On Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 5:43 PM, Tracy Flemming <cafenegritude@gmail.com> wrote:
Black Is Brilliant
April 15, 2009 | 12:00 am
Alain Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher
By Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth
(University of Chicago Press, 432 pp., $45)
In conversation in London with the British Conservative leader David
Cameron this past summer, Barack Obama lamented the frantic over-
scheduling that encourages micromanagement and with it the temptation
to try and "solve everything and end up being a dilettante." Instead,
he concluded, "the most important thing you need to do is to have big
chunks of time during the day when all you're doing is thinking." His
remark, not meant to be made public but caught on tape, did not make a
big splash, but the importance that Obama accorded to the need to stop
and think must count as one of the more revealing moments of his
campaign, not least because it gives some substance to the tag
"intellectual" that the media attached to him this past summer. Obama
is a cunning professional politician, but he is also undeniably an
intellectual, and that word--along with the cluster of others
invariably summoned up: bloodless professorial elitist egghead--became
a catchall term of opprobrium. But with his victory came a
rehabilitation of "intellectual" as a term of pride: a New York Times
columnist crowed that "the second most remarkable thing about his
election is that American voters have just picked a president who is
an open, out-of-the-closet, practicing intellectual." What would
W.E.B. Du Bois say?
One of the great intellectuals of any color, the prodigious Du Bois
comes to mind because, for him, a significant part of being an
intellectual was tied up with what Obama spoke of in London--the
capacity for, and the luxury of, stepping back from busyness to think.
"I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not, " Du Bois famously
declared, reflecting belief in the "kingdom of culture" as a space of
freedom, a realm "uncolored," above the imprisoning veil of the color
line. On a fellowship to Berlin in 1892 while pursuing graduate work
in economics, history, and sociology at Harvard, where he would be the
first black recipient of a doctorate, Du Bois was initiated into
aesthetic experience: "I had been before, above all, in a hurry, I
wanted a world hard, smooth and swift, and had no time for ...
unhurried thought and slow contemplation. Now at times I sat still."
He grew inward with Beethoven and Wagner, Rembrandt and Titian.
For black Americans in Jim Crow America, this capacity of relaxing
into thought and aesthetic pleasure was stunted by a double burden:
the reign of white supremacy, grounded in the alleged law of God and
Biology which held that black people were primarily bodies with, at
best, the minds of children, and the unwitting ratification of that
law by the leader of black America, Booker T. Washington. He
restricted black education to the hand and the heart, and not the
head. To be seen carrying books at the Tuskegee Institute risked
punishment, an echo of the plantation custom of severing a slave's
finger or hand if caught reading. Instead Washington's school was
devoted to making the Negro humble and useful to the rural communities
of the south--to know one's place, as it was defined by the Wizard of
Tuskegee, who scorned as useless learning the sight of a black child
studying a French grammar.
Working hand in glove with Northern philanthropists, Washington's
disdain for educating black minds made shrewd economic sense, as it
ensured a steady supply of cheap, non-unionized farm labor to keep the
cost of cotton profitable. Washington described Tuskegee itself as
serene, rooted "upon the solid and never deceptive foundation of
Mother Nature." Hence a black intellectual was a repugnant oxymoron
who violated Nature--Washington called them "artificial" men,
"graduates of New England colleges" with decadent tastes for "kid
gloves" and "fancy boots." He likely had the dapper mulatto Du Bois in
mind. Washington's anti-elitism is a hardy perennial of American life.
It expresses what is our national second nature--the rage to purify
bound up in the simplifying power of "American pastoral," as Philip
Roth calls our ineradicable will to innocence that divides the world
in two. Nature--the preserve of the rural, the pre-modern, the
authentic, and the masculine--defines itself against the Unnatural--
the Babylon of modernity, urban foppery, effeminacy, and
intellectuality.
Du Bois distilled the disturbance embodied in the idea of a black
intellectual into a word: he called it a "problem." And the "strange
experience" of "how it feels to be a problem" is the haunting subject
of his masterpiece The Souls of Black Folk, which appeared in 1903.
The book's most famous chapter demolishes Washington, cleverly turning
the charge of effeteness against him by denouncing his stance as
counseling "unmanly" submission. The most vivid and pained portrait of
the "problem" of being a black intellectual forms the book's sole work
of fiction, Du Bois's great short story "Of the Coming of John." Here,
in a displaced, symbolic autobiography, Du Bois meets the challenge of
representing a newly emergent social type who seemed to affront every
way of making sense of black identity in Jim Crow America. Attending a
provincial college, John Jones grows from rowdy frat boy to becoming
intoxicated with the "world of thought."
