Forum; Dr. Carla Peterson: The State of African-American Studies, professor of English and Comparitive Literature at The University of Maryland, College Park

Thank you guys. From the Longhorn Radio Network, the University of Texas at Austin, this is Forum. The point that I think I started out making first was that there's been this whole movement to recover lost African-American texts of the 19th and 20th century, and the question is, once we've recovered them, what do we do? Dr. Carla Peterson, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Maryland at College Park.

Another form of self-marginalization adopted by antebellum black women was that of geographic dislocation. What I have following is a quote that appears in Marianne Schadkary's Provincial Freeman in 1855 where a correspondent writes in and proposes to have a regular column where he is going to write about the activities of the groups of the black communities in Canada. This is a Canada West, and he says, I'm going to go around and I'm going to observe these communities, and I'm going to sign off as a color tourist, written by the color tourist. And I think this notion of a color tourist is a very important one in the antebellum period. This is Olive Graham. Today form features the remarks of Dr. Carla Peterson who teaches English and Comparative Literature at the University of Maryland at College Park. Dr. Peterson spoke at the University of Texas campus as part of a lecture series within

a new course entitled Multicultural Approaches to Literary Studies. The course is designed to look at the trans and perspectives of literature from many sources, and lecturers from around the country will explore the critical issues students in this course will confront. Dr. Peterson's lecture is entitled History and Theory in African American Studies. We take up Dr. Peterson's remarks as she describes modern criticism of African American writing by the writers themselves. Dr. Carla Peterson. We have at the same time in the 20th century the continuation of the tradition of literature as cultural work. And that's with writer critics such as James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, LaRoy Jones, Elge Cleaver, all who are very familiar, who while they wrote literature literary texts were critics at the same time. I think that we can divide them very loosely into two groups, one which emphasizes the sociological, so the treatment of blacks in literature from a sociological perspective, and the other

in attempt to formulate what was become known as a black aesthetic. And the black aesthetic then resides primarily in the blues, the jazz, or the vernacular. I think that what happens here is an outcome of this period or two main problems. One, the polarization, this dichotomy between the sociological on the one hand, and the aesthetic on the other, which once again is a modernist dichotomy. And I think that what we have to do is attempt to overcome that dichotomy not to polarize sociology on the one hand and aesthetic on the other. The second, of course, is the problem of essentialism, which has been plagued not only black scholarship but also feminist scholarship as well. What is black culture, how can we define blackness? And you get criticism that one of my graduate students refers to as black, black or blackest. And what is the blackest of them all? And I would say that this is still unresolved today, this whole issue is unresolved today.

As we've moved into the 1880s and 1890s, I think that what has happened is a domination of professionalism in black literary criticism. What we have then is the kind of movement of literary black literary criticism into the academy. And this, I think, has presented some problems, and it's up to us to find a way out of there. And I think that that's what we're all trying to do. When we look at this, this whole issue of professionalism, I think that one thing that happens in this kind of scholarship coming out of the academy is the emphasis on literary criticism as an autonomous domain, separating it out from culture. We have, along with that, the emphasis on the notion of tradition, this questioning of what constitutes a black literary tradition. What is our canon? Can we construct a canon? Notions of genealogy, who is the grandfather, the father, the son. Note there are no grandmothers, mothers or women in this.

So a certain amount of an attempt to establish a tradition, which I would say is really too early to try to do this, that we're at the point where I don't think we've recovered all of the literary texts or all the written texts that exist in the 19th century. How can we recover or talk about a tradition with so many missing links? And also, what are the criteria that we use to go into making a tradition? Are we going to adopt the criteria of the dominant culture? What are we going to use as we create a tradition? There's also, I think, a continuing tendency to use that dichotomy between the sociological and the aesthetic and to privilege aesthetic notions. And I think that we get this, especially in the work of Skip Gates. He loves to talk about notions of intertextuality of the ways in which one text talks to another, and there's no mention that writers actually write texts. It's the texts that talk to one another and not writers.

