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The Idea of Black Culture
By (author) Hortense J. Spillers
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Main blurb (for internal use only - CHECK BEFORE USING IN PRINTED PUBLICITY): Hortense Spillers's THE IDEA OF BLACK CULTURE will consist of six chapters, described below, in some detail (she has supplied more detail than I give here). Her book exploits Eagleton's successful title, and like Eagleton's book, grounds its subject (but more thoroughly) in its history. The engagement here - the controversy, as to what can be meant by the term 'Black Culture' and the necessity to bear witness to history - will run through her several strands of argument. More obviously in her sights, in her concluding chapter, are those people (treasonable clerks), like Henry Louis Gates, Houston Baker, Cornel West, who, in her view - have used African-American/Black Studies to their own financial ends, usurping and exploiting their history in a cult of personality. Spillers is an eminent and adversarial figure, acquainted personally with many of the greats of African-American culture. Her work bears steady witness to the plight of African-Americans, to the full history of slavery, North (she has written in her latest book on the horrific breeding farms in Massachusetts) and South. 1) Black culture as a discursive field-in fact, of intersecting discursive fields-self-consciously pursues the question of origins, either explicitly or implicitly. Because the motive idea of black culture is advanced as an oppositional form, its theoreticians have had to decide not only what it excludes (is the logic of choice already decided in this case?), but what it must exclude, relative to an absolute beginning, often embodied in a wide array of symbolic and figurative devices summed up as Africa. It is important to insist on a distinction here between the massive geopolitical complex of the African continent, with particular reference to Subsaharan Africa, and the plethora of poetics attendant upon literary notions of Africa, which frequencies are not only not synonymous and commensurate, but describe different orders of cases entirely; often enough, these realms of attention are elided as if they were twina. The question of genesis is by far the most prestigious problematic of scholarship and writing on the culture of black life-worlds, inasmuch as any given moment of social and political practice is predicated, even when implicitly emergent, on where the culture comes from; the current Afrocentric fashion in the United States, for example, is not new, though many of its tenets and tonalities have been redrafted as a contemporary response to the mid-century movements in Civil Rights and the Black Nationalist resurgence subsequent to it. Afrocentric theory has never dominated the field of cultural explanation, but it is fair to say that it has always been a contender, solidly poised against integrationist/assimilationist appeals on the one hand and nationalist/separatist/essentialist claims on the other. Much of the writing about the black culture problematic tends to poach on the ground of its nearest textual and contextual neighbors-history, politics, and economics-and can hardly be imagined without reference to race as theory, as interlinked material practices, as the bane or boon of public policy and address. In (more or less) monolingual communities, as in the United States and Great Britain, culture and race attend the same school, whereas the lines are drawn quite otherwise in multi- or bi-lingual national formations, as in the complicated instance of Canada, or in bilateral religious spheres, as in the case of Ireland. To say so is not to suggest that race does not appear in various interarticulations (with religious, linguistic, and national/nationalistic cartographies), neither is it to say that monolingual systems of language do not engender what Hazel Carby has called differently oriented social interests within one and the same sign community. But juxtaposing race/culture does show how one of the lines of force might be described through a stage of heterogeneously poised cultural valences. While race for the most part marks the battleground in Diasporic African communities, it is the it that means different things in different black cultural regions; in certain Caribbean communities, for example, one is not black in Kingston, or Basse Terre, or Fort de France for the same reasons that she might be in St. Louis, or Atlanta, USA. In the former instance, race loses some of its pernicious evaluative force since the community operates by the social logic of the same, while in the latter, the confrontation of heterogeneous subjects, contending for status, for superior talisman, designates race as an absolutely reified property, negatively weighted, in marked and unmarked positionings. Not too clearly, the taxonomies of marking, of stigmatizing, might be as ingeniously derived as a given situation demands, but the unseen trick is that the mark always follows an arbitrary path; blackness, for instance, is not inherently remarkable as we can think of certain contexts in which it actually disappears as a strategy of discrimination. Conventionally, however, it is one of the master signs of difference. Where race pressures are aligned in binaristic display, Afrocentric theories of culture arise as the most impassioned counterclaim. But after all, Afrocentric views of culture and their competing conceptual narratives are situated within rhetorical systems of address that may be said to constitute the discursive field of black culture. In the opening chapter, then, we will attempt to lay out a conceptual scheme of instances of black culture's discursive field according to fours stress points: a) the hagiographical tendency, which posits black heroes in a mimetic tradition of writing and celebration that traces back to the lives of the Saints; decisively marked as an intellectual technology that replicates and re-enforces the mythic cult of the leader, the hagiographical figure is manifest in divergent textual venues, form Negritude, to the New Negro of the Harlem Renaissance, to certain contemporary critical paradigms, even, to coeval Aftocentric postures; b) the teleological tendency, while related to a), projects a closural motive that opposes it: along this axis, black culture, liberated from the constraints that have paradoxically hemmed it in and defined it simultaneously, would sit, primus inter pares, at the great feast of world cultures. Whereas in the hagiographical outline, black culture follows a retroversive path, in the teleological, its coronation lies ahead. One points toward the past, the other toward an already fulfilled future; c) the sociological-historiographical figure, with its secular emphases, takes its name less from specific disciplinary interests within the social sciences than the general disposition to account for the cultural phenomena before it by way of the checks and measures of reality as well as the impact of historical cause and effect; this particular view places black culture squarely in the world of change and of the contingent. Perhaps it could be said in this case that there is black culture only insofar as it elaborates a measurable politics, a viable economics, and a soundly rationalized historical progression, often comparatively framed; d) the metacritical-theoretical figure shows little of a) and b), makes frequent raids on c), and might be thought of as the most self-conscious of these routes of rhetorical procedure. Its aim, refracting a gamut of post-modernist writing practices, is to bring black culture in communication, as a writing, with a hermeneutics of suspicion-in other words, with the ironical and paronomasic play of signs; much of the work in this discursive field is inhabited by academic critical projects on the arts, e.g., literature, music, dancing, and the plastic arts, as well as a newly concatenated cluster of objects (unspecified) that go by the collective name of cultural studies. Culture here is not delimited as
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Publisher | John Wiley and Sons Ltd
Published date | 26 Dec 2024
Language |
Format | Hardback
Pages | 176
Dimensions | 0 x 0 x 0mm (L x W x H)
Weight | 0g
ISBN | 978-0-6312-2859-2
Readership Age |
BISAC | literary criticism / american / general
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