Published in the Canadian Review of American Studies - Volume 30, No. 1, 2000

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Disciplining Race: Crossing Intellectual Borders in African American and Postcolonial Studies

Kate McInturff

One of the common conceits of intellectual work, particularly in postcolonial theory, is that it is cosmopolitan in nature. Postcolonial critic Edward Said has made a virtue of the intellectual who crosses political and cultural boundaries.1 Julia Kristeva has theorized cosmopolitanism as a political and intellectual position in Nations Without Nationalism. In my own research into the recent development of the field of Postcolonial Studies, however, I have found that political borders have been quite effective in reducing intellectual exchanges between individuals working, nominally, on the same topic. In this paper, I will argue that the US–Canadian border exists not only along the 49th Parallel but also extends its reach across academic fields of inquiry—specifically, this paper will be looking to the divisions and potential intersections between Postcolonial and African American Studies.

It is precisely because of this divide that I will attempt to provide a superficial outline of the concerns of Postcolonial Studies. Postcolonial Studies, or postcolonial theory, is a field which, roughly defined, addresses the structure and effect of colonial power relations. It examines the role of material, cultural, and psychological forces in maintaining and disrupting those colonial power relations. While some scholars working in this field have addressed non-British Imperial histories—notably Lisa Lowe and Ann Laura Stoler—most scholars working in postcolonial theory have tended to focus on the history of British Imperialism and on the history of the states which were subject to British colonial rule.2

At the moment there are a number of ethical and intellectual problems with which postcolonial theorists are grappling. My first forays into the field of African American Studies have led me to believe that these two disciplines share some of the same problems. As a result, I have begun to investigate the extent to which greater contact between African American Studies and Postcolonial Studies might be productive.

Before proceeding to outline those common concerns, I would like to acknowledge that the differences between these two disciplines are also important. As postcolonial critic Aijaz Ahmad has suggested, postcolonial theory has “attracted few Black intellectuals” (87).3 Ahmad argues that the categories first of “Commonwealth” and later of “postcolonial” were understood in the US to refer, by definition, to “other minorities, the ones who were constituted not by slavery but by immigration” (87). This disciplinary and

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historical divide has also been noted by critics, such as Christine McCleod and bell hooks, working within African American Studies.4 These critics go on to argue, however, that the disciplines of African American Studies and Postcolonial Studies ought to be brought into greater contact—a goal which I obviously share.

At the most general level, the intellectuals working in the disciplines of African American Studies and Postcolonial Studies have in common the desire that their work will be, on some level, emancipatory. This is a desire that takes many forms. The history of the ethical aims of these two disciplines is one which ranges from the desire for the emancipation of small intellectual and artistic circles, to the desire for the emancipation of cultural and social groups, and even of nation-states. This work will focus specifically on the interest which some of the intellectuals working in these two disciplines have in creating a cultural and intellectual sphere which is not Anglo- or Euro-centric. It will address the problems that arise out of the use of (European) post-structuralist models of culture in this context. Finally, it will examine the return of the notion of “experience” to work in these fields.

Postcolonial Studies was formed, in part, out of the earlier field of Commonwealth Literary Studies. Commonwealth Literary Studies began with the wider publication and circulation of texts by writers living in countries once colonized by England (Moore-Gilbert 7). Critics Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge have argued that the publication and critical examination of Commonwealth literatures that began in the 1960s functioned to re-create, in the field of literature, a picture of the world in which the outline of the now-diminished English empire was still clearly visible. They write:

as the British Empire broke up and attempted to sustain an illusion of unity under the euphemistic title of “Commonwealth,” a new object appeared on the margins of departments of English Literature: ‘Commonwealth literature.” [...] “Commonwealth literature” did not include the literature of the centre, which acted as the impossible absent standard by which it should be judged. (276)

The production of these literatures as “Commonwealth Literature” served to maintain a hierarchy in which English literature was held as the standard (and centre) against which the literatures of its former colonies were judged (Moore-Gilbert 26). Moreover, Commonwealth Literary Studies not only excluded the heterogeneous histories of non-British colonialism, it also tended to homogenize the experience of the diverse populations which existed within the communities and countries of the “Commonwealth.”

