Racist Traces in Postmodernist Theory and Literature (original) (raw)

I would like, in the brief time available to me, to describe a particular complex of our profession, a habit of repression, a structure of avoidance so imbedded in its traditional ways of thinking that I had to catch myself in a moment of surprise and even trepidation as Valerie Smith told me the title of her panel. 'Blackness as a Commodity in the Profession: Critics, Texts, the Marketplace.' Can we really talk about these things in public? I decided to confront this audacious title with one of my own: 'Racist Traces in Postmodernist Theory and Literature'. Now I was in a double dilemma. On the one hand, surely the entire reason many of us were in literary criticismrather than law or business or medicine, which are nowadays claiming more and more of the best black studentswas that, during our undergraduate development in the turbulent sixties and the seventies, we had believed on some quite deep level that the profession of literary criticism was precisely the place where 'blackness', 'racism', and 'discrimination' took second place to what we had been taught in New Criticism about 'universal laws', 'great books', and 'autonomous realms' of thought. For a fairly brief interval in my life, I, for one, was convinced of the value-free status of 'close reading', and I celebrated the strength of its impersonal, detached, objective perspective, transcending in Cartesian fashion any contingent, superficial trappings of race, gender, and nation. The uncomplicated presence of analysing subject to analysed object was the guarantor of truth and meaning. Surely the best trained minds became the best qualified readers, and they in turn produced the strongest interpretations, as Eliot said: 'There is no method, except to be very intelligent'. And recall Arnold's comforting lines: '.. . of the intellect of Europe in general, the main effort. .. has been a critical effort; the endeavour, in all branches of knowledgetheology, philosophy, history, art, scienceto see the object as in itself it really is' ('On Translating Homer'). Surely hiring, promotion, publication, and acclaim would follow, based merely on the integrity of the work. In sharp distinction to most other professions in a racist American society, then, academia seemed a virtual refuge of meritocracy, an aristocracy of readers. On the other hand, to the extent that I had finally been disabused of the idea that literary studies were value-free, and that race did not matter at all * 0 George Snead