SETH FORMAN
589
Subscribing to postmodern notions of identity in which the self is contin–
ually and voluntarily created and recreated, the black critics insist that the
color line can be redefined, crossed-over, and shifted, and set for themselves
the project of reconstructing a literary canon that "recenters" black texts.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the "dean" of today's black intellectual cohort,
insists that for contemporary black writers like Toni Morrison the chal–
lenge "seems to be to create a fiction
beyond
the color line, one that takes
the blackness of the culture for granted, as a springboard to write about
those human emotions that we share with everyone else."
Apparently, other observers are equally anxious to claim universali ty for
black wri ters. Robert Boynton wri tes in the March 1995 issue of
The
Atlalltic
that Gates and company have emerged "to revive and revitalize" the
role of the public intellectual after the passing of Howe's generation,
"bringing moral imagination and critical intelligence to bear on the defin–
ingly American matter of race-and reaching beyond race" to voice "the
commonality of American concern." Professor Martin Berube claims in
the January 1995 issue of
The New Yorker
that in fact the black nationalism
which the black critics cut their teeth on can be every bit as universalist as
the Marxism of the New York Intellectuals who preceded them. "What
Marxism was to Lionel Trilling, Clement Greenberg, Philip Rahv, and
company, black nationalism is to West, Gates, hooks, et.
a1.:
the inspiration,
the springboard, the template, but also the antagonist and the goad." All of
this is very compelling. Indeed, who would deny that today, in the age of a
large and expanding black middle-class, a black American Nobel Prize win–
ner, and a critically acclaimed
Norton Anthology
of
African American Literature,
the idea that a black writer must be consumed with racism seems as out–
dated as the idea that a black passenger must si t at the back of the bus.
But at least in terms of some of the most prominent black literary crit–
ics, the claim to have transcended the politics of the color line seems to
have pulled up short on precisely the same grounds that Irving Howe sug–
gested it must-that is, at the point where external conditions make it
almost impossible for black writers to define themselves freely. The criti–
cal difference between the situation for the black writer today and in 1963
when Howe wrote his essay is that the external conditions imposed on
black wri ting no longer arise solely from white racism, but are on some
level self-inflicted, having to do mostly with the importance of racial rep–
resentation in a radicalized multicultural environment.
It is ironic that those black critics who so enthusiastically engage post–
structuralist theory for its inventiveness in recreating the self continue to be
hemmed in by the racial branding of identity politics. The attraction of post–
structuralism for black critics lies in its central theme-that objective truth
does not exist and that al l knowledge and texts are socially constructed