This is not to suggest that the publication and criticism of these materials cannot be emancipatory but rather that the discipline of Commonwealth Literary Studies, as it constituted itself in the 1960s and 1970s, was not wholly emancipatory, nor was it sufficiently self-reflexive. What is now generally called “postcolonial theory” emerged, in part, out of a burgeoning critical awareness within Commonwealth Literary Studies. Novelist and critic Wilson Harris is one of the first within Commonwealth Studies to signal a growing unease with the analysis of Commonwealth literature in terms of the

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new critical model of universal aesthetic values. He argues that such universalism elides the Eurocentric and humanist values which not only construct the aesthetic principles of New Criticism, but which have also played a role in supporting European imperial projects. He writes:

[I wonder] in what degree such humanism is in itself subconsciously aligned to the very colonial prejudices it claims to deride which give it a new narcissistic density of “complete” literatures and “enthrallingly interesting colonial products.” [...] An unconscious political irony is in process of being born within the telling silences of the family of the Word and this is one of the first steps (who knows?) towards a radical change of tone in the dialogue of vested interests between old worlds and new. (19)5

Similar critiques were levelled by Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Chinua Achebe in the late 1970s and early 1980s.6 The result of these debates was, in part, the vein of postcolonial theory that addresses itself specifically to constructing analytical frameworks through which to read the vested interests of both colonial and postcolonial literatures.

These concerns have a precedent in the US in the early-twentieth-century-debates concerning the production and criticism of African American literature. In a 1930 essay, Sterling A. Brown addressed the role of cultural production within the movement towards political emancipation. His critique anticipates a number of issues which have persisted in both African American and Postcolonial Literary Studies:

Certain fallacies I have detected within at least the last six years are these: ¶We look upon Negro books regardless of the author’s intention, as representative of all Negroes, i.e. as sociological documents. ¶We insist that Negro books must be idealistic, optimistic tracts for race advertisement. ¶We are afraid of truth-telling, satire. ¶We criticize from the point of view of bourgeois America, of racial apologists. (70)

Debates within Commonwealth Literary Studies in the 1960s and 1970s, particularly those concerned with the work of Trinidadian novelist V.S. Naipaul, raised very similar questions concerning the responsibility of postcolonial writers to be either representative, accurate, or idealistic in their work.

The notion that the colonized and/or racialized artist ought to produce “sociological documents” that will accurately and representatively define the reality of their cultural context is one which arises partially out of colonialist ethnographic and political practices. The so-called “native informant,” or translator, is an important figure in the imaginary of the colonizing culture—as postcolonial critics, such as Homi Bhabha and Mary E. John, have pointed out. Colonialist regimes attempted to suggest that it was incumbent upon the colonized and racialized subject to translate his/her own cultural practices in order to facilitate the colonizing administration’s rule. At the same time, the administration urged the colonized subject’s adoption of the linguistic and cultural practices of the dominant culture.

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In the 1950s and 1960s, Martiniquan psychologist and anti-colonial activist Frantz Fanon took up the same kinds of questions that Brown raised regarding the role of the artist or creative writer in producing a representative creative work. In his early writing, however, Fanon is specifically interested in the role that the creative artist plays in sustaining a struggle for liberation from the colonizing authority. According to Fanon, a period of cultural nationalism is necessary in the struggle for independence. Fanon argues that the work of colonialism was supported by the erasure or gross misrepresentation of the culture and history of a subject people and, unlike Brown, posits that it is necessary to rewrite that culture and history in idealistic terms (“Address to the First Congress of Negro Writers and Artists,” 1970 34–37). In later writing, however, Fanon goes on to argue that the work of a nationalist culture is not to correct past representations of the colonized culture with an accurate or essential image of that culture. In The Wretched of the Earth, he writes:

A national culture is not a folklore, nor an abstract populism that believes it can discover the people’s true nature [...] A national culture is the whole body of efforts made by a people in the sphere of thought to describe, justify, and praise the action through which that people has created itself and keeps itself in existence. (233)

His work follows Brown’s final statement in suggesting the need for a generation of writers and artists who do not reiterate a bourgeois aesthetic (formed, in Fanon’s terms, by the assimilation of the values of the colonizing culture).

Similar issues were brought to the fore in the US during the period in which Fanon was writing. There were, of course, a heterogeneous array of cultural and political movements taking up these issues in the US in the 1960s and 1970s. In this paper, I will focus specifically on the Black Power movement and the Black Arts movement because the proponents of Black Power drew perhaps the most explicit comparisons between the history of African Americans in the US and the history of the peoples subject to French and British colonialism. The Black Power and the Black Arts movements also engaged directly with the intellectual and political work of writers and anti-colonial activists, such as Fanon and Amilcar Cabral.

