Humanism and Minority Literature: Toward a Definition of Counter-Hegemonic

Discourse
Author(s): Abdul R. JanMohamed
Source: boundary 2 , Spring - Autumn, 1984, Vol. 12/13, Vol. 12, no. 3 - Vol. 13, no. 1,
On Humanism and the University I: The Discourse of Humanism (Spring - Autumn,
1984), pp. 281-299
Published by: Duke University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/302818

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Humanism and Minority Literature:
Toward a Definition of Counter-hegemonic Discourse

Abdul R. JanMohamed

Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian novelist and poet, claims that in

the process of articulating the plight of their people, in depicting the
trauma produced by colonial domination, and in the attempt to re-
define the direction of indigenous cultures, African writers have in-
evitably involved themselves in a dialectical polemic with Western
cultures: "They have found themselves drawn irresistibly to writing
about the fate of black people in a world progressively recreated by
white men in their own image, to their glory and for their profit."' How-
ever, this accurate description of the predicament of African as well
as other Third World writers and artists only defines a small, if im-
portant area of the problem. Those of us who take Achebe's
comments seriously enough to reflect upon them are faced with an
enormous task of defining that ambivalent dialectic. For while we may
wish desperately to be culturally independent, we are attracted to and
enthralled by Western society. Even if we bracket ithe issue of
European-American economic and military domination, we are left
with a difficult job of mapping our own ambivalences, of analyzing the
manner in which Western culture infiltrates and dominates other
cultures, and of defining the various actual and ideal responses of
Third World people. We need to identify and analyze the modes of
cultural hegemony as well as the institutions and practices that are
used in this subjugating process-ranging from the destruction of tra-

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ditional values by commodity fetishism (a process brilliantly depicted
in Achebe's No Longer at Ease) and the nature of cultural dominance
inherent in technology (for example the fact that most Third World
television companies are forced to broadcast "I Love Lucy" or
"Dallas" because they cannot afford to produce their own programs)
to aspects of the publishing and curricular policies that govern the
production and study of Third World and minority literatures.
This entire problem requires careful and sustained analysis,
but in this essay I shall focus on only a small part of this vast
question: the relation between Western humanism and minority
literature and its criticism. I privilege this area because it makes
available to us the most conscious and self-aware facet of the
dialectic. Western academic institutions, which ultimately mediate
the production of minority literatures and criticism that are written in
European languages, provide the context wherein the hegemonic
process subconsciously attempts, usually successfully, to
incorporate the Third World intellectual and to ensure the eliminatio
of any oppositional or alien attitudes and tendencies. This is done
through the presentation of Western humanism, whether defined
rigorously or organized loosely as a set of values and assumptions, as
a universal philosophy superior to the traditional world-views of Third
World cultures. Thus in the realm of discursive ideology (as opposed
to practical consciousness, which is formed by more material and
concrete mundane practices) the university and humanism, which is
most attractive where it is most secularized and "universalized,"
respectively constitute the institution and "theory" that effectively
mediate hegemonic control. In order to show the pernicious effects of
this control on minority critical discourse I shall focus on a particular
manifestation of humanism, the New Humanism of Babbitt, More,
et al, and analyze, as a paradigmatic text, an anthology of essays
entitled Black American Literature and Humanism.2
I have selected the New Humanist movement as a paradigm
because it seems to me that its ultra conservative program better arti-
culates its own assumptions and ideology as well as those of a
vaguer, liberal humanism than does the latter. Even sympathetic
critics like J. David Hoeveler, Jr. recognize the drastic limitations of
the New Humanists: "Unfortunately, it was undoubtedly that per-
spective [i.e., the focus on romanticism and naturalism as the twin
evils of the modern world] that made the [New] Humanists indifferent
to the most fruitful academic achievements of the new University, the
social science, for it was their concentrated focus on the higher self
that blinded the Humanists to the value of studying human nature in
its social, economic, and political interactions with the world."3 Now
whereas the liberal humanists, unlike the New Humanists, were will-
ing to co-exist with the social sciences, until recently they were not
willing to incorporate the social and particularly the political and
economic side of human activities into their professional concerns
and preoccupations. Whereas the dominant mode of humanism was
more expansive and progressively inclusive and whereas it was will-
ing to adapt the form of its ideology without changing its substance

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the New Humanists insisted on purity and exclusion and refused to
compromise either form or substance. In fact New Humanism was
more of an assault on the adaptibility of the dominant humanism than
a reaction against a real enemy. Nevertheless, in the process of
attacking this flexibility while valorizing purity and rigor, the New
Humanist succinctly and clearly articulated the ideology of
humanism at large.
I shall focus on the relation of Black American literature to
humanism because it seems to me that the current predicament of
Black American culture foreshadows the developing situation of
many Third World cultures. To the extent that the latter's traditional
aspects have not been entirely destroyed or discarded, Third World
cultures still have some flexibility, at least in theory, in their attempts
to combine Western and traditional cultures into new syncretic so-
cieties. Nevertheless, given the expansive and co-opting hegemony of
the West, these cultures will be faced, sooner or later, with the
prospect of succumbing completely to Western culture. Black
Americans, shorn almost entirely from their traditional African
cultures, are embattled within a historically racist hegemony that in
theory offers equality and aspects of its "humanism" as models for
emulation but in practice denies equality and blocks the access to
"civilized" humanism through segregated education, economic
exclusion, and so forth. Through this and other similar "double binds"
Western societies seek to "include" and "retain" ethnic minorities
and Third World societies as subordinate classes within the
hegemony.
In this predicament, then, the attempt by minority
World critics to espouse "humanism" is more than an ironi
A scrutiny of such an attempt reveals the confused and painful
position of these critics as the mediators between the implicit
hegemonic imperatives and the ambivalent aspirations (antipathy/at-
traction) of their people. Black American Literature and Humanism,
then, can be seen as a concentrated version of every minority critic's
dilemma. It is by no means a unique text: similar problems are mani-
fested in the vast majority of minority critical discourse even when it
does not explicitly raise the issue of "humanism." However, the text I
have selected is a convenient example of the hegemonic process, par-
ticularly because it anthologizes the proceedings of a conference
sponsored jointly in 1978 by the American Council of Learned
Societies and the John C. Hodges Better English Fund and because
its publication was partly sponsored by the latter foundation (BALH,
VII).
V 11).
II

