Monday seminar paper

Matthew Savage

26:350:503: Introduction to Graduate Literary Study

Prof. Larry Lyons

November 20, 2010

Difference and Essentialism

Barbra Christian and Henry Louis Gates Jr. are both engaged with Black and Ethnic studies through what appear to be their exclusive notions of theory. In opposition to predominantly White and Western formulations, Christian and Gates both attempt to advance the roles of the Black critics and the Black authors through divergent notions of theory. Gates’s “Talking Black: Critical Signs of the Times” views literary criticism and theory as potentially valuable and advancing, while Christian’s “The Race for Theory” is a personally inflected call for the abandonment of entrenched critical methods and what is generally understood as literary theory. Though Gates and Christian may espouse different opinions of literary theory and criticism, they converge on many points that further inscribe the essential paradigms of racial difference and distinction. In its own fashion, each theorist’s essay fails to destabilize the socially ascribed oppositions and divisions responsible for the racial binaries and inequalities that they both realize to deride and de-value Black literatures and criticism; instead, they enforce and affirm racial dualism and racial essentialism.

Shelley’s Frankenstein can be used to arrive at a better understanding of the dangers of essentialism even though it does not specifically deal with the literatures and identities concerning Christian and Gates. During Safie’s reeducation, Felix explains and separates races based on what he understands to be essential of their characters. With “slothful Asiatics” he reduces an entire continent of peoples to an erroneously ascribed characteristic (Shelley 80). Also limiting and negatively generalizing are the personal reflections that litter the Monster’s narrative. These personally inflected remarks are totalizing; they are employed by the Monster in the creation of an identity. Reactionary and oppositional, this identity is limited by the Monster’s belief, both imposed and self-ascribed, in its fundamental or essential difference – “I was not even of the same nature as man” (Shelley 80).

Christian’s critique of Western theory latently functions to further inscribe racial essentialism and difference. After identifying current literary theory as an academic, esoteric and exclusionary commodity that is either pandered or protected by predominantly White and Western producers, Christian presents a contrasting portrayal of Black criticism and theory (Christian 2128). Invoking a racially essential character culturally or biologically derived, Christian appropriates what she deems to be distinct of ‘Blackness’ in the production of a perspective that escapes the appellation of ‘theory’ only in distancing itself from all that is deplored of White and Western theory. This differentiation is self-defeating in that racial binaries are affirmed or re-inscribed. In proclaiming that “people of color have always theorized – but in forms quite different from the Western form of abstract language”, Christian instantiates inherent racial differences that limit and further entrench parties on both sides of a racial distinction (2129).

Opposed to Western literary theory, Christian explains that “My folk […] have always been a race for theory – though more in the form of the hieroglyph, a written figure which is both sensual and abstract, both beautiful and communicative” (2129). While she identifies the stultifying foundations and exclusive nature of what has become accepted as literary theory in the West, Christian instantiates a racially dualistic, racially essential and reactionary approach to theory; ‘Black theorizing’ is distanced, reduced and mystified. In her language describing ‘Black theorization’, Christian’s use of “the hieroglyph” – the ancient written language of Egyptians in Africa - is suggestive of her agenda to establish and promote that which is distinctly Black, but this distinction further fuels the binary opposition out of which arose the racial inequalities and injustices she observes and intends to remedy. Speaking of the new hegemonic critical theory, Christian condemns “the language it creates as one which mystified rather than clarifies our conditions, making it possible for a few people who know that particular language to control the critical scene” (2131). It is easy to see that a similar system is enacted here with the hieroglyphs. Subverting her call to limit or abandon institutionalizing and exclusionary theory, Christian fails to depart from the underlying system of racial essentialism and exclusion that prompted that institution. For all of the emphasis on the “multiplicity of experience” in Christian’s “The Race for Theory”, where she does incorporate the concerns of different classes and racial identities, the essay reads as a-historical and exclusive; the “mechanical man” is appropriated (or created) and reduced as a counterpoint to enact racial essentialisms (Christian 2130).

Similarly to Christian, Gates identifies the cultural, and potentially political, power that is housed in the language and concerns of literary theory and criticism and observes how that power is monopolized and exerted by primarily White and Western literary theorists and critics. While Christian reverts to racial essentialism in distancing ‘Black theory’ from dominant (White Western) theory, Gates calls for the critic of Black literature “not to shy away from white power – that is, literary theory – but to translate it into the black idiom” (2435). While embracing racial dualism in literary theory that is disallowed by Christian, Gates still affirms fundamental and essential racial differences when he calls for the synthesis of “critical principles peculiar to the black literary traditions” (2435). Despite his understanding that “race is a text (an array of discursive practices), not an essence”, Gates continuously reverts to (or insists on) the promulgation of this racialized text (2434). Gates may deconstruct this ‘text’, but he does not abandon it and the insubstantial ‘text’ that informs race is shown in Gates essay to become an identifying essence.

The problematic and limiting racial essentialism interwoven in Gates’s and Christian’s concerns with theory may be investigated further through Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Gates asks, “Can we derive a valid, integral “black” text or criticism or ideology from borrowed or appropriated forms?” (2437). Supplementing the identifier “black” with “female”, this question may have been considered by Mary Shelley in her writing of Frankenstein, but as an author and a text produced from within a Western tradition, Gates and Christian implicitly deny Shelley space in their conversation. According to Gates “doubleness, alienation, equivocality […] have been recurrent tropes for the black tradition”, but these tropes and the frustrations they convey can be traced in other works, like Frankenstein – especially depicted in the Monster’s narrative (2434).

Reduced to the hegemonic White Maleness that Christian distances from and Gates aims to translate, works and critics that may share in and illuminate the concerns of the Black writer and literary critic may be unduly excluded; this is the danger of essentialism. The racial essentialism of Christian and Gates may be intended towards advancement and liberation, but it inevitably becomes limiting and totalizing.

Works Cited

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Ed J. Paul Hunter. New York: Norton, 1996. Print.

Christian, Barbara. “The Race for Theory”. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Eds. Vincent B. Leitch et al. New York: Norton, 2010. 2128-2137. Print.

Gates, Henry Louis Jr. “Talking Black: Critical Signs of the Times”. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Eds. Vincent B. Leitch et al. New York: Norton, 2010. 2430-2438. Print.