Much of the force of the first chapters of Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton’s Black Power depends on the repeated definition of the African American community as a colony.7 Carmichael and Hamilton argue specifically in their introduction that “Black Power means that black people see themselves as part of a new force sometimes called the ‘Third World’” (xi). This comparison was made in an era in which colonial Africa and Asia were in the process of an often violent decolonization. The comparison of the treatment of African Americans to the treatment of, for example, the Front de Libération Nationale in Algeria reframed the debate which the Civil Rights movement brought to the fore in the 1950s. It also upset the propagation of the image of America as a rebellious former colony itself, recasting the Anglo-American rebel-citizen as a colonialist oppressor.

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The Black Power movement addressed itself to the aesthetic-cultural sphere in part through the Black Arts movement. This movement was, in the words of one of its founding members, “the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black power concept,” which “propose[d] a radical reordering of the western cultural aesthetic” (Neal 184). In advocating the central importance of the cultural sphere, and in developing a theory of cultural production, the Black Arts and the Black Power movements were in sympathy with the work of Caribbean and African anti-colonialist activists, including Fanon, Cabral and Ngugi. Cabral, for example, argues in a speech entitled “National Liberation and Culture” that the value of culture as an element of resistance to foreign domination lies in the fact that culture is the vigorous manifestation on the ideological or idealist plane of the physical and historical reality of the society that is dominated or to be dominated. (54)

Like critics Fanon and Cabral, the Black Arts movement understood the “interested” nature of its own canon-building activities primarily as the production of a distinct black public/political/aesthetic sphere. The motivation for this work was self-avowed political interest. The definition of texts as inherently or representatively African American, however, was not on the whole theorized by the Black Arts Movement as an “interested” construction. As Don L. Lee writes, black art and music were understood as “a creative extension of our African selves” (213).

In the decades subsequent to the rise and fall of the Black Power and Black Arts movements, the discipline of African American Studies has continued to be concerned with the development of a complex model of culture. Critics in African American Literary Studies have worked to publish, and engage with, a canon of cultural material which, in Fanon’s terms, acts “to describe, justify, and praise the action through which that people has created itself and keeps itself in existence.” Most notable has been the extraordinary work of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in publishing, anthologizing, criticizing, and, indeed, canonizing African American literary texts.

In the US, Toni Morrison has characterized succinctly the importance (for better or worse) of the work of literary scholars. She writes:

Canon building is Empire building. Canon defence is national defence. Canon debate, whatever the terrain, nature and range (of criticism, of history, of the history of knowledge, of the definition of language, the universality of aesthetic principles, the sociology of art, the humanist imagination), is the clash of the cultures and all of the interests are vested. (“Unspeakable” 9)

In response to the question of the interests at stake in cultural canonization, Gates posits a post-structural characterization of his own canon-building activities. In this, he, and a number of other scholars working in African American Literary Studies, diverges from the Black Arts movement’s constructions of a canon and criticism which is defined as authentically or inherently African American. While Gates argues for the need to “read a black text within a black formal cultural matrix, as well as its ‘white’ matrix,” he goes on to remind his reader that the “[the black cultural matrix] is a historically contingent

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phenomenon; it is not inherent in the nature of ‘blackness,’ not vouchsafed by the metaphysics of some racial essence” (Loose 79).

Gates’s remarks suggest the influence of post-structuralism on contemporary debates about culture within African American Literary Studies. His rejection of “the metaphysics of some racial essence” responds to a historical form of racism which depends on the definition of distinct and deterministic racial essences. However, his comments also reflect the influence of post-structuralist theory, which has been used as an effective tool for the deconstruction of representations of an object or group in terms of a central structuring “essence.” Within Postcolonial Studies, the influence of post-structuralism has been even more pronounced.8 One of the concepts which has had perhaps the widest impact on both African American and Postcolonial Studies is the post-structuralist model of the self/other binary through which identity is formed.

This model has been influenced by the work of German philosopher Friedrich Hegel. It has been developed by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and by post-structuralist writers, such as Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous. Postcolonial and African American criticism have adopted (and adapted) the notion that the individual, the community, and the nation gain a sense of self through the production of an opposite or other. This model is one in which the human is defined through a depiction of the inhuman, or the American is defined through a depiction of the un-American.

Postcolonial critic Edward Said employs this model of identity formation in his work in Orientalism (1979). He argues that the work of the European Orientalist scholar was driven by the need to define the non-European other (201–25). This, in turn, secured for the European a sense of a cohesive identity or self. However, for Said, the relationship of the European self to its (self-constituted) Oriental other is only ever a historical event. Said writes in the introduction to Orientalism that the Western European discourse of Orientalism (which frames the Oriental as its “other”) is a “cultural, historical phenomenon” which must be treated “as a kind of willed human work” (15).