To represent, in 1903, a black man thinking pushed the perversity of
intellection to an extreme. John's capacity for becoming lost in
thought becomes the tale's motif: listening to Lohengrin at the
Metropolitan Opera, he is lost in aesthetic bliss, and the final scene
of Du Bois's story finds him humming Wagner's music, barely aware of
the onrushing lynching party as it descends upon him. (He has killed
the white man who was molesting his sister.) Eerily indifferent to his
imminent demise, John in his trancelike absorption becomes
unintelligible, a status that registers the black intellectual's
historical reality in that era: stranded in a no-man's-land, seeming
neither to know his place nor to have a place, hence synonymous with
enigma.
John Jones tastes the freedom of life above the veil, and in a sense
he dies of it. His paralysis seemed to serve his creator as an object
lesson, a warning, even a spur to the torrential productivity,
versatility, and creativity that defined Du Bois's own career. He
conducted that career, of course, not on the lofty heights of his
ideal "kingdom of culture" but within the veil, where he was "kept in
bounds" by the daily humiliations of segregation. He died in 1963 at
ninety-five in his friend Nkrumah's independent state of Ghana, on the
eve of the march on Washington. For all his accomplishments, Du Bois
always believed that white racism, as he said in 1934, "has made me
far less rounded a human being than I should like to have been."
Coupled with that cost was his ineradicable sense of self-sacrifice in
behalf of race service, and the twin constraints shape the concluding
tableau of "Of the Coming of John." It is a compelling mix of defiance
and doom, as Du Bois wrapped John Jones in the robes of tragedy. And
later writers' incarnations of the black intellectual, even when
imbued with mordant wit and gallows humor, by and large remained
garbed in tragedy for much of the century, as if born with a
birthright of existential anguish. The titles alone tell the tale:
Invisible Man; Nobody Knows My Name; The Outsider; American Hunger.
Alain Locke, who was born in Philadelphia in 1885, was seventeen years
younger than Du Bois, and had little use for the pathos of blackness.
He declined the cloak of tragedy: "I am not a race problem. I am Alain
LeRoy Locke, " he declared as he arrived at Oxford as the first
African American Rhodes Scholar.
Locke regarded his iron confidence as his birthright as a proper and
proud member of an old free black family of educators. The son and
grandson of highly cultivated people on both sides, Locke was nearly
blase about entering Harvard in 1904. His letters home from college
bear little evidence of anxiety. By 1912 he was a professor of
philosophy at Howard, where he would teach for four decades.
Locke remains best known as a prime catalyst of the blossoming of
black literary and artistic life in 1925 known as the Harlem
Renaissance, which he showcased in his landmark anthology The New
Negro. Always a controversial figure--"the high priest of the
intellectual snobbocracy" was not an untypical reaction--Locke is now
the subject of a first biography that rescues him from caricature and
brings alive his distinctive fashioning of the role of black
intellectual. Like Du Bois, Locke studied at the University of Berlin
before taking a Harvard doctorate. And as they returned from the
relative freedom of Europe, both men would wrestle with "unreconciled
strivings," as Du Bois called the tension between race man and
aesthete, between puritan and pagan, between the pursuit of social
justice and the self-cultivation embodied in their cherished German
ideal of Bildung.
It was a homegrown figure, William James, whom Du Bois and Locke held
in common as an intellectual touchstone. Of his Harvard mentor, Du
Bois had declared in his autobiography: "God be praised that I landed
squarely in the arms of William James." James had pretty much retired
from teaching by the time Locke entered Harvard, but when he lectured
at Oxford in 1908, Locke was a most receptive member of the audience.
James's pragmatism spoke with particular urgency to these black
thinkers. Along with Franz Boas's anthropology, which was another
crucial influence on both Du Bois and Locke, pragmatism was a tool
that virtually stood alone from turn-of-the-century behavioral and
social sciences in opposing the theory and the practice of white
supremacy. Pragmatist pluralism, like Boasian contextualism, dismissed
what James called "all the great single word answers to the world's
riddle, such as God, the One ... Nature" and "The Truth," as "perfect
idols of the rationalistic mind!"
