Manifesto of a Tenured Radical. Cary Nelson

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СКАЧАТЬ Young Bear’s remarkable “It Is the Fish-Faced Boy Who Struggles,” in which the people come together at the end to observe ceremonies they had long forgotten, will be more marked by the history of white repression if it is read along with “In Viewpoint: Poem for 14 Catfish and the Town of Tama, Iowa.” The latter poem, moreover, is about how the genocidal mentality of the frontier survives today, so its challenge to contemporary readers is especially pointed. The poem opens by asking “in whose world do we go on living?” and proceeds to detail the ways white abuse of the Mesquakie permeates every element of daily life, from the louts who dream of bludgeoning Native Americans on a weekend to the town newspaper that dramatizes every Mesquakie offense and relegates every positive story about the tribe to the back pages.

      Once editors find the courage to include more antagonistic texts, as most do not, the issues at stake become more complex and the works available richer and more varied. An anthology that aims to present multicultural history relationally and interactively, indeed, is not limited to literary works that divide easily into affirmative and negative groups. One can, for example, include white poets writing empathically, reflectively, or awkwardly about African American or Native American culture. And an accurately representative record of multicultural literary and historical relations will show that not only minority identities but also the dominant white identities come under scrutiny. One answer to the recurrent question of how to make whiteness visible in our history is simply to reprint the works that seek to do just that. In the 1920s and the 1930s, a period when writers from a variety of cultures regularly took up questions of race, that would include some of the poems I assigned in the course I will describe in chapter 5, such as Aqua Laluah’s “Lullaby,” Anne Spencer’s “White Things,” Claude McKay’s “To the White Fiends,” and Kenneth Patchen’s “Nice Day for a Lynching.”

      “I’m looking for a house,” Hughes announces in a 1931 poem, “where white shadows/Will not fall.” “There is no such house,” he answers, “No such house at all.”⁴ What does it mean, modern poets repeatedly ask, to bear on one’s body the sign of that history—white skin—the figure for a cultural dominance so omnipresent it was, like a white shadow, as though invisible? It is a question relatively few white Americans have felt impelled to ask in the eighties and nineties, though it is a question anthologists may be able to help put in play again, as Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps did in their important 1949 anthology The Poetry of the Negro, which included a section of poems by white poets. In her 1929 poem “Lullaby,” Laluah warns a black child not to wish for whiteness, lest he become “a shade in human draperies,” out of touch with his family and in love with death. Spencer’s 1923 “White Things” had put forward similar notions, suggesting that agents of a valorized whiteness have taken a multicolored world and “blanched [it] with their wand of power.” Lucia Trent’s 1929 poem “A White Woman Speaks” responds by declaring herself “ashamed of being white,” but Kenneth Patchen instead claims “I know that one of my hands / Is black, and one white.” What becomes clear in all these poems, perhaps because of their very dichotomous figuration, is that racial difference is relational, that its meanings are historically produced, and that one burden of our mutual history is that we are bound together in any future we can imagine. There is no way of being white in America except in relation to what it has meant to be black, no way of being black in America, in turn, except in relation to the history of whiteness.

      The same year that Hughes published his poem expressing the impossible wish to be free of the presence of white shadows, he also wrote and published “Union,” in which he calls out to “the whole oppressed / Poor world, / White and black,” and urges all to “put their hands with mine” to undermine false beliefs and entrenched powers. Many have assumed “White Shadows” and “Union” to represent opposing and irreconcilable points of view rather than related (and perhaps equally necessary) perspectives growing out of the same general history. Extended beyond white/black relations to the whole multicultural field, this constructed notion of contradiction suggests that antagonism and alliance are wholly incompatible and that a multicultural anthology or society must choose one or the other. Conservative writers often argue that any recognition of class, racial, or ethnic antagonism automatically increases their power over the culture and decreases opportunities for resolution. In fact, these views can coexist in individuals just as they do in the culture. Alliances can recognize and distinguish between warranted and unwarranted antagonisms and either work through them or build them into the terms of their negotiations. A multicultural anthology can inhibit or facilitate this present and future process by virtue of how fully it represents the historical record and how successfully it facilitates comparison and contrast between different positions. Then we can not only teach the conflicts, as Gerald Graff has helpfully argued, but also work with our students to find grounds for negotiation and mutual accommodation.

      Kenneth Warren has recently warned in “The Problem of Anthologies” that anthologies foster the illusion that we can easily imagine a Utopia where every race and gender can amiably rub elbows together. That seems to me, however, to be less a risk inherent in the anthology form than an effect of the kinds of anthologies cautiously liberal or politically conservative academic anthologists have assembled in recent decades, which tend to suggest that mutual tolerance is either a given or a readily achievable end. Anthologies that foreground the social conflicts American writers have struggled with would leave quite a different impression—that shared interests exist but that real differences and difficulties which must be worked on stand in the way of any alliances we might want to form. Such anthologies would also show that American poets and novelists have been passionately involved in articulating those differences. Warren also argues that newer, more racially diverse anthologies manage not so much to suggest that the kingdom of heaven has been taken by storm but rather that the meek have inherited the earth. That seems to me exactly right as a judgment about mainstream academic culture, but again it is the result of the selection academics usually make from minority and other writers. That selection, moreover, is governed not only by liberal fear of social antagonism but also by a desire to sustain a transcendentalizing version of literariness. It is more difficult to confer an aura of timeless, uncontested, universal value on a collection of works in obvious conflict with one another. Unfortunately, that means that the transhistorical values put forward by texts making aggressive attacks on injustice and urging revolutionary change get excluded from the ruling notions of literariness.

      For more than a decade now, moreover, from Ronald Reagan to George Bush, from William Bennett to Lynne Cheney, from the increasingly conservative judiciary to the Republican Congress of the mid-nineties, the social imaging anthologies can do has been either directly or implicitly entangled with a broad spectrum of political issues and finally with state power itself. As our anthologies have become more multicultural, the chairs of the National Endowment for the Humanities during Republican presidencies have repeatedly insisted that there is a right and a wrong way to do multiculturalism. The right way, from Lynne Cheney’s perspective, for example, is very clear—happy family multiculturalism, with selections celebrating cultural traditions but de-emphasizing an often anguished historical record, refraining from negative comments about other groups, and avoiding attacks on the nation-state. Conservative multiculturalism, then, would grant the impossibility of a melting pot and settle instead for a cookbook of recipes for unchallenged coexistence. It is not easy to create a multicultural literary or historical anthology that wholly honors that harmonious ideal but it is possible to come surprisingly close to doing so. In the process, we lose not only a sense of the real struggles that have shaped (and continue to shape) our history but also the terrain that must be negotiated for relations in the future.

      We also lose the capacity to understand the relational nature of both past and present identities. Identity comes into existence relationally and sustains or redefines itself the same way. When the subject positions that racial, ethnic, gendered, or class identities offer us begin to change, they do not change simply as a result of some exclusive, inner mutation; they change as part of continuing renegotiation and competition with, appeals to and resistance against, incorporations of and rejections of, other identities and cultural forces. When Ray Young Bear gave a poetry reading at the University СКАЧАТЬ