In Culture and Imperialism (1993), Said focuses specifically on the rise of nationalism at the turn of the last century as the locus of cultural discourses based on a self-other binary:

In time, culture comes to be associated, often aggressively, with the nation or the state; this differentiates “us’ from “them,” almost always with some degree of xenophobia. Culture in this sense is a source of identity, and a rather combative one at that.” (xiii)

Said’s remarks here are very similar to Morrison’s regarding the vested interests at stake in literary canon building.

Critic Homi Bhabha has adopted a more psychoanalytically informed version of this model of identity formation. Bhabha draws jointly on the works of Fanon and Lacan to develop a model of the relationship formed between the colonizing self and the colonized other. Unlike Said, Bhabha suggests that this process of identity formation is a universal psychic structure, not a historical phenomenon. In “Remembering Fanon,” Bhabha

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outlines “three conditions that underlie an understanding of the process of identification” (117).9 He begins by stating that “to exist is to be called into being in relation to Otherness, its look or locus” (117). The self/other relationship, however, is not marked by the Hegelian dialectic that one finds in different forms in both Lacan and Fanon. Bhabha does not agree with Fanon’s contention that “the real Other for the white man is and will continue to be the black man. And conversely” (qtd. in “Remembering” 119). This, Bhabha argues, is a “too hasty” and too literal turn away from “the ambivalences of identification to the antagonistic identities of political alienation and cultural discrimination” (119).

Bhabha’s work also distinguishes itself from Said’s in arguing that

it is difficult to conceive of the process of subjectification as a placing within Orientalist or colonialist discourse for the dominated subject without the dominant being strategically placed within it too. (Location 72)

Bhabha’s work emphasizes the multi-directionality of the operation of colonial power, and he argues that the colonizer and the colonized are equally subject to those operations. Bhabha is at once concerned with reasserting the effectiveness of unconscious forces of “subjectification,” and, at the same time, is careful to recognize the agency of a colonized subject capable of a “sly” speaking back to colonialist discourse.

Where Bhabha points to the elision of the agency of the colonized “other” in Said’s use of the self-other model, bell hooks has offered another direction for critique. She argues that the use of these variants of the post-structuralist model of the self-other relationship in the study of the representation of race has produced a critical tendency to focus exclusively on race as it was deployed to construct non-Anglo peoples. hooks writes:

In far too much contemporary writing—though there are some outstanding exceptions—race is always an issue of otherness that is not white; it is black, brown, yellow, red, purple even. Yet only a persistent, rigorous, and informed critique of whiteness could really determine what forces of denial, fear, and competition are responsible for creating fundamental gaps between professed political commitment to eradicating racism and the participation in the construction of a discourse on race that perpetuates racial domination. (54)

Within the context of African American Studies, hooks’s critique suggests a form of academic re-colonization of “blackness” as territory ripe for intellectual picking—a point that Helen Tiffin, Ella Shohat, and Anne McClintock have each made concerning the mobilization of the category of the “other” in postcolonial theory.10

hooks’s comments are also reminiscent of the initial critique of Commonwealth Literary Studies. Just as Mishra and Hodge argue, the focus on race or otherness as the specific locus of non-whites does not mean that this model does not contain an implicit standard which is “white” or “Anglo” or “Euro”-centric. Postcolonial critics, such as Abdul

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JanMohamed and Helen Tiffin, argue that post-structuralism has a tendency to reinforce the Eurocentric focus that it proposes to disrupt. In this vein, Tiffin writes that

“Otherness” as a source of interest, revivification, even celebration (and certainly academic exploitation) is pervasive in European and Euro-American post-structuralist theory. But as it is currently theorized, it remains perpetually foreclosed, its apparent avenues of newness and difference always turning out to be cul-de-sac contained by that same European archive [...] Post-structuralist excursions into difference, still rediscovers Europe. (429)

Tiffin’s point concerning this trend is that it tends, in practice, to involve the critical examination of European colonialist discourses about non-Europeans in order to better understand the functioning of the European subject—which continues to act as the centre or norm.

