W. Lawrence Hogue. The African American Male, Writing, and Difference: A Polycentric Approach to African American Literature, Criticism, and History

African American Review, Winter, 2004 by Miguel A. Segovia

W. Lawrence Hogue. The African American Male, Writing, and Difference: A Polycentric Approach to African American Literature, Criticism, and History. Albany: SUNY P, 2003.291 pp. $29.95.

In the 11 chapters that comprise The African American Male, Writing, and Difference, W. Lawrence Hogue pursues texts written by African American male writers of the twentieth century who have not only been "neglected," but who have figured in literature and history, particularly within the cultural networks of normative definitions and European and American institutions, as non-agential, passive, romantic objects defined by the values and aesthetics of the white and African American middle-classes. But more importantly, he contends that African American men and masculinity have not only been historically and culturally "misread" and "ignored," but because "there is no social or literary movement to earner critical attention for existential, Voodoo, blues, and urban subaltern literary texts," he turns to resuscitate, include, and reassess alternative ways in which African American men have been positively represented in literature and imbued with agency.

By anchoring his focus on African American men's texts, he explores, disrupts, and deconstructs the "white/black binary of signification that defines whites as normative and superior and that represents blacks as victim, as inferior, as devalued Other, or, since the 1960s, as the Same as whites." Rejecting the binary's restrictive logic, Hogue initiates a critique of "colonization" that enacts simultaneous moves, and thus shows how European conceptions of Otherness developed both at home and abroad. Illustrating how the Other emerged out of multiple regimes of power and knowledge, Hogue shows how those regimes were enmeshed with colonial expansion from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to European exploits in the Americas on and after 1492. He reveals how the white/black binary was enforced through biology, sociology, and politics and via the idiom of racism, and underscores how it was propelled by Europe's drama with its own internal "non-European Other," and other hierarchies of light/dark, self/Other, civilized/primitive, colonizer/colonized, and Christian/pagan common to various cultures around the globe rather than as the strict practice of "the Europeans."

Tracing the analysis of the white/black binary and these other forms of domination to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, both in their individual and structural terms and within their circuitous trajectory, Hogue links them to the rise of modernity and situates them in the colonial order and (il)logic of race relations in the United States during and after Reconstruction, World War II, the era of segregation and its myth of racial difference, and the Civil Rights era of the 1950s and 60s and within the cultural activity and literary criticism of the 70s and 80s. He then critiques the limits of the Civil Rights sociopolitical ideology of racial uplift and its wide-ranging effects, along with its subjugation of African America's rich aesthetics. He expresses serious concerns for this narrative's denial of class and difference within African American society and its polyvocal and hybrid history--the assimilationist Civil Rights rhetoric that renders the black as the same as the middle class Christian white American norm, leaving the white/black framework in place, unscathed, and leaving firm the notion of a naturalized devalued Other.

Borrowing the concept of "polycentrism" from Walter Laqueur and Samir Amin, and employing poststructuralism, postmodernism, postcolonial theory, and feminism, Hogue deconstructs the white/black binary and its naturalizing logic, and astutely shows how the dyad has been kept in place--through different, though similar mechanisms across cultures and within their own idioms. He looks closely at how the binary has repressed the diverse character of "communities" and other expressive forms within African America. This colonization, he argues, took shape on a number of registers: by the structure of the white/black binary within literature and criticism, aesthetics, and economic apparati that denied and ignored many black experiences. These experiences--which are lived and expressed differently by different subjects-generated manifold communities, methods, lifestyles, cosmologies, aesthetics, and cultural imaginaries and must be given their weight in history and criticism. This acknowledgement is productive, Hogue contends, because it reworks how we understand culture, power, and race relations, but more generally how we can reinterpret literature, and more specifically how we can regard African American aesthetic production beyond repression, dependence, and the narrative of victim.

Using Foucault's insights from The Archaeology of Knowledge, Hogue affirms a sense of history that is "dispersed, decentered, and polycentric" and applies this notion to his own project of radical deconstruction, giving rise more amply and radically, to other ways of asking questions. These innovations encourage differences that can thrive without the terms of "a hierarchical system that privileges a center with a subordinated periphery." By means of this critical deconstruction with its implied reconstruction--as deconstruction not only disrupts, but simultaneously permits new forms of seeing that make possible visions beyond hierarchies and outside the bounds of "repression and violence" and within the conditions of their own "logic and validity"--Hogue can offer an analysis of black radical individualism, existentialism, postmodernism, and what he calls "urban survivalism." These phenomena are integral to black existence and are equal to but different from dominant practices, and cannot be properly called into question and positively explored within the white/black binary or in the Civil Rights narrative that "posits a quest for social equality" in the terms of middle-class interests, aesthetics, and its sanitizing forms of cultural value. Through the radical dispersion of power, the re-imagination of subordinated texts, institutions, traditions and discourses, as well as the empowering of the marginalized, Hogue achieves this positive critique through his close readings of "different racial minorities" and "different belief systems and definitions of life" in James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, William Melvin Kelly's A Different Drummer, Charles Wright's The Messenger, Clarence Major's Dirty Bird Blues, Nathan Heard's Howard Street, James Earl Hardy's B-Boy Blues, and Don Belton's Almost Midnight. These readings are intelligent, original, and reflective of Hogue's fierce command of various theories and literatures.