Negotiating Difference: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Positionality. - Review - book reviews

African American Review, Fall, 1999 by Shanna Greene Benjamin

Michael Awkward. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. 225 pp. $14.95.

University of Wisconsin, Madison

In Negotiating Difference, Michael Awkward charts the politics and pitfalls of crossing boundaries created by race and gender. In this project, he attempts to create a space for critical readings that resist essentialist binaries and questions the motivations behind epistemological territorialism. Working with popular culture and traditional literary texts, Awkward strives to bridge the chasm between them by highlighting how selected texts reflect difficulties mediating difference. Awkward's work offers a much needed postmodern interrogation of the comfortable, yet untenable binaries that permeate much critical discourse.

Negotiating Difference is divided into two sections. The first, "Surveying the Critical Terrain," posits the book's fundamental theoretical and ideological framework. This section also establishes the critical vocabulary that connects parts one and two. In part one, Awkward explicates critical texts to chart his sense of Black male feminism and examines "the differences race can make in the interpretation of black texts." The second section, "Interpretation at the Borders," questions the "relationship between race and reading" in selected texts. In part two, close readings take center stage against a backdrop of other relevant theories.

In his first chapter, Awkward establishes the sites of difference that shape the remainder of the text: gendered positions that either grant or deny male access into feminist/womanist spaces, and racialized positions that guard against the participation of whites in studies of Afro-Americanist literature and film. Chapters two and three - "A Black Man's Place in Black Feminist Criticism" and "Negotiations of Power: White Critics, Black Texts, and the Self-Referential Impulse" - provide nuanced readings of the fear and protectionism that undergird debates about "border crossing," the unwillingness of many feminists to approve of male participation in feminist discourse, the possibilities of afrocentric feminism as an alternative for Afro-American men's "re-vis(ion)ing" themselves, summaries of the development of critical debates on the role of the white critic in Afro-Americanist cultural criticism, and encouragement for Afro-American literary scholars to stay abreast of emerging criticism to guard against work that encourages the "advocacy of older, caucacentric orders."

In part two, chapters four through seven, Awkward explores how popular and literary texts reveal the difficulties of gender and racial boundary crossing. His coverage includes a "black male feminist critique" of an L.A. Law episode that aired the day Mike Tyson "was sentenced for his rape conviction"; Spike Lee's attempt in She's Gotta Have It to "produce a film as little influenced as possible by phallocentrism"; and a close reading of "the new" in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon.

In his final chapters, Awkward returns to his earlier discussion of "caucacentric protectionism" to stress the myopia inherent in creating an epistemology based on an "essential" Black culture. In chapter six," 'The Crookeds with the Straights': On Fences, Race, and the Politics of Adaptation," Awkward problematizes August Wilson's demand for a Black director in the film adaptation of Fences in light of his creation of a drama that is, consequently, about erasing stereotypes. Awkward dedicates the final chapter to a reading of Michael Jackson's body as a text upon which the difficulties of mediating the space between "essentialism and difference, or constructionism" are inscribed.

Awkward's postmodern/cultural studies critical study locates discursive disruptions and brings together otherwise disparate narratives. The possibilities of contact between points of difference guide the arguments of his book. While the first part of Negotiating Difference is at times overwhelmingly dense in its effort to map the development of "black male feminism," and Black Afro-Americanists' resistance to "caucacentric invasion," Awkward is at his best in the second half of his text, in which illuminating close readings offer acute insight into the discursive underpinnings of popular and traditional literary texts. His analysis of Spike Lee's journal Spike Lee's Gotta Have It is especially fascinating through its account of Lee's reliance on Black women's novels (particularly Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Toni Morrison's Sula) as thematic touchstones for his film. And I am very impressed with Awkward's use of the male autobiographical "I" to substantiate his participation in Black feminist criticism. There can be little doubt that Awkward's questions move Afro-Americanist literary and cultural thought to a new level of interpretive rigor.