Lectures in China

PHBW blog –July 16, 2012

Lectures in China

                To address the growing interest in African American literature and culture at HuaZhong Normal University (Wuhan) and other institutions in China, I have given lectures there since 2009.   Chinese auditors, however astute and savvy they are, may be easily confused by the literary critical games played in the West.  Often they do not understand the cultural dynamics of academic trends.  Why do Western critics so dread the absolute, the essential, and the certain?  The reasons, of course, are at once philosophical, racial, and political.  One must exercise care in explaining that the universal is not universal but merely a smokescreen for intellectual hegemony, that deconstruction can too often be a weapon of massive destruction. 

                During May and June 2012, I presented nine lectures designed to plant seeds for critical growth.  The listing includes a post-delivery comment for each of them.

1)      Trickster Criticism: Kenneth Warren’s What Was African American Literature?--- In international forums for literary study, it is necessary to have a critique of Warren’s tendentious misreading of African American literary history and culture and its probable consequences of such misreading  in a future of African American literary study.  I am indebted to Maryemma Graham for drawing my attention to an important example of a consequence:  Gruesz, Kirsten Silva. “What Was Latino Literature?” PMLA 127.2 (2012):335-341.

2)      The Poetry of Natasha Trethewey ---Trethewey’s strategies for recovering history in Domestic Work, Bellocq’s Ophelia, and Native Guard are aesthetic warnings against post-racial delusions. To put Trethewey’s being named Poet Laureate of the United States in proper perspective, one must read Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s brilliant essay “The Subjective Briar Patch: Contemporary American Poetry.” Virginia Quarterly Review (Spring 2012): 97-106. Access http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2012/spring/jeffers-contemporary-poetry

3)      The Cambridge History of African American Literature and the Limits of Literary History – This commentary seeks to explain the inevitable absence in literary historical narratives of writers who are of equal merit with and sometimes of greater importance than those who are discussed.

4)      On Reginald Martin’s Idea of Transcultural Theory –This discussion of Martin’s appropriation of transcultural theory as a method of reading texts foregrounds the need to make clear distinctions among theory, methodology, and method.

5)      The Tonal Drawings of Asili Ya Nadhiri: Temporality and Musicality – Given the absence of critical attention  to how Nadhiri  uses oral/aural memory , grammatical innovations regarding tense, ideas about music and art, and some problems of time and being dealt with in theoretical physics  in a conceptual poetic genre, this lecture acknowledges his unique contribution to African American poetry.

6)      Ishmael Reed and Multiculturalism –A  discussion of Reed’s sustained efforts since the late 1960s to promote real rather than lip-service multiculturalism in the literature of the United States, this lecture suggests that Reed has provided a rich matrix for the delayed conversation on what it means to be an American.

7)      Acknowledgement: The Contact/Combat Zone ---A meditation on the function of the literary critic in the 21^st century, this lecture argues that warfare is the dominant but rarely acknowledged trope in discussions of the literature of the United States.

8)      Richard Wright and Twenty-first Century Questions ---The purpose of this lecture is to argue that significant research questions and making of transcendent connections (imaginative reflection) can be derived from close reading of Richard Wright’s “Blueprint for Negro Writing” and his novella The Man Who Lived Underground.

9)       American Literature and Digital Humanities ---This lecture involves a series of speculations on how new technologies may change the study and teaching of literature, especially of African American literature.

I have little interest in fashionable academic games, efforts to avoid telling a truth about the essential complexity of African American literature and its continuing evolution, or rhetorical lies about the existence of shared values among diverse citizens of the United States or Europe.  To promote honest exchanges among Chinese and American intellectual communities, I embrace an unfashionable humanism that minimizes post-human dominance. I want my Chinese colleagues to have more options for making conclusions about truth.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

Wright, Hurston, and Bad Blood

Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and Bad Blood

Q:   I really want to read Richard Wright’s review of Their Eyes Were Watching God.  I wonder what caused the bad blood between him and Hurston.

A (1):  To read Wright’s review, access http://people.virginia.edu/~sfr/enam854/summer/hurston.html

There you will find the in-house review by Hurston’s publisher and reviews by George Stevens, Lucille Thompson, Sheila Hibben, Otis Ferguson, Sterling Brown, and Alain Locke.  Wright was not the only male who did not praise Hurston’s novel in 1937.