The prime strategy of the New Humanist project was to

establish an ideological ascendency by privileging a particular aspect
of the Western Cultural tradition. They saw themselves as advocating
the adoption and cultivation of the essence of Western culture, which

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they felt was threatened simultaneously by "romanticism" and
"naturalism." However, this attempt to valorize "The Tradition" was in
effect the advocacy of an intentionally selective version of the past,
the adoption of which would preclude all other aspects and versions
of history. This strategy, if accepted by Americans, would have given
the New Humanists a virtual monopoly in discriminating the "usable"
from the "unusable" past and would therefore have allowed them to
determine the relative importance of present values and, by ex-
tension, future priorities as well. It was, in other words, a strategy im-
plicitly designed to monopolize the formation of a contemporary
social and cultural order, to impose firmly upon the present a control-
ling ideology. Given the polemical nature of their attack on a more
liberal version of humanism and the tone of arrogance derived from
their self-righteousness, the New Humanists clearly revealed their
ideological project through their hyperbolic rhetoric.
The desire to control contemporary society is particularly
evident in the prose of Paul Elmer More. Arguing that the "educated
man" is the one who has learned to savor the "highest and most
enduring pleasure which is derived from the few great books selected
and approved by the verdict of tradition," More goes on to define the
benefits: "And in that power of enjoyment he will feel himself set free
form his own petty limitations, and made a humble companion of
those who share the heritage of time." Should there be any doubt
about the power and control being appropriated here through the
distinction between the "petty limitations" of the ordinary man, fit
only to become a "humble companion," and those like More, who
have a privileged access to the "heritage of time" and who are
capable of properly appreciating that heritage, he obliges us with a
further clarification in castigating the common man for his "self-
conceit and the laziness coming from that self-conceit." Invoking
Matthew Arnold and others who have great "insight into human
nature," More arrogates to himself "the right to speak." His own
judgments are equated to those of "mankind," and those individuals
who advocate "the liberty of taste" are simply dismissed as being "in
the main uneducated." More's rhetoric also clearly reveals this desire
to impose an exclusive tradition on his fellow men, who, he argues,
are reluctant to accept "the reality of the higher and more permanent
pleasure, until it has been forced upon their recognition by the experi-
ence of others. And just here is the function of tradition."4 Education,
according to More, was the cultivation of "the ability to judge," and
since the New Humanists were properly educated they had no doubts
about their judgments or their desire to use the "continuity" of "the
tradition" in order to create and establish an exclusive contemporary
order: "The task of assimilating what is best in the past and present,"
said Irving Babbitt, "and adopting it to one's own use and the use of
others, so far from lacking in originality, calls for something akin to
creation."'5
The remarkable fact about the New Humanist project is its
clear articulation of its own ideological imperatives. In fact, the desire
to appropriate a centralizing, defining position of power is so strong

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that it manifests itself as the crucial principle of centrality. At the
individual level the imperative for centrality results in the dualistic
theory wherein reason and emotion are constantly in conflict: reason
tries to control, organize, and provide direction to the emotions and
the impulses of desire which are constantly "drifting." Struggling
against the constant flux of experience, the reasonable "higher self"
strives towards unity and completeness: consciousness of that still
point in the turning world is the basis of "true liberation." The fore-
grounding of the desire for "the central and the correct" (to use the
terminology of the I Ching) defines in effect an essential feature of all
ideologies: in spite of contradictions, conflicts, and confusions, those
individuals who accept or who have been formed by a given
hegemonic system will constantly try to align themselves as closely
as possible with the center of that system, or conversely, if they rebel,
with the center of an alternate hegemony. Among the New Humanists
this imperative became a conscious and deliberate focus of their
program. Thus in the social and cultural realms the goal of the New
Humanists, as J. David Hoeveler, Jr. put it, "was to locate a 'center of
humanity' that must function as an ideal norm and model of
emulation for all persons. This 'higher humanity' must also determine
each individual's check on his emotions and temperament; the uni-
versal in this sense must, in other words, function as a disciplining
quality."6 And naturally the New Humanists would control the
definition of the "universal."
The urgency of this desire for centrality and control can be
measured by a fundamental contradiction within the New Humanist
project. Some of the implications of the Darwinian revolution-the
possibility that human intelligence was simply an adaptive device and
not the product of some higher teleology, as well as the corollary that
change was the ultimate reality-threatened the New Humanists and
led them to emphasize the permanent, the traditional, and the uni-
versal aspects of human nature. However, in order to valorize per-
manence, they used a selective version of history, that is, of the
record of change. This contradiction reached its pristine articulation
in Robert M. Hutchins's great books program at the University of
Chicago. According to him the "heart of any course of study designed
for the whole people will be... the same at any time, in any place,
under any political, social, or economic conditions."7 If education
could not adapt to rapidly changing economic, social, and political
reality and if consequently man's response to that changing reality
could not transform itself, then clearly the entire culture would remain
static. In their attempt to halt any change the New Humanists were
using their notion of "the tradition," a selective version of historical
development, in order to negate the very concept and possibility of
history.
Just as they sought to use history to negate and control it, so
they used a program for the welfare of "humanity" to deprive it of
choice and self-determination. This negation was also accomplished
by drawing exclusive boundaries between those who were unable to
judge and the New Humanists who, because of their superior edu-