In the effort to deconstruct and historicize representations of “otherness,” there is one area, in particular, in which scholars in African American and Postcolonial Studies appear to be working in concert. Morrison, hooks, and Ware have all called for—and performed—an attentive deconstruction of “whiteness” as a category. Morrison’s Playing in the Dark analyses the representation of race in Anglo-American literature. Like Edward Said, she argues that the representation of “blackness” is often constructed in relation to an implicit definition of “whiteness.” She states that Playing in the Dark “is an effort to avert the critical gaze from the racial object to the racial subject; from the described and imagined to the describers and imaginers; from the serving to the served” (90). Like Bhabha, she argues that racializing and racist discourse affects both the object of the discourse and the author of the discourse:

The scholarship that looks into the mind, imagination, and behavior of slaves is valuable. But equally valuable is a serious intellectual effort to see what racial ideology does to the mind, imagination, and behavior of masters.” (11–12)

The call for an examination of “whiteness” does not entirely resolve the conflicts which arise out of the use of post-structuralism in disciplines shaped, in part, by the desire to produce a distinct and separate intellectual and cultural field. The post-structuralist insistence on the necessity of the discursive relationship between the cultural and social formations of both the dominant and the subjected groups may be in conflict with the desire to set aside the study of European philosophical and cultural traditions in an attempt to undermine the academic privileging of those traditions.

The deconstruction of representations of race has raised another critical problem. There is a tendency in both African American and Postcolonial Studies to valorize “race” as the most constructed—and most deconstructible—identity category. Gates’s otherwise illuminating essay on “Writing and ‘Race’ and the Difference It Makes” is exemplary of this trend. He writes:

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Race is the ultimate trope of differences because it is so very arbitrary in its application. The sanction of biology contained in sexual difference, simply put, does not and can never obtain when one is speaking of “racial difference.” (49)

In an article which appears next to Gates’s in its first printing, Anthony Kwame Appiah supports Gates’s claim concerning the lack of biological sanction for racial difference (21). That said, more recent discussions in biology have likewise suggested the unreliability of chromosomal denominations of sexed identity. Thomas Laqueur and Judith Butler have also questioned the extent to which the apparent biological “fact’ of sexual identity has ever existed outside of constructions of masculinity and femininity.11

Postcolonial critic Anne McClintock has gone further in suggesting that the categories of race and gender cannot be analysed separately. McClintock has set out a sustained critique of the extent to which colonial-racial relations of power are naturalized through a nineteenth-century, Western European model of family relations. McClintock suggests that the European model of the family acted to naturalize and support relations of power between sexes, classes, and races simultaneously. She writes:

The family offered an indispensable figure for sanctioning social hierarchy .... Because the subordination of woman to man and child to adult were deemed natural facts, other forms of social hierarchy could be depicted in familial terms to guarantee social difference as a category of nature. The family image came to figure hierarchy within unity as an organic element of historical progress, and thus became indispensable for legitimising exclusion and hierarchy within nonfamilial social forms such as nationalism, liberal individualism and imperialism. The metaphoric depiction of social hierarchy as natural and familial thus depends on the prior naturalising of the social subordination of women and children. (Imperial 45)

Centrally, McClintock’s work demonstrates that the construction of a working class, for example, cannot be examined in isolation from the construction of racial identity and gender identity: “race, gender and class are not distinct realms of experience, existing in splendid isolation from each other ... they come into existence in and through relations to each other” (Imperial 5).

McClintock’s work also has an important precedent in the work of feminist writers of colour. Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga’s influential collection This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color contains a number of essays which comment on the mutually constitutive relationship of representations of race to representations of gender, class, and sexuality.12 In this collection, the Combahee River Collective write that they often find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously. We know that there is such a thing as racial-sexual oppression which is neither solely racial nor solely sexual, e.g., the history of the rape of Black women by white men as a weapon of political oppression. (213)

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Likewise, in “Towards a Black Feminist Criticism,” Barbara Smith outlines a “black feminist criticism” which would recognize “that the politics of race and class are crucially interlocking factors in the works of black women writers” (412).

While Anzaldúa and Moraga advocate “a feminist political theory” which is more attentive to the experience of women from different racial-ethnic and economic backgrounds (xxiv), they are careful nonetheless to state that they are not attempting to construct themselves as unified as women of colour. Moraga adds that this group should not be understood as one defined by “essential” characteristics: “We are not so much a ‘natural’ affinity group, as women who have come together out of political necessity” (“foreword,” n.pag.). In this, they anticipate Gates’s characterization of race and later postcolonial interrogations of both race and gender.

Amongst the essays in this collection is Audre Lorde’s well-known argument that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (99). Lorde’s statement suggests another potential refusal of the post-structuralist method. Post-structuralist scholarship is often precisely an attempt to dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools—to rationally deconstruct European rationality in European texts. Lorde’s essay, however, elaborates a less direct interrogation of deconstructive practice. She focuses on a feminist reliance on the institutions and discourses of patriarchal power and suggests that those structures cannot be separated from the power relations within which they were formed (99–100). This, in itself, is an argument not dissimilar to Foucault’s notion of institutional power.

