Race For Theory Research Articles

Invitation

Invitation

Contemporary Notes on the Black Speculative Arts Movement

Contemporary Notes on the Black Speculative Arts Movement Reynaldo Anderson (bio) There is an energy abroad in the world today that is influenced by financialization, digitalization, commodification and globalization that seeks to marginalize presence, erase our memories, and quiet our voices. Yet we persist, we refuse to die, and our persistence has yielded fruit. The Black Speculative Arts Movement is a product of memories that survive in our cultural DNA that remind us of the need for safe harbors to imagine Black utopias for the beautiful unborn and honor the best of our past. More specifically, the Black Speculative tradition gave birth to what we now refer to as Afrofuturism with its roots in 19th century discourses around anti-slavery revolutionary practices, science, and early pan-Africanist sentiment. The cultural critic Greg Tate asserted that a people without visionaries is a people without an inspirational path to the future. Black speculative literatures genesis lies in the 19th century with the work of men and women like Martin Delany, Sutton Griggs and Pauline Hopkins. Their work grappled with the intersection of the oppression of African people, scientific racism, esotericism, and politics. Their work and other Black writers paralleled the emergence of the European science fiction tradition. The origins of the Black Speculative Arts Movement lie in the planning and execution of the Unveiling Visions: The Alchemy of the Black Imagination cocurated by John Jennings and I in a 2015 exhibition at the Schomburg library in Harlem, New York. The conceptual and speculative design for the exhibition were heavily influenced by the vision and scholarship of W.E.B. Du Bois and the ideas and material culture produced by artists and intellectuals that contribute to Black speculative culture. However, the social movement dynamism of the Black Speculative Arts Movement reflects historical processes, global in scope, that have historical currents in societal changes that have emerged the last 50 years. Although the movement is indebted to earlier Black diasporic art formations that date back to the early 20th century, it has been heavily influenced by the social changes described as Future Shock, Megatrends, and Acceleration. For example, what can be described as the Future Shock era of social change of the 60s and 70s aptly described by writer Alvin Toffler and singer Curtis Mayfield. Future Shock, or the social disorientation that accompanied rapid social change in technology and social values shaped the artistic work and production of creatives like Sun Ra, Octavia Butler, Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed and other artists and [End Page 5] thinkers of the period producing work that was in conversation with the global Black liberation struggle and Black Arts movement of the period in question. Moreover, the work of these artists would sow the seeds of creative thought and praxis later generations of creatives would refer to as Afrofuturism. However, the work of these creatives was only the beginning of forecasting the currents of social change that would be referred to by some as the era of megatrends of the late 20th century. The megatrends of the late 20th century reflected changes in capitalism that were tied to the end of the Cold War and an intensification of the spread of neoliberalism and globalization whose ideas and conceptual origins were reflected in the policies and ideas of Margaret Thatcher, Pierre Trudeau, and Ronald Reagan. Furthermore, during this period of the late 80s and early 90s scholars like Cornel West, Molefi Asante, Henry Louis Gates, bell hooks and others would produce intellectual works that would increasingly reflect a post-civil rights era sentiment among Black scholars. Black feminist scholar Barbara Christian characterized the environment best when she wrote an essay “The Race for Theory” in 1987 that described the environment surrounding the attempt to frame the new environment. During the period in question, Black Studies scholars like Molefi Kete Asante and C.T. Keto at Temple University, wrote about the destiny of African people in relation to time and space, and the need to be futurologists, and comic creators like Dwane McDuffie illustrated futuristic Black sensibilities. During this social milieu cultural critic Mark Dery wrote an article “Black to the Future” that observed the nexus between black speculative...