Locke possessed a cool detachment that was the source of a remarkable
self-awareness and absence of self-pity, qualities that allowed him to
minimize and to manage the pathos that inevitably afflicted an
American of his gifts, ambitions, and color. Like all black
intellectuals of his era he found himself "trapped between two
worlds," but unlike many others Locke seemed to resolve the
frustrations. Unlike Du Bois, he did not make a career out of them. He
would never be capable, at least in public, of the flamboyant
histrionics that Du Bois displays at the start of his autobiography:
"Crucified on the vast wheel of time, I flew round and round with the
Zeitgeist, waving my pen ... to see, foresee and prophesy." The
audacity of Du Bois's mind set him apart, and eventually made him a
worldhistorical figure. Locke knew his own limits and was guided by a
stoic steadiness and an irony about himself that helped him to
persevere and thereby to avoid becoming one more burned-out case, the
fate of many of his famous Harlem friends.
Refusing to be a "problem," Locke instead led a life "in the key of
paradox, " as he retrospectively remarked. And his cultivation of
paradox has always kept him out of focus. Contemporary scholars tend
to simplify by casting him either as a race man or an apolitical
aesthete. Yet in fact, as Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth show,
Locke kept up the pressure on both roles, as his thought continually
refined itself and deepened. Though he wrote excellent literary
journalism, he was primarily an academic philosopher, and the slim
amount of his published work reflected a pace customary in his
discipline. If and when he is read these days it is for his
introduction to The New Negro.
But the current neglect of Alain Locke should not make us skeptical of
the claim made by his biographers, who call him "the most influential
African American intellectual born between W.E.B Du Bois and Martin
Luther King, Jr." They are right. Locke won acclaim as the self-
described "philosophical mid- wife" to the Harlem Renaissance. But his
most interesting writings on race and culture remain his least known,
perhaps because they challenge the racial chauvinism that the race man
inevitably traffics in. These writings, mostly from the later decades
of his career--"The Contribution of Race to Culture," "Who and What is
'Negro'?" and "Frontiers of Culture" (all found in Leonard Harris's
valuable collection of Locke's writings)--adumbrate an anti-
proprietary notion of cosmopolitanism that urges us to consider that
"culture has no color ... there is no monopoly, no special proprietary
rights" about culture. Unfortunately, this biography, for all its
careful explication of Locke's ideas, neglects Locke's richest
reflections.
The paradoxical Locke, barely five feet and with a rheumatic heart,
was a whirlwind of activity, an unabashed elitist and aesthete but one
who refused what he called "an ivory tower of colorless
cosmopolitanism" and instead "dug deep into the human soil." His
cosmopolitanism was hands-on and immersive. An inveterate world
traveler not only to Europe but also Egypt and Russia and Africa, an
expert on and collector of African art, Locke's worldliness inspired
his recognition that cultures are not discrete organic wholes
embodying a nation's blood but composite, impure assemblages, created
in reciprocal exchange with other cultures. His global and trans-
national perspectives--what he called "intercultural reciprocity"--
were way ahead of their time.
He made his reputation with his race work in the "human soil" back
home, where he became a self-described "advocate of cultural racialism
as a defensive counter-move for the American Negro." His advocacy
proved effective because he had mastered the cultural politics of the
two centers of black intellectual life: Washington D.C., his
professional outpost as a professor at Howard, and New York City,
where, especially after 1925, he visited most weekends and kept a room
in Harlem. Charming and generous, adept at cultivating the powerful
but with a fine eye for younger talent, Locke knew everyone, was a
tireless organizer of educational programs, musical productions,
publishing and lecture series, and awards dinners, while chairing
countless editorial, foundation, and fellowship boards. As the
personal executor and confidante to a wealthy and eccentric white
patron, the patronizing Charlotte Osgood Mason, known to all as
"Godmother," Locke distributed stipends while enduring her romantic
racialist fatuities: she called him "my precious brown boy" and,
believing that "all Negroes are after all the children of the sun,"
urged him to be more natural and "slough off this weight of white
culture."