Where Lorde differs from Foucault is in her return to the category of experience. Lorde’s work here shares the tendency in Edward Said’s to read identity as constructed through power relations, while, at the same time, calling for a more accurate narration of a particular place or identity or experience. She writes:

in a world of possibility for us all, our personal vision helps lay the groundwork for political action. The failure of the academic feminist to recognise difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. Divide and conquer in our world, must become define and empower.” (100, my emphasis)

The place of experience has been problematized by post-structuralist writers who view experience as always already constituted by institutional discourses. Recently, however, experience has returned to critical debates as a form of critique of the Eurocentric focus of some post-structuralist scholarship. Critics such as Judith Butler argue, on the one hand, that post-structuralism’s detaching of gendered or racial attributes from the biological opens up the potential to see varied performances of gendered or racialized identities as equally authentic—or rather, as equally inauthentic. On the other hand, theorists such as Lorde have suggested that a repudiation of the authenticity of identity and experience is the privilege of those individuals whose experience and identity have been represented within the dominant discourse. Without the privilege of the institutionalization and legitimization of one’s experience as authentic, a rejection of the authenticity of one’s experience appears somewhat less emancipatory.

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Said has also invoked the category of experience in response to the problems which arise out of postcolonial uses of post-structuralism. For Said, it is experience, precisely, that exceeds political and theoretical formulations of “us” and “them,” of “self” and “other.” He writes:

Let us begin by accepting the notion that although there is an irreducible subjective core to human experience, this experience is also historical and secular, it is accessible to analysis and interpretation, and—centrally important—it is not exhausted by totalizing theories, not marked and limited by doctrinal or national lines, not confined once and for all to analytical constructs. (Culture 31)

Said argues that experience exceeds “analytical constructs” like the post-structuralist self/other binary because one’s experience is that one is never “only, mainly, exclusively, white [sic] or Black, or Western, or Oriental” (Culture 336).

Critics such as Lorde and Said have advocated the circulation of representations of (authentic) experiences of difference and subjection. At the same time, they wish to interrogate representation as a site upon which the imprint of constructed relations of power are visible. This bind has produced a tendency to delve further into post-structuralist explanations of the relationship between language, subjectivity, and power. Conversely, it has produced an increasing number of calls to remove the quotation marks from the terms “race,” “class,” “gender,” and “sexuality”—to distinguish between the constructed nature of categories such as “black” or “white” and the way in which being identified as black or white continues to affect the experiences of individuals.

Postcolonial Studies, at its intersection with post-structuralist, feminist, and African American Studies, finds itself face to face with this problem at the moment. Like the scholars working within African American Studies, postcolonial critics grapple with the explanatory complexity of post-structuralism’s account of the self/other binary and the desire to drive away from the cul-de-sac of Eurocentrism. Likewise, as Benita Parry has commented, the reduction of relations of power to the rules of language is unappealing (12). The problems raised by postcolonial appropriations of post-structuralism have moved scholars such as Hortense Spillers, Rey Chow, Asha Varadharajan, and Homi Bhabha towards psychoanalytic explanations of subjectivity as a potential source for a more complex understanding of the way in which power is exercised through categories of identification.

At the same time, a call for a reassessment of the relationship of experience to identity and representation recurs in recent postcolonial writing. Mary E. John, like Said, has argued that

instead of striving to reduce race to an empty or illusory notion, perhaps one must take on its ineducable imbrication with other concepts, not excluding such “unviable” markers as skin color. As Patricia Williams has it, “I wish to recognise that terms like ‘black’ and ‘white’ do not begin to capture the rich ethnic and political diversity of my subject. But I do believe that the simple matter of the color of one’s skin so profoundly affects the way

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one is treated, so radically shapes what one is allowed to think and feel ... , that the decision to generalise from such a division is valid.” (99)13

It is unclear if these assertions will provide a sufficient, or even a temporary, solution to the intellectual and ethical conflicts which exist in African American Studies and in Postcolonial Studies.

Said, like Lorde, has argued that experience can provide an important framework through which to analyse and critique cultural institutions and the relations of power which they incarnate. In his essay “Travelling Theory,” Said locates a subversive potential in the intrusion of “sentiment, passion, [and] chance” into the consciousness shaped by institutional discourses. “At such a moment, then,” Said writes,

mind, or “subject” has its one opportunity to escape reification: by thinking through what it is that causes reality to appear to be only a collection of objects or economic données. And the very act of looking for the process behind what appears to be eternally given and objectified, makes it possible for the mind to know itself as subject and not as a lifeless object. (48)

What is particularly interesting about this account of the “crisis,” which “is converted into criticism of the status quo” (48), is that this crisis is precipitated by the force of precisely those things which are usually opposed to rationality and objectivity: sentiment, passion, and chance.