Misreadings

Misreadings Yumi Pak (bio) "That reading wasn't more comfortable than writing. That by reading one learned to question and remember. That memory was love."1 I've been teaching the literary theory and criticism class required of all English majors, my sixth time teaching it in as many years. The common charge of many students in the class has been, and remains, that it is just too difficult. For students for whom literature has been a site of potential and pleasurable disidentification, this theory class can be acutely alienating, especially if the comfort of reading is a constant they've had in a largely unfamiliar world. Over 80% of students at California State University, San Bernardino are first generation students, and thus academia, with all of its accompanying rituals, can be a space unknown.2 Some retreat into self-doubt, or worse, the paralyzing possibility that they were never good at reading to begin with. [End Page 43] One reading for the class is Barbara Christian's "The Race for Theory." In it, she excoriates the division between "literature" and "theory" as a divide that ignores the active theorizing undertaken by writers of color in narrative forms. I have asked students to engage with the shifting definitions of literature and theory and consider how one can be disciplined by a discipline, to ask the question that Christian puts to her readers: "[f]or whom are we doing what we are doing when we do literary criticism?"3 With Christian, students often conclude that literature is in some ways much more difficult to read than theory. Theorists eventually tell us what their arguments are; "creative writers," on the other hand, don't. Literary analysis, as part of the educational model of reading literature, might seem 'easier' because it has been the template, training us to explain the symbolism of Kino's pearl or Jonas' red sled. Reading is not only a question of what, but also of how. "I can't help but wonder if I've been disciplined to cite Foucault, & whether or not it matters if I read Foucault correctly. Why, still, am I so anxious about misreading Foucault when I have been misread time & time again?"4 Teaching as faculty of color, as underrepresented Black or Native/Indigenous faculty, can mean teaching our students the knife edge of inter/disciplinary language and methodology when they – and we – are so often misread through the depoliticizing and flattened rhetoric of diversity. Why the anxiety of performing a misreading when misreading of people occurs so frequently? When formations of antiblack texts leads to misreading Derek Chauvin's murder of George Floyd as an act of one bad cop, rather than the institution of policing working perfectly?5 When the strategic formations of heteronormative and misogynistic texts lead to continuously misgendering Tony McDade and erasing entirely Breonna Taylor? When white liberals and conservatives alike delight in quoting Dr. King as a figurehead of respectable niceties, performing not only a willful misreading of his most-quoted speech but also a selective reading of his oeuvre? When so many insist on misreading Amy Cooper as an exception to white womanhood, rather than the rule? How are these things connected to, produced by, something like institutional diversity? "For each paragraph break, he leaned back or forward in his chair. She had an excuse now to stare at the tented fingers she [End Page 44] had always loved: a tap of his left fingertips to his right meant a comma. Right index fingertip to left was a colon; pinkie to pinkie a semi. He bent his knuckles and locked his fingers together for a period."6 Being misread consistently is a condition of what W.E.B Du Bois calls double consciousness, and, differently, what I think of as nunchi.7 Those who teach from behind the veil or with this keen eye prioritize reading students with both tenderness and acuity. We understand the significance of clarity not only in what we teach but with whom we create, for that is what it means to teach – always fleeting, yes, but no less powerful because of its ephemerality. This has been one of the challenges of...

Founding Foreclosures: Violence and Rhetorical Ownership in Philosophical Discourse on the Body

Drawing inspiration from Susan Sontag’s notion of ‘rhetorical ownership’—applied not only to illness but also to the body more generally—this essay argues that philosophy, like medicine, has privileged a metaphorics of war and violence in its own discourses on embodiment. Drawing inspiration from Barbara Christian’s seminal essay ‘The Race for Theory,’ as well as literary theorist Eve Sedgwick’s account of what she calls ‘paranoid’ forms of inquiry in her book Touching Feeling, this essay explores the status of violence as an especially resonant trope in discourses on materiality. One worry is that the omnipresence of violent metaphors in contemporary philosophy of the body may be narrowing the space for the elaboration of nonviolent understanding of corporeality that would imagine the body otherwise than as a battlefield or a site of violence.

Critical Theory and Popular Education

Functions traditionally attributed to the intellectual or to the artist currently are perceptible across broad segments of society. Their appearance is facilitated by digital technologies in ways that trouble any remaining distinctions between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ for film and media scholars, theorists and makers. ‘Critical Theory and Popular Education’ explores the relevance of the conceptualization of ‘theory’ offered in Barbara Christian's essay, ‘The Race for Theory’, to a consideration of a range of responses to a dispersal of the intellectual function throughout society and argues that approaching new media technologies and industries themselves as ‘theory’ and modes of theorizing might contribute to our understandings of current configurations of knowledge and power.