Locke's role as consummate insider dispensing largesse made him a
lightning rod for criticism. Some of it was justified: as an editor,
he compromised the radicalism of Claude McKay's poetry and had a nasty
rivalry with the novelist and editor Jesse Fauset. Conflicted emotions
and frayed relations marked virtually all Locke's friendships with the
writers he took up and put down--among them Countee Cullen, Langston
Hughes (with whom he was once romantically involved), and Zora Neale
Hurston. Few were as flagrantly divided as Hurston, a principal
recipient, along with Hughes, of Godmother's philanthropy. Hurston
began her long and combative association with Locke as his student at
Howard, where his skepticism of racial uplift and absolutist thinking
was an important influence. She once urged him to succeed Du Bois as
the central race leader, but after reading Locke's less than warm
review of Their Eyes Were Watching God, she called him, in a letter to
James Weldon Johnson, "a malicious, spiteful little snot that thinks
he ought to be the leading Negro because of his degrees. "
Not only was Locke inevitably caught in the crossfire to which any
gatekeeper is exposed, but his imperious manner only made matters
worse. His suavity bothered even himself ("my tongue never tires as
you know," he wrote his doting mother, "indeed it is oiled to an
appalling slickness.... I don't know that I can even be sincere with
you"), and the open secret of his homosexuality (which made, he once
said, a "haughty distrust" mandatory) made him a target for gossip and
ridicule. Detested by some, respected by many, Locke possessed an
undeniable intellectual brilliance and a capacious vision of world
culture. For aspiring writers such as Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray
seeking to break out of the racial province, he was a "heroic figure."
Growing up a pampered only child, Locke once recalled that his mother
"dipped me as a very young child in the magic waters of cold cynicism
and haughty distrust and disdain of public opinion." His mother,
according to Locke's estimate, raised "an almost hurt-proof child."
The "almost" pointed to what he called his "all too vulnerable
Achilles heel of homosexuality--which she may have suspected was
there, both for her sake and my own safety--I kept in an armored shoe
of reserve and haughty caution." That remoteness came easy. Laughter
was barred in the Locke household. Instead his father smiled and
whistled, and (as his son explained) "the smile substituted not in a
sour but in a debonair way--This was the antidote of being Negro--the
distinguished protest of the second and third generation away from
slavery."
The startling frankness of Locke's remark raises questions. In a white
world where black laughter was the image of the happy and ignorant
"Sambo," was the household taboo on impulse and spontaneity, the
Lockes' commitment in effect to anti-nature, an equal and opposite
deformation inflicted by racism? Harris and Molesworth wisely favor a
less moralistic reading; they suggest that Locke's upholding of anti-
nature turns his renunciation of spontaneous impulse from a symptom of
racist confinement into a valuable basis of receptivity to the
discipline of style and technical mastery. Locke revered African art
precisely because it lacked the sloppy exuberance and naivete of the
African American spirit, which had been formed in response to the
"peculiar experience in America." African art was "disciplined,
sophisticated, laconic and fatalistic"--in short, much like Alain
Locke.
At Oxford as a Rhodes, he happily succumbed to the social whirl of
campus life--he was soon changing clothes four and five times a day to
keep up with his social calendar, and before long was deeply in debt
to tailors and food emporiums--and eventually tasted of the wider
freedoms, cultural and sexual, offered by London, Paris, and Berlin.
Locke's four years on the continent encouraged devotion to what he
called his one religion, the Greek ideal of friendship, and all his
life he treasured his relations with sensitive young men. Perhaps his
most adored was Langston Hughes, whom he long pursued until Hughes
finally surrendered for a time in Paris in the spring and summer of
1924.
But there was more going on at Oxford than high life. Though he had
declared "I'm not going to England as a Negro," that is, as a "dime
museum freak" on exhibition as a representative of the race, Southern
white Rhodes scholars would not let him forget his color. They made
every effort to exclude and to embarrass him. Oxford's Cosmopolitan
Club came to the rescue, an oasis of hospitality amid the attempts to
segregate him. At the Cosmopolitan Club, Locke met impressive men of
color, including several who were colonial subjects of the British
Empire, "men who impressed Locke with their commitment to return to
their various countries and serve the interests of their people."
Locke's community of friends at the Club began to raise his racial and
political consciousness, making him come to grips with the cultural
legacy of Africa and with the outrages of imperialism. He began to
devise an intense cosmopolitanism as a weapon against segregation and
rigid classification--enemies shared by William James. By 1911, the
year he returned to the United States, he was on his way to becoming
an Africanist and human paradox: a cosmopolitan race man.