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cation, knew what was best for everyone. In literature, the field from
which they derived their major inspirations, they drew rigid
boundaries by using Matthew Arnold's notion of the highest sense of
the permanent being derived from a deep and broad acquaintance
with "the best that has been said and thought in the world." But "the
world," of course, only meant, as it still does to a great extent, certain
segments of Europe and America. Thus they held up the Puritans,
whose self-discipline and restraint they admired, as a model of the
most vital, progressive, and enriching human tradition.8 The New
Humanists also privileged Emerson, Hawthorne, Whitman and Twain
as the bases of new spiritual renaissance in America, and declared
that the task of American literature, based on these writers, was to
strive for a cultural unity, which would be achieved by illuminating the
national character-particularly its profound moral idealism. This
valorization was accompanied by a blanket negation of the experi-
mental and varied literary endeavors of their contemporaries, par-
ticularly of naturalism, which, as it turned out, was practiced by the
descendents of more recent migrants. According to Sherman, the
"informing spirit," of Theodore Dreiser's work "was naturalism rawly
conceived-the crude 'jungle' philosophy," which he felt could be
better designated as "barbaric naturalism." The critique does not con-
fine itself to Dreiser's novels, but includes the man as well: "He
specializes in the primary instincts. But he understands himself pretty
well and he constructs his men and women out of parcels of
himself."'9 This sharp distinction between those who are beacons of
moral idealism and the rest who are informed only by a lamentable
crude jungle philosophy would, of course, also exclude from
"civilized" letters all Black American writing; there is no mention in
Sherman's work of the Harlem Renaissance, and Black naturalist
authors like Richard Wright would probably be condemned along with
Dreiser. The assumption of a right to draw boundaries, which would
exclude the vast majority of Americans from civilized society, reveals
their urgent desires for power and control. The New Humanists did
not "confuse literature and life," as Hoeveler argues;10 rather they
tried to use carefully selected literary texts in order to define and
control life.
This anxiety to dominate and to exclude is most clearly evident
in the New Humanist program for education, the control of which
would in effect guarantee their dominance of subjective and social
formation. In an essay entitled "Academic Leadership," More argues
that to cultivate the "higher imagination" and self-knowledge through
a study of the tradition "is to be raised into the nobility of the intellect.
To hold this knowledge in a mind trained to fine efficiency and con-
firmed by faithful comradeship is to take one's place with the rightful
governors of the people." Although he tries to disavow the "invidious
exclusiveness" of such an aristocracy, he cannot help confirming it:

Yet, if not exclusive, an academic aristocracy must

by its very nature be exceedingly jealous of any level-
ling process which would shape education to the

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 needs of the intellectual proletariat and so diminish
its own ranks. It cannot admit that, if education is
once leveled downwards, the whole body of men will
of themselves gradually raise the level to the higher
range; for its creed declares that elevation must
come from leadership rather than from self-motion of
the mass. It will therefore be opposed to any scheme
of studies which relaxes discipline or destroys intel-
lectual solidarity. ... It will set itself against any
regular subjection of the "fierce spirit of liberty,"
which is the breath of distinction and the very
character of aristocracy, to the sullen spirit of
equality, which proceeds from envy in the baser sort
of democracy."

The language of jealousy, envy, subjection, etc., quite clearly

delineates the proto-fascist anxiety to draw boundaries around the
moral superiority of the "rightful governors of the people." Given the
contempt for the "intellectual proletariat," it is not surprising that in
the concern for the higher self of humanity there is no discussion
about the fact that Blacks were systematically deprived of an
adequate education or about racism in general. While the naturalists
were implying in their novels that modern man was at the mercy of his
environment and that the capitalist society had commodified him and
thus alienated and deprived him of initiative, the New Humanists were
in perfect congruence with such a society and were in fact articu-
lating its fundamental hegemonic principle in their denial of the
efficacy of the common man's initiative, his "self-motion." This
emasculation of the "intellectual proletariat" and the arrogation of
telos to themselves show the New Humanist project to be a rather
naive and quixotic attempt to garner power simply through definition
and moral persuasion. Nevertheless, their theory was remarkably
conscious of its own ideological imperatives; not only did they want
to control education, but they also attempted to incorporate within
that control its own reproduction. The goal of an appropriate
education, again according to More, was to train the mind so that it
was capable of "grasping in a single firm vision, so to speak, the long
course of human history and of distinguishing what is essential
therein from what is ephemeral," and so, in other words, of
reproducing the means of ideological production, "the tradition.''2
As one might expect, this imperative to define oneself in
morally exclusive terms also manifests itself in a purer Manichean
version. Ironically, the New Humanists found the evil alterity in the
Germans, whom Sherman portrayed as the embodiment of vulgarity
and militarism while he considered the Americans and Allies as the
defenders of art, culture, and democracy. The latter, he claimed, were
"fighting for the common interests of the whole family of civilized
nations." Even though Sherman was more open-minded than his col-
leagues and had defended educational reforms, he was just as blind
as they were to the fact that the "civilized" status of America was

