590
PARTISAN REVIEW
devices through which the powerful perpetuate their domination over the
weak. In this view, there exist no relevant standards of artistic judgment,
no authoritative interpretation of texts, and no distinction between the
"high" art of advanced civilizations and the "low" art of "mass" culture or
folk art. These ideas form the basis for the efforts to "recenter" texts by
black writers which have been ignored or overlooked by white critics
immersed in Western literary theory.
But what first appears as liberation for black artists soon reveals itself
to be nothing of the sort. If all knowledge is socially constructed, then the
texts and the interpretation of texts reflect the perspective of social groups,
or "interpretive conul1unities," not that of individuals. The black writer, in
this view, is not free to find his own literary voice, as Ellison had insisted
he was, but merely reflects the oppressed nature of the social group to
which he belongs . The liberating promise of poststructuralist theory for
formerly ignored black writers is subordinated to the inherently political
and social nature of artistic expression, leaving the black critic in exactly
the same quandary as Irving Howe: how to free the black writer from the
imperatives of the social world.
The disappearance of the self in pos tstructurali st cri ticism poses a seri–
ous obstacle to contemporary black critics who, according to Henry Louis
Gates,]
r. ,
seek to retrieve black Ii terature in order "to wri te their rhetori–
cal selves into language. I wri te, therefore I am." As the scholar Betsy
Erkkila has written, while black critics like Gates and Houston Baker may
embrace poststructuralist theory as an "emancipatory strategy in the analy–
ses of black writing, neither has let go of the notion of a creative,
expressive, signifying, and ultimately resistant and resisting black author–
ship."
It is not surprising, therefore, that the work of de-essentializing the
black experience has not sufficiently involved the release of black criticism
from the grip of racial protest. Black artists may now draw from a variety
of social experiences-weal th, poverty, fame, obscuri ty, homosexuali ty,
heterosexuality-but many black critics insist that what these new black
voices share is resistance to white domination. The limited and restricting
nature of this re-definition of blackness is most cogently expressed by the
social critic Manning Marable in his 1995 book entitled, ironically,
Beyond
Black and White.
Marable explains that the category of "black" includes in it
all who are in some way oppressed. "We must find new room in our iden–
tity as people of color to include all other oppressed national
minori ties-Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Asian /Pacific Americans, Native
Americans, and other people of Mrican descent...working-class people,
the physically challenged, the homeless, the unemployed, and those
Americans who suffer discrimination because they are lesbian or gay."