This double perspective guided Locke's most lasting achievement: the
editorship of the epochal anthology The New Negro, which surveyed, and
was itself a part of, the artistic and intellectual ferment of the
Harlem Renaissance. "Locke had been preparing for the Renaissance for
almost two decades," Harris and Molesworth report. His years in Europe
amid urban modernism, his academic training in pragmatism with its
emphasis on democratic pluralism, his diverse contacts and interests:
all this helped to make Locke, though he neither lived in Harlem nor
was an editor, the man for the moment. His chance came when he was
asked to edit a special Harlem issue of Survey Graphic, a leading
progressive magazine of sociology and culture. Locke assembled a
diverse and stellar group of contributors (while playing down
sociology and economics, which he found dull, and adding more art and
literature), and made the Harlem issue a hit, selling over thirty
thousand copies and generating so much attention that it soon gave
birth to an expanded hardcover edition called The New Negro. It
contained articles on art, music, sociology, anthropology and history,
poems, stories, drama, original art work; its contributors were young
and old, black, white, male, female, all viewing matters from vantages
variously local, national, and international.
Locke's introduction set the turbulent scene of Harlem in global
perspective. In Harlem, he wrote, "the first concentration in history
of so many diverse elements of Negro life"--African, West Indian and
Negro American--is the "laboratory of a great race-welding," as "the
elements undergo "contact and interaction." As the "home of the
Negro's 'Zionism,'" Harlem bids to be a "race capital," and is at the
center of the "mission of rehabilitating the race in world esteem from
that loss of prestige for which the fate and conditions of slavery
have so largely been responsible." "As with the Jew, persecution is
making the Negro international." Harlem "has the same role to play for
the New Negro as Dublin has had for the New Ireland or Prague for the
New Czechoslovakia." Admiring these "nascent centers of folk-
expression and self- determination," Locke gives voice to a romantic
nationalism akin to Herder's.
Embracing global cosmopolitan modernity, The New Negro sought to bury
the deadly cliches of white paternalism: "the day of 'aunties,'
'uncles,' and 'mammies'" are redolent of "yesterday," as are "Uncle
Tom and Sambo" as emblems of a naive and humble race. The American
mind, Locke declared in the title essay, "must reckon with a
fundamentally changed Negro" and a "new group psychology" of "self-
respect" derived from a "deep feeling of race." This "renewed race-
spirit" "consciously and proudly sets itself apart." But lest his
claim seem to align him with Marcus Garvey's back-to-Africa movement--
a significant force in Harlem in the 1920s but barely present in The
New Negro--Locke sets this proud race spirit squarely within the
democratic ideals of America: "the Negro mind reaches out as yet to
nothing but American wants, American ideas. But this forced attempt to
build his Americanism on race values is a unique social experiment,
and its ultimate success is impossible except through the fullest
sharing of American culture and institutions." To those Americans who
hope that "the trend of Negro advance is wholly separatist," Locke
replies: "this cannot be--even if it were desirable," because
"democracy itself is obstructed and stagnated to the extent that any
of its channels are closed." He was fanning new life into Du Bois's
famous question to his white readers near the end of The Souls of
Black Folk--"your country? How came it yours?" Du Bois's point is that
"before the Pilgrims landed we were here" and "mingled our blood" with
this nation, facts that expose what his readers would prefer not to
know--the reality of motley mixture.
After 1925, Locke's fame and audience broadened, with visiting
appointments at University of Wisconsin, the New School, a lecture at
Harvard, membership in prestigious interracial collaborations. But
accounts of his career usually look only at the Locke of the Harlem
Renaissance years, who championed beauty over the use of art as
propaganda. This biography's account of his later decades valuably
complicates the conventional image of Locke as a rarefied elitist by
showing in detail that by the mid-1930s Locke acknowledged that there
was "no cure or saving magic in art" in a world of "capitalistic
exploitation" and the "disease-and crime-ridden slum." He supported
the New Deal, and though he was never a man of the left ("too
Philadelphian for that!"), his concern for aesthetics gave way to
politics, especially on the issues of democracy, race, and
citizenship. Challenging what he dubbed "the most sacrosanct of all
our secular concepts, the autonomous sovereignty of the self-arbiter
nation," Locke urged the abandonment of the "Pax Romana of
irrepressible power politics" that rules America's economic
imperialism of "dollar diplomacy," and its replacement by a "Pax
democratica of reciprocal international rights and responsibilities"
that "would give democracy full moral stature."
The dire state of world politics, the bellicose ethnic nationalisms
that used "race as a political instrument" to foment violence, led him
to revisit his own earlier use of race as a political instrument in
the 1920s. He looked back on The New Negro as "defensive, promotive
propaganda." In 1950, he confessed that he was "both proud and
ashamed" of his "brain child": the Harlem Renaissance had been
valuable but it did not achieve its potential, owing to a "false
conception of culture" as a "market-place commodity." Once the "New
Negro" took hold, it "offered that irresistible American lure of a
vogue of success ... an easy cheap road to vicarious compensation."
