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PARTISAN REVIEW
Professor Wolff, for his ideas are not always consistent and can be quite
self-contradictory. In the new introduction, presumably intended to
jus–
tify reprinting what he wrote earlier, he says, "I have moved considerably
farther to the left than I was in 1969. With an exquisite historical sensibil–
ity, I have become a serious student of the economic theories of
Karl
Marx just in time to witness the official worldwide declaration that
Marxism is dead."
In
Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars,
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
does not undertake to write about the university, either as an idea or as
ideal, but about a marginal controversy over the place of what is variously
known as multiculturalism, diversity, pluralism in the humanities curricu–
lum of the university, and the part black studies should play in all this. He
has no apology for the attention he gives the subject for, as he says, it
has
been featured "on the covers of
Time, Newsweek,
and
U.
S.
News
&
World
Report;
in television .. . and in hundreds of news items in this country."
What more could one ask?
His book, with a few exceptions, is made up, he says, of pieces that
"originated as talks prepared for oral delivery, and have been altered very
little since." He admits right off that "there are significant differences in
perspective and emphasis" among them, that some profess "a confidence
greater than I can now muster," while others seem "insufficiently critical"
and still others "excessively critical." He feels "pangs of misgiving" about
the book because it records "what I was doing when I wasn't doing what
I was supposed to be doing." Such candor invites a measure of forbear–
ance from his critics.
Gates is right in saying that multiculturalism has been the subject of
"ferocious attacks," but more significant is his awareness that much of the
ferocity has been intraracial. There is ferocity of advocacy as well as of
opposition. The fierceness of advocates often arises from deeply felt re–
sentment of racial injustice, but it can take some rather extreme, irra–
tional, and even bigoted forms. Among them are claims by one or an–
other group of black supremacy; Afrocentricity; the rejection ofWestern
culture and the simultaneous claim that Africa was mother of it all; the
violent anti-Semitism of the Nation of Islam; and the spreading belief that
racial separation rather than integration is the cure for segregation. Gates
passes over some of this in silence and some with gestures of impatience
or outright opposition, but his main contribution to restoring sanity is a
lightness of touch and a touch of humor. The lightness (paradoxically) is
illustrated by the pun in the title,
Loose Canons;
the humor by two essays
that are spoofs of the culture war in the guise of Dashiell Hammett's Sam
Spade, spoken out of the side of the mouth. If his influence and his repu–
tation as superstar of black studies at Harvard had to be won by relentless