A (2):  As one result of American cultural games, the bad blood has been so magnified that what is a sub-atomic particle looks like a Siberian tiger.  In literary circles, one game is played by driving a contrived wedge between selected African American iconic figures.  The divisive action is formulaic.  Select two people ---let us say, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., Terry McMillan and Toni Morrison, or Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois.  Extract diametrically opposed quotations from each either in or out of context.  Magnify and distort the differences.  Claim the differences are symbolic of some more or less permanent fault line in the collective consciousness of a people, symbolic of a wailing wall of hate between the two people selected.  You do not have to provide proof, nor exercise the civility of waiting for an answer.

This very American game is replete with racialized ideological baggage.  It is marked by bad sociology, bad psychology, and bad history.  It is vicious.

Fortunately, we can speculate about the bad blood between Hurston and Wright outside the boundaries of this game as I have said in my unpublished essay “Hurston, Wright, and Literary History.”  In 1937, Wright published “Between Laughter and Tears,” a combined review of Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Waters Turpin’s These Low Grounds in the October 5 issue of New Masses. Wright’s evaluation of both novels was less than favorable.  Hurston had an opportunity to repay Wright in kind when she reviewed Uncle Tom’s Children under the title “Stories in Conflict” in the April 2, 1938 issue of Saturday Review of Literature.  Hurston was less than pleased with Wright’s accomplishment.

Wright had been critical of Hurston’s sentimentality, her exploration of the human heart and love at the expense of ignoring any impact systemic racism might have had on the lives of her characters.  Hurston in turn was critical of Wright’s preoccupation with race hatred, his exploitation of “the wish-fulfillment theme,” and his apparent fidelity, as she informed her audience, to “the picture of the South that the communists have been passing around of late.”  Hurston was not sympathetic to the restrictions of thought implicit in Marxism American style.  Wright became disillusioned with those restrictions in the early 1940s.  But in 1937, Wright had no patience with Hurston’s “facile sensuality,” the structure of feelings that could be a portal to the realm of minstrelsy.  The difference between the two writers is grounded in ideological opposition, incompatible ideas about the function of literature or writing in life and the obligations of the writer.  Hurston and Wright had genuine reasons for concern about the effects of writing upon the minds of racially embattled readers.

Wright and Hurston were at once blunt and considerate in their attacks.  They were careful in deflecting attention from personality to writing, from content of character to matters of technical skill.  “Miss Hurston can write,” Richard Wright admitted.  He found, however, that her dialogue “manages to catch the psychological movements of the Negro folk-mind in their simplicity but that’s as far as it goes.”  Hurston did not catch the “complex simplicity” that Wright had called for in “Blueprint for Negro Writing.”  That is to say, she succeed in simplicity but missed “all the complexity, the strangeness, the magic wonder of life that plays like a bright sheen over the most sordid existence….”[ Blueprint, section 6: Social Consciousness and Responsibility]  Wright misread his own critical language and failed to see the sheen in Hurston’s novel.  At second glance, it is not Hurston’s romanticism that he is criticizing.  He is condemning her failure to link folklore with “the concepts that move and direct the forces of history today.” [Section 6]

Hurston complimented Wright by suggesting that “[s]ome of his sentences have the shocking-power of a forty-four,” a feature that confirmed for her that Wright “knows his way around among words.”  Nevertheless, she found his representation of dialect to be “a puzzling thing.”  How did he arrive at it?  “Certainly,” she proposed, “he does not write by ear unless he is tone-deaf.  But aside from the broken speech of his characters, the book contains some beautiful writing.”  What was not beautiful was Wright’s male-dominated subject matter.  “This is a book about hatreds. Mr. Wright,” according to Hurston, “serves notice by his title that he speaks of people in revolt, and his stories are so grim that the Dismal Swamp of race hatred must be where they live.  Not one act of understanding and sympathy comes to pass in the entire work.”  By way of hyperbole, Hurston found the violence of black life in Wright’s stories to be excessive. In contrast, her novel was a testament that violence and hatred in fiction should be tempered by civility, love, and compassion.

It is reasonable to propose the two reviews are gestures of respect.   There is some degree of balance between the two reviews if we attend to what might have been reality for Hurston and Wright and their readers. Wright and Hurston were playing literary politics, and their discourses had to be social and political.  They were writers writing about writing. Wright was conserving the radical tradition of black nationalism; Hurston was subverting the idea that a black writer had to be radical according to an “ism” that was alien to deep roots of folk wisdom.  Perhaps we can avoid exaggerating bad blood and focus on how speech acts properly contextualized show that distinctions between the aesthetic and the political can be exposed as the fictions that they are.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                                                            PHBW A/Q BLOG

October 28, 2012