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being repeatedly contradicted by the series of brutal race riots
against blacks in the 1910s and 20s. The New Humanists were not
simply ignorant about actual social and economic conditions and as-
pirations of Americans; rather they deliberately chose to avoid the
issues that tended to isolate "the student from the great inheritance
of the past." The "frequent habit of dragging [the student] through the
slums of sociology," More argued, "debauches his mind with a flabby,
or inflames it with a fanatic, humanitarianism."'13
Although New Humanism may be unfashionable now, its
fundamental sentiments still prevail in its more liberal version. The
valorization by both humanisms of what they consider significant
about the (Western) past is not substantially different-the great
majority of contemporary humanists would not quarrel with the canon
that Hutchins established at Chicago. But from an ideological
viewpoint the most crucial and objectionable element of continuity
between the two humanisms is their studious avoidance of questions
of domination, exploitation, and manipulation that are inevitably
involved in the formation of any culture. The only significant differ-
ence between New and liberal humanism is that the former attempted
to draw distinct boundaries and to exclude the "intellectual
proletariat" and its literature, whereas the latter tends to be
tolerant, flexible, and inclusive. Thus in contrast to the su
liberal humanism, the failure of its more conservative avatar can be
ascribed to its inability to understand the mechanisms of hegemony.
Overly anxious to control and assert its moral superiority, New
Humanism articulated far too explicitly its archaic program and
thereby revealed its desire to establish an absolute and homogeneous
subjectivity and to dominate through exclusion. Thus in terms of a
Gramscian register New Humanism defined itself as dominant rather
than hegemonic, that is, its anxiety required the passive and indirect,
rather than active and direct, "consent" of the subordinated class.
The failure of this strategy was produced by a fundamental con-
tradiction between means and ends: New Humanism relied entirely on
moral persuasion, without any recourse to economic coercion or
force, in order to persuade the inferior masses to repress themselves
and accede control to the few enlightened ones. Liberal humanism, on
the other hand, has established an effective hegemony by being far
more flexible and inclusive and thus winning a more active and direct
"consent." Through a dual inclusiveness, that is, by admitting Dreiser
as well as minority writers to the canon and by extending education to
the "intellectual proletariat," liberal humanism has been able to ad-
vocate a set of values in such a way that they have saturated the
entire culture. These values, which, by repressing the issues of
domination, exploitation, and manipulation, allow all of us to situate
ourselves at the moral center of a civilizing tradition, have permeated
not only all economic, social, and political activity but also the very
structures of knowledge, experience, and identity. Precisely because
these values are experienced as "common sensical" and reciprocally
confirming does liberal humanism enjoy a relatively undisturbed
ascendency. And precisely because we are working against a back-

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ground of racist exclusion that used to characterize blacks and other
minorities as subhuman beings does the relatively new flexibility of
humanism (dating back to the acceptance of Black culture in the
middle sixties) paradoxically generate the minority's anxiety to be
included. This anxiety, of which Black American Literature and
Humanism is a symptom, has to be resisted as much as the New
Humanist anxiety to exclude and the co-opting element in the
tolerance of liberal humanism. But, of course, these strategies must
be opposed for very different reasons.

Ill

The preface and introduction to Black American Literature and

Humanism reveal simultaneously the fundamental contradiction
within which minority critics are caught and the antagonistic histo-
rical pressures with which they have had to grapple repeatedly: on the
one hand, there is a desire to define one's ethnic and cultural
uniqueness against the pressures of the majority culture and on th
other hand an equally strong, if not stronger, urge to abandon th
uniqueness in order to conform to the hegemonic pressures of the
liberal humanistic culture.
R. Baxter Miller, the organizer of the conference and the editor
of the anthology, clearly recognizes the shortcomings of the New
Humanist movement: he sees that it "distorted the high purpose of
the philosophy into a conservativism which indirectly encouraged
bigotry"; that, concerned entirely with tradition, it tended "to place
humanness in the past, to reduce diachrony to synchrony"; that it
"avoided talking about the lower classes"; and that its association of
humanism with a particular class and its manners amounted to
intolerance. Miller even links the intolerance of the southern agrarian
poets with that of the New Humanists and admits that the "Modern
Humanism of the United States has been shaped by the New
Humanists of the 1930s." Against this archaism, narrow class
interests, and intolerance, he proposes to define the specificity of
Black literature and criticism. The "essays collected here," he argues,
"suggest the possibility of freeing scholarship from Western culture's
self-imposed restrictions. In the reopened range of human efforts,
Black literature has dignity and meaning." These essays are also
significant for him because "they define humanism from an Afro-
American perspective" and because they are able to define identity
through "race and culture" (BALH, pp. 1-6).
This criticism of humanism and the assertion of Black
literature and culture, however, are completely contradicted by a chill-
ing attempt to comply with the dictates of New and liberal Humanism.
The original intention of the conference was to examine how
"scholars use Black American literature to train American humanists
in the 'classical sense.' The professors attending would have to learn
to minimize the discrepancy between human action and the highest
values reflected in the arts." In other words, the original intent was to

