The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on Hegemony and Resistance. - book reviews

Journal of Social History, Summer, 1993 by David C. Wright

The Bounds of Race brings together a collection of papers that originated at a Cornell University conference hosted by Dominick LaCapra. Fifteen years ago, few social historians would have read a book of essays written mostly by literary critics. But in the intervening years literary, or more broadly, cultural criticism has taken an historical turn and history has taken a linguistic turn. Many historians are now interested in questions of how to read texts, how canons of literature (in the broadest sense) are formed, and in what ways social formations, such as race, gender and class, are connected to cultural production and reception.

The essays in LaCapra's book are uneven in quality and vary considerably in methodology and focus. What coherence the book does possess is largely due to a selection of topics that fall within relatively limited boundaries. While gender and class are not ignored, race is the central concern of the book's authors. Except for a concluding essay on Britain's culture of colonialism, all of the essays examine various aspects of the African cultural experience in Africa itself or the western hemisphere.

Starting the collection with "The Master's Pieces: On Canon Formation and the Afro-American Tradition" by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was an excellent decision. Gates skillfully addresses highly contested issues of literary theory through a mix of autobiography, political argument, and literary history. The main purpose of the essay is for Gates to justify constructing a canon of African-American literature. He claims that critics on the Right oppose the creation of multiple American literary canons and critics on the Left fear that "the very idea of the canon is hierarchical, patriarchal, and otherwise politically suspect". Gates asserts that the earliest commentators on an American canon noted the originality of the African-American cultural contribution, specifically in the form of slave narratives, and that black poetry was already anthologized by the 1840s. During the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and the black liberation movement of the 1960s, there were further attempts to define the canon of black American literature. In the course of considering previous efforts to define a distinctive black literary canon, Gates makes several insightful comments about criteria for canon formation and the way in which the choices made in each era were consonant with the social and political context. A full-blown history of black literary canon formation, which this essay suggests is nearly within our grasp, would be a welcome contribution to the social and cultural history of the African-American experience. By the end of the essay, Gates has convincingly established that the attempt to define a black American canon is theoretically sound, as well as politically desirable.

"Moving on Down the Line: Variations on the African-American Sermon" by Hortense J. Spillers is an imaginative, though sometimes abstruse, essay that demonstrates the validity of Gates' argument. Basing her work on a study of manuscripts of Afro-American sermons from 1782 to 1917, Spillers finds the preachers helped create a community, shape a complex historical memory, and instill a sense that suffering will eventually give way and there will be a "'good time coming'". She argues that unlike the great European churches built to inscribe hierarchy within the consciousness of the faithful through the majesty seen by the eye, the visually more democratic African-American church has focused on the Word being delivered to the ear of the faithful. Therefore, while Spillers displays a dizzying mastery of the methods of post-structuralist and feminist textural analysis, she ultimately shifts her focus from written texts to the spoken words, full of repetition, delay, and rhetorical power.

The book's next two essays argue that race has been crucial to the shaping and distortion of modern science and American politics. "Appropriating the Idioms of Science: The Rejection of Scientific Racism," by Nancy Leys Stepan and Sander Gilman, focus on the ways in which Jews and African-Americans tried to counter scientific theories of racial inferiority between 1870 and 1920. Others, such as George L. Mosse and Stepan Jay Gould, have already written about scientific racism. What makes the essay by Stepan and Gilman innovative is its exploration of the resistance to that racism by minority group writers. In "The Color of Politics in the United States: White Supremacy as the Main Explanation for the Peculiarities of American Politics from Colonial Times to the Present," Michael Goldfield presents an essay on the time-worn topic of "American Exceptionalism." Goldfield rejects psychological and cultural explanations for racism, instead insisting on the primacy of economic factors. To "prove" this he provides an eighteen-page history of three centuries of race and labor relations in America. The main authors cited, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Friedrich Engels, and Karl Marx, indicate that this essay's greatest value is as a synthesis of classic texts.