Suchergebnisse

Eric Sundquist, Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005)As measured by that deadly but inescapable phrase "quantity and quality," Eric Sundquist is perhaps the most productive American literature scholar of his generation. Since 1979, when he was still in his twenties, he has authored half a dozen books while editing another half-dozen. All have made an impact and many of these have been highly influential—his first book, Home as Found: Authority and Genealogy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, was among the very first to read canonical American works through the lens of contemporary literary and psychoanalytic theory; his edited collection American Realism: New Essays (1982) proved pivotal in reviving the critical energy in a major but long-dormant literary and historical period. To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (1993) was by implicit design and to powerful effect nothing less than a rewriting of the foundational work of American literary history and criticism—F. O. Matthiessen's monumental American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941). I will spend some time describing To Wake the Nations not only because of the book's exceptional importance but because its eloquent introduction provides the closest thing to a critical credo that Sundquist has written. His description there of his critical ideals—particularly of "justice," boundary-crossing and "verification"—will help orient our approach to Strangers in the Land, which remains loyal to these ideals as it extends his interest in race and ethnicity, black and white, to the tormented subject of blacks and Jews, united by a "bond of alienation." (52).

This essay is organized into two parts. The first constructs historical and thematic contexts, including a reading of W. E. B. Du Bois's famous collision with Booker T. Washington as an instance of a larger historical pattern in the late nineteenth century in both the West and in West Africa, a pattern that reveals the social role of the intellectual as founded on a refusal of the ideology of the authentic. This refusal has rarely, if ever, been articulated more strenuously than in the life and work of Frantz Fanon. "Against origins and starting from them," Fanon and Du Bois fashion a performative cosmopolitanism that anticipates the contemporary moment of postidentity. The extremity of Fanon's turn from Negritude to universalism sets in relief Du Bois's own efforts to negotiate the racial particular and the unraced universal. In moving beyond authenticity, they both displace the originary Cartesian subject by deriving identity from action. In Fanon, this shift is analogous to his plea that anticolonial nationalism move rapidly from national consciousness (pre-occupied with who people are) to political and social consciousness (focused on people acting in relation to others). The contexts developed in part one situate the subject of part two--how a figure who had been deemed a freak of nature requiring containment (at least since the attestation affixed to Phillis Wheatley's book of poems in 1773) managed to emerge as a social category. The emergence of black literary intellectuals depended on their devising an aesthetic of deferral, vagueness, and open margin, modes of literary representation that simultaneously became political strategies of denaturalization in a society where racist stereotypes reigned serenely as "nature."

Henry James, in my view, prefigures those of a later generation--W. E. B. Du Bois and John Dewey--in enacting a pragmatism that turns aesthetics from contemplation to action that cuts against the grain of capitalist efficiency and utility. In neglecting this tradition of pragmatist aesthetics, cultural studies not only depends on a caricatured notion of aesthetic value, but foregoes the opportunity to profit from a tradition that resolves the obdurate conflict between aesthetics and politics.

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Dedication -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Varieties of Black Historicism: Issues of Antimodernism and "Presentism -- Sentimental Afrocentrism -- Vindicationist and Contributionist Traditions -- Heroic Monumentalism: The Egyptocentric Mode -- A Grand Center of Negro Nationality -- African Redemptionism: The Hands of Ethiopia -- Romantic Racialism: Cult of African Moral Superiority -- African Diaspora and Culture Diffusion -- The Antimodernist Paradox: Modernism as Primitivism -- Afrocentrism and Mythic Truth -- Avoiding Presentism: Afrocentrism as a Response to Slavery and Segregation -- The Need for a Cultural Anchor -- Thematic Concerns of the Present Work -- 3 From Superman to Man: A Historiography of Decline -- 4 Progress, Providence, and Civilizationism: Alexander Crummell, Frederick Douglass, and Others -- 5 W. E. B. Du Bois and Antimodernism -- Section 1: Arminianism, Antinomianism, and Africanity in Religion -- Section 2: Barbarism, Civilization, and Decadence -- Conclusion -- 6 Afrocentrism, Cosmopolitanism, and Cultural Literacy in the American Negro Academy -- 7 Caliban's Utopia: Modernism, Relativism, and Primitivism -- 8 Barbarism Grafted onto Decadence -- 9 Conclusion: Afrocentrism, Antimodernism, and Utopia -- Notes -- Index

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Pragmatism Then and Now -- WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES PRAGMATISM MAKE? THE VIEW FROM PHILOSOPHY -- Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism -- Response to Hilary Putnam's "Pragmatism and Realism" -- The Moral Impulse -- What's the Use of Calling Emerson a Pragmatist? -- PRAGMATISM AND THE REMAKING OF SOCIAL THOUGHT -- Pragmatism: An Old Name for Some New Ways of Thinking? -- Pragmatism and Democracy: Reconstructing the Logic of John Dewey's Faith -- Community in the Pragmatic Tradition -- Another Pragmatism: Alain Locke, Critical "Race" Theory, and the Politics of Culture -- Going Astray, Going Forward: Du Boisian Pragmatism and Its Lineage -- The Inspiration of Pragmatism: Some Personal Remarks -- The Missing Pragmatic Revival in American Social Science -- Pragmatism and Its Limits -- PRAGMATISM AND LAW -- Pragmatic Adjudication -- Freestanding Legal Pragmatism -- What's Pragmatic about Legal Pragmatism? -- Pragmatism and Law: A Response to David Luban -- It's a Positivist, It's a Pragmatist, It's a Codifier! Reflections on Nietzsche and Stendhal -- Pragmatism, Pluralism, and Legal Interpretation: Posner's and Rorty's Justice without Metaphysics Meets Hate Speech -- PRAGMATISM, CULTURE, AND ART -- Why Do Pragmatists Want to Be Like Poets? -- Pragmatists and Poets: A Response to Richard Poirier -- The Novelist of Everyday Life, -- When Mind Is a Verb: Thomas Eakins and the Work of Doing -- Religion and the Recent Revival of Pragmatism -- Afterword Truth and Toilets: Pragmatism and the Practices of Life -- Selected Bibliography -- Contributors -- Index