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conform exactly to the New Humanist project. However, realizing that
this would subordinate Black literature to fixed and archaic values
and norms, Miller retreats to an apparently safer position: "The fina
proposal to ACLS read 'The purpose here is not to abolish diversit
but to emphasize commonality.' " By this he seems to mean that in
extending "the possibilities of Anglo-American literature, Black
American writing ironically recreates and modifies the tradition"
(BALH, pp. vii-viii). This shift from the original to the actual intention
has in fact allowed Miller to move from a position where he was
attempting to accommodate himself to the rigid demands of the New
Humanism to an alliance with a more tolerant and inclusive liberal
humanism. By defining Black literature as an extension, however
ironic, of the main tradition, Miller denies all oppositional impulses of
that literature and allows it to constitute its identity through the pre-
vailing hegemonic terms, thus implicitly denying the uniqueness of
Black literature. Historically, this anxiety to be included is far
stronger than the need to stress the difference. The traditional narcis-
sism of a dominant white culture-that is, the culture's ability only to
recognize man in its own image and its refusal to recognize the sub-
stantial validity of any alterity-puts enormous pressure on Blacks
and other minorities to recreate themselves and their culture as ap-
proximate versions of the Western humanist tradition, as images that
"humanism" will recognize and understand. The power of this narcis-
sism is verified by Miller's success in obtaining an ACLS grant; it is
very difficult to imagine ACLS funding a conference dedicated to
articulating the antagonistic relation between humanism and
minority literature.
As analyses of specific literary texts or as statements by
writers about their own work, all the essays in this anthology are
informative and interesting. But in their approach to humanism the
essays fall into three categories: an essay about "Cultural
Formalism" as a critical method; a series of essays that avoid the an-
tagonism/inclusion contradiction through cursory and vague refer-
ences to humanism; and essays that seriously attempt to articulate
the unique characteristics of Black literature but that are ultimately
hindered by the contradiction. Chester J. Fontenot, Jr.'s essay on
"Cultural Formalism" argues that the criticism of Black literature
should avoid the two extremes of literary analysis: the text as a purely
formal object and the text as political rhetoric. No one will quarrel
with this wish to combine formal and cultural analysis, but in his con-
sideration of "culture" he entirely omits the unique and unavoidable
aspects of the Black predicament within American culture: the ever
present experience of domination and racism. In order to avoid these
problematic and embarrassing areas he is forced to define the
"humanistic" preoccupations of cultural formalism in the most
general way possible: "Literary study is distinguished by its concern
for human beings, their interest, themes, and social organizations. In
relation to literature and literary criticism, humanists must deal with
the dialectic between human beings and their activity, between
literary characters and their contextual situations" (BALH, pp. 34-35).

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However, to the extent that all criticism more or less fits this
definition, Fontenot's notion of humanism becomes tautological.
A more interesting version of this tautological exercise is
found in the essay about Langston Hughes by Richard K. Barkesdale,
a good example of the second category. The essay begins with an
adequate appreciation of Hughes's struggle against the prevailing
Black literary tradition that was dominated by "protest literature,"
which was addressed to a liberal white audience and was seeking its
charitable benevolence. Barkesdale appreciates the stifling quality of
such a tradition that has no space in it for "the celebration of the
Black lifestyle for its own sake," and he applauds Hughes's rejection
of his white patron, Mrs. R. Osgood Mason, who would have restricted
him to the cult of "primitive" poetry. However, having stressed the
historical and biographical aspects of Hughes's struggle against the
prevailing tradition, Barkesdale completely fails to recognize the
literary manifestations of the poet's antagonistic stances because he
is too preoccupied with fitting Hughes into the humanistic traditon.
Thus "Lover's Return" is considered a humanist poem because in it
Hughes "suggests that the vulnerable, dilemma-ridden, anti-heroic
persona truly counts in the larger human equation" (BALH, p. 16).
Similarly, irony becomes a "humanistic technique," and human
"failures and defeats are actually the mark of. .. humanity," as are
"disappointment and disillusionment" (BALH, pp. 17-19). According
to these criteria we are all part of a happy (if at times fallible, etc.)
human family. Unfortunately, the anxiety to be included leads to a
major problem. Like "protest literature" this kind of criticism negates
the celebration of Black or minority life in order to seek racial inte-
gration through criticism and "humanism"-an integration that was
denied in most other aspects of life. Such criticism in effect entirely
annihilates Barkesdale's own appreciation of Hughes's historic and
biographic struggle to celebrate Black culture.
Such a negation is most clearly evident in Barkesdale's dis-
cussion of "Trumpet Player: 52nd Street." In this poem which depicts
the function of music and the conditions of its production in Black
culture, Barkesdale once again finds Hughes humanizing "the
function of art and music," but, more interestingly, he also sees it as
affirming a Wordsworthian view of the creation of poetry: Hughes's
musician has "found the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions
that the youthful Wordsworth was in search of and actually never
found . . ." (BALH, p. 24). However, a closer scrutiny of the poem
shows that Hughes's view of artistic production is exactly the
opposite. The poem begins with the trumpet player nursing "the
smoldering memory/Of slave ships" and "the crack of whips/About
his thighs," and goes on to show that this music "Is ecstasy/Distilled
from old desire."''14 Hughes then introduces a stanza that deliberately
dissociates the production of music from the pastoral myth.

Desire
That is longing for the moon
Where the moonlight's but a spotlight

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 In his eyes,
Desire
That is longing for the sea
Where the sea's a bar-glass
Sucker size.

Then playing upon the use of drugs by musicians and music as a nar
cotic, Hughes concludes with a stanza about pain as the source of
blues and jazz: the trumpeter

Does not know

Upon what riff the music slips
Its hypodermic needle
To his soul-
But softly
As the tune comes from his throat
Trouble
Mellows to a golden note.

It seems quite clear that in contrasting images of the urban ghetto

nightclub to those of a pastoral myth Hughes is defining the con-
straints and controls, the impossible odds, against which jazz is
created. For Hughes, music is not the product of an "overflow," of a
surfeit-the luxury of surplus value; rather it is the result of a "distil-
lation," of a deficit-poverty, suffering, and pain. Hughes is describ-
ing the tenacity that can turn pain, in spite of itself, into music; he is
celebrating the power of the marginalized, oppressed man not only to
survive but also to create a beautiful culture.
This is not the place to demonstrate systematically how the
antagonistic stance of Hughes's poetry is founded on a definition an
a celebration of marginality, but a discussion of two brief poems, "Me
and the Mule" and "Still Here" will illustrate the essence of his
stance:

My old mule,
He's got a grin on his face.
He's been a mule so long
He's forgot about his race.
I'm like that old mule-
Black-and don't give a damn!
You got to take me
Like I am.

