SETH FORMAN
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Marable's concern is not so much to move "beyond black and white," or
to redefine blackness as something other than an unending exercise in
racial subjugation, but rather to democratize the definition of blackness to
enlist all potential allies in the fight against white males.
Marable's attempt to recall black identity to its true and salubrious ori–
gins in whi te victirrilzation is joined by other prorrilnent black critics in
the fields of literature and culture. For example, Houston Baker, Jr., a
scholar at the University of Pennsylvania and the former president of the
Modern Language Association, holds black scholars and critics accountable
to the imperatives of radical racial protest.
In
his widely read essay
"Caliban's Triple Play," Baker proscribes the work of black writers in the
following way. At a time when "violent reinforcement and retrenchment
of white male hegemony dictates the dismantling of quotas meant to repair
damages done by old... differentiations," Baker writes, all black writers are
on
"display,"
and their work had better be appropriately geared to carrying
out "guerilla actions."
In
Baker's view, black critics are anything but free
from the responsibilities imposed on them by race. "I believe that many
Mro-American acaderrilcs today find themselves in tenured (indeed, even
'chaired') situations where they are... compelled... to execute" attacks on
the Western canon.
The black feminist bell hooks, like Marable, indicates that she is for
moving beyond the color line, but, also like Marable, lapses into a false and
impoverished notion of just what this rrilght mean. Hooks claims that she
is part of the new group of black critics who, on the one hand, "eschew
essentialist notions of identi ty," but, contradictorily, also "fashion selves that
emerge from...radical political commitments." Hooks counts herself
among those black intellectuals who view their work as "directed towards
... the strengthening of our collective capacity to engage in meaningful
resistance struggle."
Hooks explains her belief that black essentialism is rooted in white
supremacy and must therefore be resisted, but falls short of articulating a
truly pluralistic black identity.
In
her view, no black can escape the expe–
rience of racial imprisonment, for the black "collective condition ...has
been and is characterized by continued displacement, profound alienation,
and despair." Accordingly, given the choice of studying with a "progres–
sive black professor" or a "progressive white woman" she would choose
the black professor "because this individual would have brought to the class
that unique mixture of experiential and analytical ways of knowing-that
is, a privileged standpoint." For hooks it does not matter how far removed
a black scholar may feel from racial "imprisonment" or "despair." Blacks
are the only authentic interpreters of black history and
Ii
terature, owing to
the shared experience of white racism.