Intellectual self-consciousness, in Said’s account, occurs as the result of a disjunction between a subjective passion and an authoritative discourse. For Said, exile is the experience which produces this disjunction. That is to say, the displaced subject’s passionate, sentimental, or chance attachment to a homeland is that which allows his/her critical consciousness of the artificiality of the discourse of the new location in which they find themselves.

Said goes on to argue, in Representations of the Intellectual, that the ethical intellectual must always occupy the position of outsider or of exile. Said characterizes his work as an attempt to negotiate a position for the intellectual between individual “affiliation, national background, and primeval loyalties” and the universal “standard of truth about human misery and oppression” (xii). He argues that exiles are best suited to the position of intellectual, not just because their experiences and affiliations are at odds with the location in which they find themselves, but because they can ultimately distance themselves from both their “home” and their new location. He writes:

The pattern that sets the course for the intellectual as outsider is best exemplified by the condition of exile, the state of never being fully adjusted, always feeling outside the chatty, familiar world inhabited by natives, so to speak, tending to avoid and even dislike the trappings of accommodation and national well-being. Exile for the intellectual in this metaphysical sense is restlessness, movement, constantly being unsettled, and unsettling others. You cannot go back to some earlier and perhaps more stable condition of being at

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home; and, alas, you can never fully arrive, be at one with your new home or situation. (52–53)

While Said emphasizes the distance which exile—actual or metaphysical—provides, I find Said’s and Lorde’s discussions of experience at their most productive when they emphasize that neither he nor she nor I simply becomes an exile from nowhere, but rather that we become exiles precisely because we once felt that we belonged somewhere. In this, they provide a reminder of the importance of remembering both the place of the border that marks our own intellectual belonging and the limits of our exile.

Notes1 See Said’s characterization of the intellectual as outsider or as exile in Representations in particular.

2 I have in mind Lisa Lowe’s early Critical Terrains, which responds to Said’s work on Orientalism and attempts to outline some of the distinctions between different European political and literary attitudes towards the Middle East. Likewise, Ann Laura Stoler’s Race focuses on Dutch constructions of race, gender, and miscegenation in Dutch colonial holdings in Southeast Asia.

3 Ahmad’s statement is particularly about American intellectuals and not the Black British intellectual movements of the 1970s and 1980s, which have engaged directly with postcolonial theory. The work of Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy would be exemplary in this latter case.

4 Christine McCleod comments on this in her article “Black American Literature and the Postcolonial Debate.” hooks’s comments, in Yearning in particular, will be discussed in more detail below.

5 Harris makes a point in this essay which critic Aimé Césaire has also made concerning European humanist philosophy. Specifically, Césaire argues that, within the celebration of the liberty, equality, and fraternity of humanity, there exists an implicit category of the inhuman. The category of the “inhuman,” Césaire argues, allowed the celebration of humanist values in Europe in the midst of a period in which European countries were subjecting non-European peoples to colonial rule (15).

6 I have in mind Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Decolonising and Chinua Achebe’s “African Writer.”

7 The definition of a singular African American community with homogeneous experiences and aims has inspired a great deal of criticism by both those working within the Black Power movement (Beal 343) and by subsequent academic evaluations of Black nationalist movements and nationalism in general (hooks 58; Gilroy 25). I don’t intend to suggest homogeneity here but rather to repeat the terms of their argument as it is made in their published work.

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8 For a more extended analysis, I would refer the reader to Bart Moore-Gilbert’s Postcolonial Theory. Moore-Gilbert provides a careful, clearly written analysis of the influence of post-structuralism on postcolonial theory.

9 This passage also appears in The Location of Culture on page 44.

10 McClintock makes this point in her essay “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term ‘Post-Colonialism’” (85) and Shohat makes a similar argument in “Notes on the ‘Post-Colonial’” (108).

11 Laqueur’s Making Sex traces Western, particularly European, definitions of the difference between “male” and “female.” Laqueur argues that they have, in every case he examines, depended upon pre-existing constructions of masculinity and femininity and that the difference has indeed not always been understood as very great.

12 In her essay “On the Threshold of the Woman’s Era,” Hazel V. Carby suggests an even earlier presentation of this argument in the work of Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, and novelist Pauline Hopkins.