Not only is this poem a confident and calm affirmation of the Blac
self, but in its positive comparison of a Black to an animal it
deliberately subverts the racist strategy of denigrating the Black man
by comparison with animals; and in this subversion Hughes also
implicitly rejects the Blacks' reliance on white definitions, including,
one must assume, "humanism." In "Still Here" Hughes celebrates the
determination and tenacity of an oppressed minority:

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 I've been scarred and battered.
My hopes the wind done scattered.
Snow has friz me, sun has baked me.
Looks like between 'em
They done tried to make me
Stop laughin', stop lovin', stop livin'-
But I don't care!
I'm still here!

It would seem that in the face of adversity Hughes does not protest or
attempt to find hope in some notion of common humanity. Rather he
seems to rely on a simple but firm existential assertion of self.
However, in the context of Hughes's abundant and brilliant use of the
Black folk tradition, of the blues and jazz forms, it is clear that his
assertion is in fact an affirmation of an alternate tradition and, in its
celebration of marginality, it points toward an alternate hegemony.
A good example of the third group of essays, Trudier Harris's
examination of the writings of Sarah E. Wright, Alice Walker, and
Paula Marshall stresses the use of Black folk tradition as an alternate
culture and a source of Black identity. In spite of her accurate appre
ciation of the sources of an alternate hegemony in the works of the
three writers (in fact she has clearly chosen these writers because
their novels possess this characteristic), Harris's essay illustrates the
pressures from the prevailing hegemony which prevent her from de-
veloping her insights to their logical conclusion. If one feature of
ideology can be defined (negatively) as that which, by forestalling the
release of contradictions within the subject, helps to secure the
existence of the dominant social relations of production, then this
essay provides an interesting example of such ideological closure.
Trudier Harris begins by observing quite accurately that due to
enforced illiteracy Blacks were obliged to define themselves through
folk or oral cultures, which in fact became an alternate culture. She
cites Ralph Ellison's succinct summation of this fact: folk culture
"describes those boundaries of feeling, thought and action which that
particular group has found to be the limitation of the human con-
dition. It projects this wisdom in symbols which express the group's
will to survive; it embodies those values by which the group lives and
dies." Black folklore, "evolving within a larger culture which regarded
it as inferior, was an especially courageous expression. It announced
the Negro's willingness to trust his own experience, his own sensi-
bilities as the definition of reality, rather than allow his masters to
define these crucial matters for him."''5 Ellison valorizes a specific
version of "the human condition," the specificity of which is marked,
first, by the experiences of racism, slavery, and prolonged exclusion
from and oppression by the dominant culture and, second, by the cor-
responding development of perseverance, the will to survive, and the
celebration of the marginal human condition. If these features are
ignored, the specificity of Black culture and literature evaporates.
Harris's essay not only appreciates this specificity but also clearly
demonstrates that in Wright's This Child's Gonna Live, Walker's The

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Third Life of Grange Copeland, and Marshall's The Chosen Place, The
Timeless People the protagonists who are all trapped and oppressed
by racism eventually reject Christianity and find some form of
salvation or liberation through the Black folk culture. Harris eluci-
dates the heroic tenacity and purpose of Wright's heroine and the
historical function of resistance to domination as a symbol for later
generations in Marshall's novel. She argues persuasively that the
alternate culture is predicated on resistance in the latter novel, and
she properly privileges the fact that "self-determination necessarily
has self-definition as its basis" (BALH, pp. 66-67). However, the
importance of self-definition, of rejecting the master's definition is, in
the final analysis, undermined in Harris's essay by her acceptance of
"humanism" as a valid set of criteria.
This contradiction is most apparent in Harris's analysis of
Alice Walker's novel. Her appraisal of racial politics in the novel is
quite accurate on the whole. She is thoroughly lucid about the fa
that the "subhuman" status of Copeland is a result of his acceptance
and internalization of his complete rejection by white racist society:
he becomes aware of his condition when a white woman, whom he
tries to rescue, prefers to drown rather than be saved by a "nigger."
Harris accurately ascribes the liberation of Copeland to his coming-
to-consciousness about the depth of his previous subordination to
white society and his subsequent acceptance of responsibility for
himself and others. Copeland realizes that his subjugation and iso-
lation were due to his inability to distinguish the "cracker's will from
his [own]," and he knows that by accepting responsibility for others he
can become a social, communal being for the first time in his life.
However, Harris's analysis is subverted at this point by her
"humanistic" preoccupations. She argues that his acceptance of re-
sponsibility demonstrates "a morality that goes not only beyond
Christianity but beyond racial considerations" (BALH, p. 63, italics
added). This interpretation of the novel as a transcendence of racial
politics does injustice to the novel. Copeland maintains that in order
to be liberated "you must hold tight a place in you where they [whites]
can't come."'16 For Copeland this is neither simple rhetoric nor a
"merely" abstract awareness of his condition. His commitment to
preserving the sanctity of that "place" manifests itself in his attempt
to save his grand-daughter from the kind of racist subjectification that
has distorted him and his son. In order to protect her he eventually
dies in a shoot-out with white policemen who have been sent by the
court to retrieve her. As he is dying in a barn surrounded by policemen,
he cries to himself because he needs to hear a human voice and he
rocks himself "in his own arms to a final sleep.'17 Copeland's iso-
lation and death symbolize that inviolable "place" that must be pro-
tected from racist contamination at all costs. Thus the novel does not
transcend "racial considerations"; rather it confirms them and shows
that in a racist society liberation can be achieved by working through,
rather than avoiding, racial antagonism. Harris's hasty desire to
transcend racial issues results not in liberation but in a capitulation
to a more subtle and seductive hegemonic domination. She relies on

