Limits of New Theoretical Approaches

Henry Louis Gates claims “We must learn to read a black text within a black formal cultural matrix as well as its ‘white’ matrix” and that it is “necessary because the existence of a black canon is a historically contingent phenomenon” (Gates 2435). Is Gates calling for the creation “together with itself, organically, one or more strata of intellectuals which give it homogeneity and awareness of its own function” (Gramsci 1002)? Is he calling to cast off the anxiety of influence of a white male canon, or does he accept that black literary theory and black traditions can and should coexist with the Western tradition?

Henry Louis Gates also serves as a faculty member at Harvard University, a renowned educational institution, but one that has also served as a launching platform for the privileged white male. As a faculty member at an institution of the State, can he truly be considered part of an emergent culture bringing about “new meanings and values, new practices, new significances and experiences” (Williams 1431)? Has Gates simply become a component of the dominant culture?

Barbara Christian suggests that “because those who have effected the takeover have the power…first of all to be published, and thereby to determine the ideas which are deemed valuable, some of our most daring and potentially radical critics…have been influenced, even coopted, into speaking a language and defining their discussion in terms alien to and opposed to our needs and orientation” (Christian 2129). Christian is referring to the limitations of theoretical approaches of studying literature. That is, once more approaching Bloom’s anxiety of influence and posing the question of how to create a new approach within the limitations of the existing theoretical approaches. She explains that new “literary critical theory is as hegemonic as the world which it attacks” (2129). Existing theoretical approaches then are ensuring “the subjection to the ruling ideology” (Althusser 1339). How then can theorists resist the dominant culture of existing academia? Is it possible to, as Gates suggests, develop a specifically black literary theoretical approach within the limits of the existing academic structures or are all theorists all limited by existing academic structures?