13 Likewise, in her discussion of constructions of “race” and “ethnicity,” Sneja Gunew succinctly points out that “while ‘race’ has no basis in fact, racism does” (33). Stuart Hall has also argued that “it is only too tempting to fall into the trap of assuming that, because essentialism has been deconstructed theoretically, therefore it has been displaced politically” (249).

Works CitedAchebe, Chinua. “The African Writer and the English Language.” Morning Yet on Creation Day. New York: Doubleday, 1975. 91–103.Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London: Verso, 1992.Anzaldúa, Gloria, and Cherríe Moraga, eds. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. New York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color, 1983.Appiah, Anthony. “The Uncompleted Argument.” Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 21–37.Beal, Francis M. “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female.” Sisterhood is Powerful. Ed. Robin Morgan. New York: Vintage, 1970. 340–52.Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.———. “Remembering Fanon.” Williams and Chrisman 112-24.Brown, Sterling A. “Our Literary Audience.” Within the Circle. Ed. Angelyn Mitchell. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1994. 69–78.Cabral, Amilcar. “National Liberation and Culture.” Williams and Chrisman 53–65.Carby, Hazel V. “On the Threshold of the Woman’s Era.” Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 262–77.Carmichael, Stokely, and Charles Hamilton. Black Power. New York: Random, 1967.Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. Trans. Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review P, 1972.Chambers, Iain, and Lidia Curti, eds. The Post-Colonial Question. London: Routledge, 1996.

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Combahee River Collective. “A Black Feminist Statement.” Anzaldúa and Moraga 210–18.Fanon, Frantz. “Address to the First Congress of Negro Writers and Artists.” 1956. Towards an African Revolution. Trans. Haakon Chevalier. London: Penguin, 1970. 34–37.———. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove, 1968.Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.———. “Writing, ‘Race,’ and the Difference it Makes.” Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.Gilroy, Paul. “Route Work: The Black Atlantic and the Politics of Exile.” Chambers and Curti 17–29.Gunew, Sneja. “Postcolonialism and Multiculturalism.” Yearbook of English Studies 27 (1997): 22–39.Hall, Stuart. “When Was the Postcolonial?” Chambers and Curti 242–60.Harris, Wilson. “Reflection and Vision.” Commonwealth Literature and the Modern World. Ed. Hena Maes-Jelinek. Liège, Belgium: Revue des Langues Vivantes. 1975. 15–19.hooks, bell. Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End, 1990.JanMohamed, Abdul. “The Economy of the Manichean Allegory.” Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 59–87.John, Mary E. Discrepant Dislocations. Berkeley: U of California P, 1996.Kristeva, Julia. Nations Without Nationalism. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1993.Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990.Lee, Don L. “Towards a Definition: Black Poetry of the Sixties.” Within the Circle. Ed. Angelyn Mitchell. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1994. 213–23.Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” Anzaldúa and Moraga 98–101.Lowe, Lisa. Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1991.McCleod, Christine. “Black American Literature and the Postcolonial Debate.” Yearbook of English Studies 27 (1997): 51–65.McClintock, Anne. “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term ‘Post-Colonialism.’” Socialtext 31/32 (1992): 84–98.———. Imperial Leather. New York: Routledge, 1995.Mishra, Vijay and Bob Hodge. “What is Post (-) colonialism?” Williams and Chrisman 276–90.Mitchell, Angelyn, ed. Within the Circle. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1994. Moore-Gilbert, Bart. Postcolonial Theory. London: Verso, 1997.Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992.———. “Unspeakable Things Unspoken.” Mitchell 368–98.Neal, Larry. “The Black Arts Movement.” Mitchell 184–98.

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Ngugi, Thiong’o wa. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: James Currey, 1981.Parry, Benita. “Postcolonial: Conceptual Category or Chimera?” Yearbook of English Studies 27 (1997): 3–21.Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1993.———. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979.———. Representations of the Intellectual. New York: Vintage, 1996.———. “Travelling Theory.” Raritan 1.3 (1982): 41–67.Shohat, Ella. “Notes on the ‘Post-Colonial.’” Socialtext 31 (1992): 99–113.Smith, Barbara. “Towards a Black Feminist Criticism.” Mitchell 410–27.Stoler, Ann Laura. Race and the Education of Desire. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1996.Tiffin, Helen. “Transformative Imageries.” From Commonwealth to Postcolonial. Ed. Anna Rutherford. Sydney, Australia: Dangaroo, 1992.Ware, Vron. “Defining Forces: ‘Race,’ Gender and Memories of Empire.” The Post-Colonial Question. Ed. Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti. London: Routledge, 1996. 142–56.Williams, Patrick, and Laura Chrisman. Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.

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