Mother Tongues & Masters of Words: Callaloo Across the Atlantic

Mother Tongues & Masters of WordsCallaloo Across the Atlantic Salamishah Tillet (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Salamishah Tillet Michael K. Taylor © 2013 [End Page 557] For whom are we doing what we do when we do literary criticism? I can only speak for myself. But how I write and what I write is done in order to save my own life. —Barbara Christian, “Race for Theory” When the late Barbara Christian penned this famous essay, she did so with the urgency of the moment. In the late 1980s, the canon wars were raging; multiculturalism was seen either as a belated gift or imminent threat; and African American literary studies had the growing pains that came with its legitimacy in the American academy. Even our beloved Callaloo was only a mere decade old. But, I always read Christian’s words as not just for her time, but also as a harbinger for things to come. It reveals the long-standing concern, even angst, amongst those of my generation who continue to do African American literary criticism. Though there is certain circularity to this tension between formal politics and literary criticism, it is also inescapable. For whom are we speaking? In what languages do we write? And to what end? Those questions stayed with me after I left last year’s Callaloo Conference titled “The Transatlantic, Africa, and Its Diaspora” at Oxford University and Goldsmiths, University of London. A sentiment I do not share lightly because it was sparked as much by the insights of the conference participants as it was by the interruption of a single audience member. Perhaps, I should not use this space to think about his disruption. For those who attended the conference and experienced the successive series of his verbal assaults firsthand, we left feeling that this one person—whose name I sadly never learned—took up too much of our time and intellectual energy. But, I think his comments, our responses, and the eventual outcome of our exchange reveal the limits and the power of African American literary criticism itself. Language is the battlefield. It can be the tool of conquest and the sword. —Ngugi wa Thiong’o It did not have to be a strained moment. The panel, “Europe and the UK: Transatlantic Studies” featured a conversation about imagining new cartographies, or as geographer Pat Noxolo noted, new ways of seeing and recognizing creolizations, the in-between-space, that pushes us beyond the Atlantic. Likewise, literary critic Jean-Paul Rocchi posited the African Diaspora as “the possible space of recreation and reinvention,” always contingent [End Page 558] on “multiple identifications and multiple points of intersections.” Within this context of thinking through new circuits and the context of black diaspora studies, it was strange when a graduate student in the audience (from the United States but now studying in Paris) asked the panel about a debate that seems to plague some of us in the American academy: what is the role, if any, of the critic as public intellectual? The lines were quickly drawn. And the African Americanists primarily gave the responses: one panelist said the critic is the interpreter and disseminator of ideas to the outside world; another senior critic proffered that we should differentiate the public intellectual from publicity intellectual, the scholar from the pundit. In both cases, the emphasis was on the performance of translation—that delicate dance between the critic and our various publics. So, when the next question came up, it did not belie the contentiousness that would later take us off course. It started off innocuous enough, but it landed with a punch: “I am not sure why you all speak the way you do. Without passion. Without love.” Upon first blush, this audience member’s move is not so unfamiliar. Joyce Ann Joyce’s postulation that “Black creative art is an act of love” in 1987 was so bold that Sharon Holland would later call the ensuing debate between Joyce, Houston Baker, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. about the role of post-structuralism within African American literary criticism as so heated and important that it was “a revolution that should have been televised” (Joyce...

A Conversation “Overflowing with Memory”

This conversation between Jafari S. Allen and Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley (with Natalie Bennett, Rosamond S. King, Rinaldo Walcott, and Michelle Wright) follows a lively debate during the Black/Queer/Diaspora Work(ing) Group symposium in 2009. This debate centered on the promise and pitfalls associated with pushing beyond disciplinary frameworks and methodological conventions toward, for example, narrative theorizing and creative responses as a legitimate way to represent black women's (erotic) histories. Whither interdisciplinarity? What are the limits of various approaches and genres? This conversation serves as a preface to an excerpt from Tinsley's work of historical fiction. The conversation takes up scholars' responses to the impossibility of knowing some of the particularities of historical experience and subjectivity, as Tinsley's contribution attempts to revindicate the theoretics of those who, in Barbara Christian's words, “have always been a race for theory.”

