Masks: Blackness, Race and the Imagination. - book review

African American Review, Summer, 2002 by Ashraf H.A. Rushdy

Adam Lively. Masks: Blackness, Race and the Imagination. New York: Oxford UP, 2000. 295 pp. $30.00.

It is not a new argument that there is a fundamental black presence at the heart of modernity, whether that modernity be defined as beginning with the Enlightenment philosophers of the eighteenth century or the primitivist artists of the twentieth, and whether that presence manifests itself as a positive cultural inheritance or a hidden racist discourse. For the past decade, scholars have been exposing to light the racist discourse at the foundations of liberalism and the Africanist cultures present in works of European modernisms. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has traced the signifying relationship African writers established with those eighteenth-century European racialists, while Paul Gilroy has measured the depth of the Black Atlantic, whose waves lapped on both Caribbean and English shores. Christopher Miller and Tzvetan Todorov have explored how a wide range of intellectuals deploy an "Africanist discourse" in French writing, while Toni Morrison has showed us the persistence of what she calls the "Africanist presence" in modern works of American literature. Central to these studies are two interrelated beliefs: first, the materialist belief that the given conditions of a racialized and racist society manifest themselves in the cultural productions of that society and, second, the psychoanalytic belief that these cultural productions manifest this racism or indebtedness in a repressed yet recoverable form.

Adam Lively's Masks is another and welcome addition to this burgeoning and still fruitful field of study. Divided into two parts--the first on the "invention" of race, the second on the manifestations of blackness in modernist texts in the twentieth century--the book asserts just how central the "ongoing cultural and scientific debate as to what... race signifies" has been and continues to be to "modem thought and sensibilities."

In the first part, dealing with the preconditions of modernism, Lively provides engaging and wide-ranging explorations of how race developed as an intellectual system in a Christian context. Looking first at the ways that European thinkers "invented" race, Lively then examines the ways race was transmuted in the shifts from the culture of sentimental abolitionism to the age of empire. What is particularly admirable about this survey is its range. In his first chapter, for example, Lively attends to theological debates (the origins of the association of blackness with Ham), philosophical theories (Leonardo on the "grey" offspring of black and white parents, Swedenborg on how Africans think "interiorly" while Europeans think "exteriorly"), and cultural phenomena (the Moorish origins of the English morris dance, the blackness of the Harlequin figure in commedia dell'arte). This analysis of intellectual debates and cultural events provides a useful supplement to the kind of work that has been ably performed by hi storians like Walter Allen, who have been more focused on the material "invention of race" in the early modern period. The book's attention to European developments also supplements the kinds of analysis of cultural texts that have been more focused on America, as Eric Lott's work, for instance, has been. It should also be noted, however, that the work on the "invention of race" in Lively's book does not (and is not intended to) replace the more thorough histories of race as an intellectual concept (like Thomas Gossett's Race: The History of an Idea in America) or a material set of political practices (like Oliver Cromwell Cox's older but still insufficiently-appreciated Marxist text Caste, Class, and Race).

Throughout the first part, Lively spends some time looking at particular works of fiction to give more concrete examples of the specificities of the intellectual traditions he is delineating. In the first chapter he provides a lengthy reading of Simon Tyssot de Patot's Les Voyages et Aventures de Jacques Masse (1710), in the second of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), and in the fourth of Joseph Conrad's Nigger of the 'Narcissus' (1898) and Heart of Darkness (1902). Mostly, though, in the first section Lively is more heavily concerned with drawing out what he sees as the key shifts from the age of sentiment to the age of empire. The most notable shift is that from the sentimentalist idea of identification ("Am I not a man and a brother?" asks the kneeling slave in Josiah Wedgwood's medallion) to the imperialist idea of disidentification (where the "Negro became irredeemably Other" to the colonizing mind). This is especially marked in the notable shift from the abolitionist representation of ev ery black person as having a white soul to the colonial fictions that suggested that within "every white skin is a heart of darkness." As Lively makes quite clear, the symbolism of blackness plays the fundamental role in these changes and also in the final shift at the turn into the twentieth century, the shift from imperial romance to imperial modernism.