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Peter Faulkner's Humanism and the English Novel for her definition of
humanism.'8 But that definition (BALH, p. 54), based on "human hap-
piness," "mutual responsibility," a "flexible and undogmatic" spirit,
avoidance of "rigid orthodoxy," and so on, is designed precisely to
exclude the issue of the politics of economic, social, and cultural
domination, exploitation, and manipulation-all the factors, in other
words, that are responsible for slavery and racism. And the fact that
Harris succumbs to the humanist definitions in spite of her aware-
ness of the importance of self-definition demonstrates the ideological
power of humanism to foreclose certain "sensitive" areas of critical
discourse in order to repress contradictions.
The essays in Black American Literature and Humanism, none
of which reject the humanist programs or defintions, collectively con-
stitute what Raymond Williams calls a "formation," that is, a
conscious and more or less coherent articulation of a wider, more
diffused, and subconscious anxiety to be included and "normalized."
By subordinating their analyses of Black literature to the terms of
"humanism," which is itself an important formation of the current
hegemony, these critics in effect provide an active and direct
"consent" to the hegemonic culture, and thereby strengthen it. Their
self-identification with the hegemonic system not only frees the re-
pressive and coercive apparatuses of the system so that they can be
better used elsewhere, but it also reinforces the "inclusive" practice
of the system and thereby paradoxically allows it to reaffirm its moral
and political centrality. It thus helps to maintain the illusory
continuity of a redeeming and transcending tradition. Capitulation to
the most generalizing definition of humanism also leads to commodi-
fication at the cutural level; it accedes to the cultural equivalent of
exchange value, to a currency which can collapse non-identical,
singular beings, experiences, and achievements into commensurable
and identical ones. A minority critical discourse that succumbs so
easily to humanism permits the hegemonic system to select and
define meanings and values, to socialize future generations as it sees
fit, and ultimately, if it wishes, to deny once again, through a process
of creative selection, minority cultures and histories.

IV

In order to guard against either a recuperation and a neutral-

ization or a renewed negation of minority literature by the dominant
culture, we need to define the fundamental features of that literature
which must not only be protected from hegemonic co-option but also
cultivated, and indeed celebrated. As Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari have recently argued, the three fundamental characteristics
of a "minor" literatures are: 1) its persistent urge to deterritoria
the dominant language which is simultaneously its imposed and
chosen medium; 2) its experience and representation of the world as
thoroughly politicized; and 3) its tendency to articulate the collective
consciousness.19 Even though Deleuze's theory about the

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deterritorialization of the dominant language is extremely suggestive
and quite accurate in its generality, it tends to be problematic in its
specific application because it is based entirely on his analysis of
Kafka's texts. It sets a complex task which I will take up later. Here I
would like to elaborate the second and third aspects of his definition.
The political nature of minority literature must be stressed,
particularly in view of the deliberate and systematic, if unspoken
attempt of various humanisms to repress the political characteristics
of literature. As I have shown in detail elsewhere,2o the very process of
internal (i.e., slavery) and external colonization (which includes the
negation and destruction of indigenous cultural and material
practices as well as the forceful appropriation of material resources)
is entirely political, as is the process of pseudo-emancipation. Even
"education," the very means through which the minority writer learns
the dominant language (and culture) is thoroughly politicized.
Because the writer and his or her community are steeped in the
politics of domination and subordination and because humanism has
not (yet) completely depoliticized him, politics is a major and
inescapable ingredient of his psychic and social formation. Thus
works of minority writers are linked by the imperative to negate, in
various ways, the prior negation of his culture by the dominators.
Even though such an imperative may be initially entirely negative, it
implies an affirmative search for an alternative that is yet
unarticulated. Occasionally, as in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's A Grain of
Wheat, the writer may go on to delineate an alternative social
formation which will be equally political.
The "communal" characteristic of minority literature is due not
to the "scarcity of talent," as Deleuze argues, but, at least in Third
World literature, to the fact that the minority writer, whose social
formation is not yet adequately controlled by Western bourgeois
culture, has not sufficiently internalized the fiction of the autonomous
subject. In the ontological and cultural continuum of tension between
the experience of the self-as-an-individual and the self-as-a-social-
being the experience of the Third World writer tends to be at the
collective end of the spectrum. Furthermore, the tendency of the
dominant culture to characterize and treat him as a categorical,
generic being, rather than an individual, ultimately confirms his sense
of solidarity with his community. Thus Deleuze is absolutely correct in
insisting on the importance of politics and communality in minority
literature and on the primary socio-political function of such
literature: ". . . exactly because the collective or national
consciousness is 'often unrealized in public life and tending to
disintegrate,' it is literature which comes to be charged positively with
the role and function of collective, even revolutionary utterance: it is
literature which produces an active solidarity, in spite of
scepticism ....,21 In fact to the extent that such a collective cannot be
considered fully existent and functional until it comes-to-
consciousness about itself, literature has the important function of
bringing the nature of collectivity to consciousness, and even, as in
the novels of the South African writer Alex La Guma, of bringing to