Philosophy, postcolonialism, african-american feminism, and the race for theory

Who is the contemporary? Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship 77 Perhaps a strange woman walks down from the corner into my bedroom wasps nest behind her ears she is eating a half-ripe bana...

Recent Books on Modern Black Fiction: An Essay-Review

Recent Books on Modern Black Fiction:An Essay-Review Craig Werner (bio) An unnecessary and wasteful internecine battle is being waged by critics of Afro-American literature. As the critical tradition—which can trace its lineage from W. E. B. DuBois and Sterling Brown through Larry Neal and Audre Lorde—reaches a professional maturity of ambiguous value, a substantial number of significant critics have found it necessary to align themselves with camps defined by their support of, or dismay over, "critical theory." Recent essays by Barbara Christian ("The Race for Theory," Cultural Critique), Norman Harris ("'Who's Zoomin' Who': The New Black Formalism," MMLA), and Joyce A. Joyce ("The Black Canon: Reconstructing Black American Literary Criticism," New Literary History) assail the "theoretical" criticism of Houston Baker, Robert Stepto, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Based in part on substance and in part on style—to accept, momentarily, a distinction ultimately irrelevant to Afro-American discourse—the battle threatens to create a situation in which critics on both sides fail to exploit useful insights generated within the other camp. If we are to remain or to become an actual community—a vision basic to the tradition on which all critics of Afro-American literature draw and to which many belong—we must now confront several basic [End Page 125] questions: will we generate an alternative to the petty, hierarchical, and ultimately irrelevant disputes all too common in mainstream criticism? Will we succeed in constructing a discourse—consistent with the basic values of Afro-American writers from Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs through Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison—that can acknowledge diversity by accepting, nurturing, and using the insights of poststructuralists and black nationalists, pluralists and feminists, close readers and cultural historians? The essays cited above did not instigate the current battle, which has roots both in nationalist attacks on integrationist poetics during the Black Aesthetic movement of the 1960s and in several theoretical essays published in Stepto's anthology Afro-American Literature: The Reconstruction of Instruction that attack modes of criticism focusing on "extra-literary" concerns. The success of these attacks, originally intended as correctives for the excess of the Black Aesthetic movement, can be measured by the defensive postures assumed by Harris, Joyce, and Christian, all of whom (rightly) perceive that Gates, Stepto, and Baker occupy positions closer to the center of literary power in the United States. Although the differences between individual positions should not be underestimated, Harris, Joyce, and Christian all criticize the theorists for imposing an inappropriate (continental, academic, Euro-American, abstract) vocabulary on Afro-American materials, for ignoring the political circumstances conditioning Afro-American literature, and (although Christian would probably not endorse this extension) for failing to accept "blackness" as an essence. Related to these substantial issues are a cluster of criticisms focusing on the theorists' styles, which are widely perceived as expressions of indifference to or contempt for the largely nonacademic Afro-American community. Although it frequently remains implicit—at least in print—this criticism is often accompanied by a corollary belief that the theorists, the most influential of whom are based at Ivy League institutions, have created a kind of literary Tuskegee Machine. Supported by the power of mainstream literary institutions such as Critical Inquiry and The New York Times Book Review (which selected Gates rather than a black woman critic to write a major essay celebrating 'black women's literary self-determination), this theoretical machine is seen as excluding or margihalizing critics—especially those based in the Midwest or South—who choose not to employ an acceptably academic vocabulary. The publication of Gates's first critical book, Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the "Racial" Self, and of Stepto's essay on Charles Chesnutt (to be included in his forthcoming book, Write Me A Tale: Storytelling in the Afro-American Narrative) in Gunter Lenz's fine anthology History and Tradition in Afro-American Culture provides an ideal occasion for reconsidering the antitheoretical positions. An attentive reading of the new work suggests that the antitheorists have a tendency to create "straw men" whose [End Page 126] positions are only distantly related to those actually professed by Gates or Stepto. For example, the oft-reiterated idea...