomizes. I will illustrate how Gaines’s aesthetic endeavor involves the re-centering not merely of the black male voice, but of a black male communal voice which contrasts sharply with the mono-voicedness of protest discourse. In A Gathering of Old Men, Gaines’s re-examination and reinscription of black masculinity result in a revised representation of black literary subjectivity. Specifically, the author deconstructs the notion that black masculinity is merely derivative, and he simultaneously demonstrates that voice and story function not only as fictive tropes but as viable vehicles for the transformation of the black male self. This essay argues that Gaines’s relationship with the protest tradition is more countertextual than intertextual: he appropriates but also subverts discursive features of protest fiction in order to center the empowering nature of communal storytelling and storylistening in terms of black male agency and subject formation. Ii In light of Trudier Harris’ trenchant observation that “There...

“The right to labour, love and pray”: the creation of the ideal Christian Woman in ulster Roman Catholic and Protestant religious literature, 1850-1914

Evangelical Protestant and Catholic laywomen in Ulster, through their publications and written records, wrote glowingly of ‘women's place’ as being subservient to that of men. ‘women's place’ was an honourable one because it entailed self-sacrifice. While Catholic and Protestant discourses on the ‘ideal’ Christian woman would seem to be at variance their images of the ‘ideal’ Christian woman were essentially the same. This article examines the arguments put forward within Catholic and Protestant religious publications regarding women's place in society. Each group argued that the other was fundamentally anti-woman and anti-family. However, for Catholic and Protestant women female piety was seen as essentially domestic, and their expectations of women's domestic destiny were the same.

“The right to labour, love and pray”: the creation of the ideal christian woman in ulster roman catholic and protestant religious literature, 1850-1914

Abstract Evangelical Protestant and Catholic laywomen in Ulster, through their publications and written records, wrote glowingly of ‘women's place’ as being subservient to that of men. ‘women's place’ was an honourable one because it entailed self-sacrifice. While Catholic and Protestant discourses on the ‘ideal’ Christian woman would seem to be at variance their images of the ‘ideal’ Christian woman were essentially the same. This article examines the arguments put forward within Catholic and Protestant religious publications regarding women's place in society. Each group argued that the other was fundamentally anti-woman and anti-family. However, for Catholic and Protestant women female piety was seen as essentially domestic, and their expectations of women's domestic destiny were the same.

Italy: A new language for a new politics?

The aim of this article is to analyze the language used by the major actors in contemporary Italian politics. After a brief introduction, which lists the general questions posed by such an analysis, we examine the language of the pre‐1992 regime, which has been rather too hastily condemned as obscure and solipsistic. We then pass to the self‐consciously simple language of Bossi, who constructs a discourse of protest, and of Berlusconi, who offers a discourse of government. These lead to the very different, albeit sometimes complementary, languages of Prodi and D'Alema, which go beyond populism and open new political perspectives. Through these and other examples we examine the role of political language in a changing Italy.

Narratives of Women: English Feminists of the 1790s

Did ‘feminist’ writers of the 1790s produce narratives in which women could find self‐respect and authenticity? Before this ‘positive’ endeavour came the ‘negative’ task of constructing narratives revealing women’s oppression. More positive images may be found in narratives which relate women to political discourses and events. But the main type of narrative pointing the way towards authentic selfhood for women, free from the prisonhouse of gender, is the narrative of Bildung or development, so common in novels, conduct books, treatises on education and polemics. This narrative, criticized by some twentieth‐century feminists but treated sympathetically here, may be a middle‐class assertion of Kultur against decadent aristocratic Zivilisation; it is also formed by Stoic, republican and Protestant discourses, and is turned into a woman’s narrative not only by republicans such as Macaulay, Wollstonecraft and Hays but also by conservatives such as Chapone and More. It is concerned with a rich and rational inner life rather than surface appearance and superficial accomplishments, and encourages women to be self‐controlled rather than other‐determined, to some extent selves for themselves rather than for men.

Des mots pour un pays. Marqueurs lexicaux de l'écrit et de l'oral en Camargue

Martel (Claude). — A country through its words. Lexical markers in the oral and written expression of Camargue. Starting with about ten works représentative of Camargue and six interviews of inhabitants, we examine, using the vocabulary adopted by writers and witnesses, the rôle and operating mode of lexical indi-cators, markers and stéréotypés in the expression of Camarguais identity. Whether one wanders through the teeming crowd of words that assume new overtones irom one work to the next to celebrate a Camargue for eternity more mythical than real, or whether one indulges oneself in the spoken production closer to the grassroots and apparendy more trivial, one can see in its broad oudines the same picture of this country. But while written texts tend to give a more valorized vision, by insisting on the fascinating strangeness of an indefinite land between water and sait, oral productions denounce forcefully, though concisely, the most devalorizing aspects. To build the picture, the same words operate at several levels : beginning as plain describers, eveiyday words, or trade words in the local Camarguais speech, they become markers through sheer récurrence in a discourse of passionate protest and/or assessment, or through literary reshaping to eventually end up as written stéréotypés. But at every level, each in its own way, those words contribute to the expression and reconstruction of an identity for a country which thinks of itself and claims to be spécial, savage, wild, untamed, free brand. Le Monde Alpin et rhodanien, ler-2 trimestres 1993, L'identité vécue. Discours, rites, emblèmes, pp. 63 à 84.

Christianity and colonialism in South Africa

Christian evangelists were intimately involved in the colonial process in southern Africa. This essay distinguishes two dimensions of their historical role, each associated with a different form of power. In the domain of formal political processes, of the concrete exercise of power, the effect of the nonconformist mission to the Tswana, as elsewhere in Africa, was inherently ambiguous. However, in the domain of implicit signs and practices, of the diffuse control over everyday meaning, it instilled the authoritative imprint of Western capitalist culture. But there was a contradiction between these dimensions: while the mission introduced a new world view, it could not deliver the world to go with it. And this contradiction, in turn, gave rise to various discourses of protest and resistance. [South Africa, Tswana, colonialism, Christianity, missionaries, power, domination and resistance, historical agency and cultural discourse]