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consciousness the fundamental necessity of coming-to-
consciousness.
However, this definition of the "collective" characteristic of
minority literature is ambiguous and can be misleading if it is taken to
imply that minority experience of culture, society, economic life, etc.,
is full, well-rounded, and adequately satisfying, that it is "central and
correct" in its own way. On the contrary, the "collective" or individual
experience represented in minority literature is one of dehuman-
ization and abject marginality. In fact we must insist that the fourth
fundamental characteristic of minority literature is its representation
of marginality; paradoxically, marginality is the "universal" of
minority literature. It is surely central to Kafka's oeuvre, to the vast
bulk of Black American literature-from the earliest slave narratives
to the contemporary novels of Alice Walker-and to Third World lite-
ratures written in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. The
marginality of diverse minority cultures is emblematized by the Black
American culture, which has been most systematically shorn of its
original African heritage and most ruthlessly subjugated, but which at
the same time has been forced to develop itself within the most
minimal margins of the dominant and repressive culture. Whithin this
emblematic literature the paradigmatic text of marginality is, surely,
Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, which focuses on the politics of
hegemony and marginality. The unnamed narrator/protagonist of the
novel is constantly propelled by the desire to identify himself by
achieving some kind of centrality, but he is repeatedly betrayed and
remarginalized until he learns to celebrate his invisibility and to
define himself through it.
In its relentless exploration of marginality, Invisible Man also
indicates the direction for an apposite criticism of minority literature.
The struggle against the hegemonic system can take many different
forms that may not be overtly recognizable as political or economic.
If, as Deleuze argues, the struggle must be carried on through lite-
rature before it becomes explicitly political or economic, then clearly
criticism must also be involved in this struggle. In fact, the essays in
Black American Literature and Humanism provide a perfect illus-
tration of how the insights of a minority literature can be easily
occluded by a criticism that, in its anxiety to be centralized, has
succumbed to hegemonic pressures. Thus we must insist that
criticism, whether we like it or not, is a field marked by constant
struggle over definitions of individual and social formation. Until
recently, minority literatures were effectively excluded from adequate
critical consideration; however, now that they have been admitted
into the margins of the canon, minority criticism must resist the
hegemonic pressures which seek to neutralize them by repressing
their political nature. In fact a viable counter-hegemonic discourse
must consist of minority literary texts and a criticism that can further
articulate the challenge of the texts; if apolitical humanistic
definitions are allowed to emasculate minority critical discourse, then
the challenge of minority literature can be easily neutralized or
ignored. If minority literature repeatedly explores the political,

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collective, and marginal aspects of human experience, then minority
criticism must also systematically avoid the temptation of a
seductively inclusive, apolitical humanism: it must articulate and help
to bring to consciousness those elements of minority literature that
oppose, subvert, or negate the power of hegemonic culture, and it
must learn to celebrate marginality in its specific manifestations
without fetishizing or reifying it. Minority texts, like all literary texts,
exist simultaneously as determinate objects and as rhetorical
practices. In their former capacity they will preserve forever the
oppositional elements of minority cultures that they have encoded.
However, in the context of the neutralizing hegemonic pressures, they
will never become effective rhetorical practices until a minority
critical discourse articulates them as such. The initial task, then, is to
define and comprehend the rhetorical context, which is constituted
not only by the political use of literary images, definition, and self-
definitions of minorities in hegemonic and counter-hegemonic texts
but also by the economic, political, and social formations and
interests that are intimately linked with the literary and critical
struggles. This must be accompanied by the articulation of specific
minority literary histories through the recovery of texts that have been
discarded and repressed by hegemonic canons, through the redress
of selective, reductive, distorting, and incorporating interpretations,
and, most importantly, through a judicious avoidance of those
elements of hegemonic terminologies, definitions, and analytic
methods that would in effect emasculate minority discourses. Finally,
the recuperated texts have to be linked to form an alternate tradition:
unless the texts are organized in a historical pattern of changing but
essentially connected and accumulative modes of opposition, the
recovered elements will remain fragmented. In the Black American
context such an articulation is well under way, for instance in studies
such as Addison Gayle Jr.'s The Way of the New World,22 but the
criticism of anglophone African and Indian literature is still firmly
under the control of an apolitical humanism.

University of California at Berkeley

NOTES

1 Chinua Achebe, "The Black Writer's Burden," Pr6sence Africaine, 31, no. 59
(1966), 135.

2 R. Baxter Miller, ed., Black American Literature and Humanism (Lexington: The
Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1981), hereafter cited in the text as BALH.

3 J. David Hoeveler, Jr., The New Humanism: A Critique of Modern America,

1900-1940 (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1977), p. 123.

4 Paul Elmer More, The Demon of the Absolute (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press,
1928), pp. 26-28.

5 Irving Babbitt, Literature and the American College (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1908), p. 101.

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 6 Hoeveler, The New Humanism, p. 37.

7 Robert Maynard Hutchins, The Higher Learning in America (New Haven: Yale
Univ. Press, 1936), p. 73.

8 See, for instance, Stuart P. Sherman's The Genius of America (New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1923).

9 Stuart P. Sherman, The Main Stream (New York: Charles Schribner's Sons,
1927), pp. 138-39.

10 Hoeveler, The New Humanism, p. 25.

11 Paul Elmer More, Aristocracy and Justice (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915),
pp. 58-59.

12 More, Aristocracy and Justice, p. 36.

13 More, Aristocracy and Justice, p. 37.

14 Langston Hughes, Selected Poems (New York: Vintage Books, 1974),

pp. 114-15.

15 Cited by Harris, BALH, p. 51. For the original see Ralph Ellison, Shadow and
Act (New York: Signet, 1966). Other Black writers such as Langston Hughes and
Richard Wright have also stressed the importance of this source.

16 Alice Walker, The Third Life of Grange Cope/and (New York: Avon, 1971), p. 216.

17 Walker, The Third Life of Grange Cope/and, p. 255.

18 Peter Faulkner, Humanism in the English Novel (New York: Harper and Row,
1967).

19 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, trans. Robert Brinkley, "What is a Minor
Literature?" Mississippi Review, 11 (Spring 1983), 13-33.

20 Although my analysis in Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in

Colonial Africa (Amherst: The Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1983), is limited to
anglophone African writers, I think the conclusions are applicable to other
Third World writers.

21 Deleuze, "What is a Minor Literature," p. 3, I have modified Brinkley's

translation.

22 Addison Gayle, Jr., The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America
(Garden City: Anchor Press, 1975).

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