Instead of emphasizing the "substance" of Negro life, "complexion"
came first. Locke had learned an important lesson, a way to grasp race
and culture that would defuse racial anger and cultural chauvinism:
"Culture-goods, once evolved, are no longer the exclusive property of
the race or people that originated them. They belong to all who can
use them; and belong most to those who can use them best. " More
succinctly, "culture has no color."
Locke here reaches back to the teachings of an earlier generation, as
in effect he revives and adapts for the mid-century world an insight
of his Howard colleague and mentor Kelly Miller, a prominent turn-of-
the-century race leader and later a professor of mathematics. In 1905,
in his "open letter" to the white Southern novelist Thomas Dixon,
Miller refuted the familiar claim that "the Negro lives in the light
of the white man's civilization." The white man, Miller asserted, "has
no exclusive proprietorship of civilization. White man's civilization
is as much a misnomer as the white man's multiplication table. It is
the equal inheritance of anyone who can appropriate and apply it." As
Du Bois did earlier in his notion of the uncolored "kingdom of
culture," and Locke would do later in equating the anti-proprietary
and the cosmopolitan, Miller de-racialized culture by making one's
relation to it a matter of present action, not prior identity. What
becomes pivotal is the desire and capacity for doing--for sitting with
Shakespeare.
The imperative to act in a world in which "all is shades and no
boundaries" and experience "overflows its own definition," was how
William James described the premises of his "radical empiricism," a
vision articulated at Oxford when Locke heard him lecture. James
emphasized that pluralism is the "permanent form" of the world, which
entails treating "assured conclusions concerning matters of fact" as
hypotheses, subject to "modification in the course of future
experience." Although Locke's biographers are clear about his
pragmatist orientation, they confine it to a distrust of absolutist
systems and to "cultural relativism," while ignoring how liberating
was James's insouciance toward alleged necessities, his skepticism of
the authority of origin, essence, and identity, and his esteem for the
unclassified and unbounded.
In minimizing James's influence and Kelly Miller's, Harris and
Molesworth inevitably scant Locke's rejection of the proprietary. The
one time the word comes up is in a letter from the late 1920s that
they cite, in which Locke remarks that "I hold to no proprietary
notion about human relationships. Jealousy and the monopoly it
implies ... I hold essentially vulgar." Here, had they realized it, is
the emotional ground of Locke's intellectual affinity for anti-
proprietary cosmopolitanism. Locke thought the idea so important that
he regarded it as an inevitable part of a "solution reconciling
nationalism with internationalism, racialism with universalism." We
ignore this anti-proprietary understanding of culture at our peril, he
warned, for "the vicious practice of vested proprietary interests in
various forms of culture" undergirds imperialism and is responsible
for the "tragedies of history." What must be recovered, he insisted,
is the "long ignored" but "very elemental historical fact" of "an
almost limitless natural reciprocity between cultures. Civilization,
for all its claims of distinctiveness, is a vast amalgam of cultures."
This rejection of the primacy of identity in matters of culture
remains insufficiently appreciated in our day. The idea and its
avatars are overshadowed by the prestige of multiculturalism, with its
coarse tribalism and its ugly purism. So I am glad to note a rare
exception to this neglect. In 1968, Philip Rieff, the great
sociologist of culture, attempted to rescue Kelly Miller from
oblivion: "Shakespeare and Whitman belonged to him; they were part of
his inalienable life; they did not belong to butchers in London or
slobs in Camden simply because they happen to be white men. Race is
the most terrible cultural simplification of all; in his wisdom and
learning, Miller rejected the fatal simplicity that the provenance of
a value determined membership in it." And, echoing Locke, Rieff
proclaimed that "a culture has no color ... A high culture is a living
and active faith." Rieff was writing in the midst of a resurgence of
identity politics--more specifically, of the black nationalist
celebration of "black values." A few years later Rieff remarked that
the slogan "black is beautiful" played into the remissive role that
white radicals--most egregiously Norman Mailer--invited blacks to
enact; and, with the "nobility" of Du Bois in mind, Rieff hoped that
the slogan might be replaced by "Black is Brilliant." Had he been
alive on January 20, 2009, Rieff might have admitted that his wish had
been granted.
Ross Posnock teaches English and American Studies at Columbia
University and is the author of Color & Culture (Harvard University
Press) and Philip Roth's Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity (Princeton
University Press).
By Ross Posnock
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
No comments:
Post a Comment