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PARTISAN REVIEW
Perhaps the most imaginative recent attempt to overcome the preoc–
cupation with white racism in black culture comes from the Briton Paul
Gilroy, who concerns himself in his 1993 book
Black Atlantic
with identi–
fYing a transnational black "counterculture." Gilroy skewers the essentialist
approach to black art and cultural criticism for its "brute pan-Africanism"
and its inability to "specifY precisely where the highly prized but dogged–
ly evasive essence of black artis tic and poli tical sensibili ty is currently
located." But his defense of a "pluralistic" approach to black culture indi–
cates that Gilroy shares with hooks an ambivalence toward relinquishing a
black identity based on political protest. The difficulty, Gilroy explains, "is
that in leaving racial essentialism behind by viewing 'race' itself as a social
and cultural construction, it has been insufficiently alive to the lingering
power of specifically racialized forms of power and subordination." Indeed,
Gilroy's work is primarily motivated by his resistance to white racism.
Behind his efforts in writing
Black Atlantic
and rethinking black national–
ism, Gilroy explains, lies "the struggle to have Blacks perceived as agents,
as people with cognitive capacities and even with an intellectual history–
attributes denied by modern racism."
Gilroy's transatlantic black nationalism is based on his belief that even
the most popular formulations of black nationalism like those of Martin
Delaney, Marcus Garvey, and the Nation of Islam are products of Western
domination, taken explicitly from European cultural criticism. Blacks
must therefore use the small containers of autonomy given by the West,
like music, to link forever artistic expression to political protest. "Artistic
expression, expanded beyond recognition from the grudging gifts offered
by the masters... therefore becomes the means towards both individual self–
fashioning and communal liberation." One is only left to wonder the
character of the "individual self-fashioning" that can be achieved through
black artistic expressions that are, according to Gilroy, inherently and
inescapably a form of political resistance.
The case of Henry Louis Gates,jr. is a bit more complicated. Gates is
far more willing to wrestle publicly with the difficulty of developing an
alternative canon of minority works that could be taught alongside the
classics of European culture. Unlike some of his colleagues, Gates admits
that some texts are simply better than others, but insists that it is possible
to identifY a body of black works that are "complex and reflect layers of
experience otherwise scarce, otherwise ignored." The real challenge for
black critics, Gates writes in his influential essay "Writing, 'Race,' and the
Difference it Makes," is "to speak the other's language without renounc–
ing [our] own," to use "the most sophisticated critical theories and
methods available to reappropriate and redefine our own 'colonial' dis–
courses."