We're left, I think, with a whole host of questions that we still have to work our way out of. One would be, then, the problem, what is the politics or what are the politics of location of the black academic literary critic, who is marginalized on the one hand within the academy and on the other hand, cut off from the black community. How can black literary criticism maintain its oppositional force? How can we avoid being subsumed into the hegemonic? How do we go about defining a black literary text? What is a black literary text? What paradigms do we use to evaluate it? How can we avoid the trap of essentialism? Do we just want to say that a black aesthetic resides in the blues or in jazz, or are there other criteria that we would like to use as well? Two critics, Michelle Wallace and Bell Hooks, have talked about the whole notion of politics of location. And they have suggested that the best thing to do is to occupy no one place, but that it's all right to feel at home everywhere and nowhere.

And the best thing to do is to have what they call a mobility of multiple theoretical positions. And Hooks, in her essay, talks about deliberately choosing marginalization. And she talks about the margins as a space of radical openness and possibility. I would love to say that I could choose a margin and exist comfortably on a margin. I don't know that that's possible. And margins can be pretty uncomfortable. I would say that though my own sense, if I had to talk about my own politics of location, that I do sense that I am on the margin of the academy, at least within my institution, that I am not working out of the black community. I have to admit to that, but that I see that my work as being that of my teaching, of addressing both black and white students in the classroom with the hopes that they will carry out the ideas, carry them on out into their own communities. I was astounded to find the Bell Hooks article, which is very recent. It's an 89 or 90 article, because her notion of adopting a position on the margins is

exactly that taken by my 19th century black women that I study and that I'll be talking about just about from now on. What I'm doing then, the first part of my project, the first thing that I want to do is to turn back to the 19th century. I see that is absolutely essential. And to try and find out what black writers and literary critics were doing in the 19th century, what kind of cultural work their texts were doing, and is, does that then enable me to do cultural work of my own? And then I said beyond that, to take this work, this cultural work that I have found, and to take it into the classroom in order to do cultural work with my students. I'm working then on a group of African American women starting in writers, starting in the early, in the anti-Bellum period, so the early 19th century from about 1830 on, who referred to themselves as doers of the word.

And this in particular is a term that the evangelical, the spiritual religious women women use, and the whole notion of doers of the word was first of all the word of God. But beyond that, the word, doing of the word, spreads out from the word of God, to the work of moral reform, of abolitionism, of temperates, of women's rights, et cetera. And the whole attempt in this then was the effort to do what they called racial uplift or elevation of the race, and that they would do this not in particular political and social activities, but also in the word through the performative power of the word. Some, the women that I'm working on, and I'll name them, and the names might be familiar to some of you, or might not, Dharina Lee, Zulfo Ilo, Julia Foote, Mariah Stewart, who are then the evangelical women, Nancy Prince, who was a traveler and wrote some very interesting travel narratives, Sarah Parker Ramon, Francis Watkins Harper, who were gave speeches toward the country, and Sarah Parker Ramon went to the British Isles, and spent many years there

as abolitionists. Marianne Shad Perry, our first black newspaper woman, Harriet Jacobs, author of Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl, Harriet Wilson, who wrote our name. So that what I do then is I kind of deconstruct the notion of what constitutes a literary text to open it up beyond fiction and poetry, to travel narratives, to speeches, essays, and so forth. What I'm also trying to do is not simply to look at the literary text as an object in itself, so that what I'm saying is that we must examine both the politics of publication and the politics of reception of these texts. The access on one hand to mainstream publishing houses, self or whether the texts were self-published or came under white abolitionist patronage, or with the politics of reception, who were the audiences that were being addressed. In my own work, I have sought to reconceptualize notions of textuality to include these factors

and to investigate as much as archival recovery has permitted the production of reception of the writings of 19th century African-American women. What I do as well is not only try to examine the literary text, but look at the whole context in which these women wrote, to look at their activities specifically in moral reform, in temperance, in women's rights, and so forth. What my political agenda is then. I start with the twin contentions that the civil rights movement is not a modern phenomenon, but can be traced back at least as far as the 19th century, and that a study of African Americans in the free north is a necessary counterweight to the vast historiography of sudden slavery, where power relations between blacks and whites took on a highly specific and codified configuration. What we have mainly in work in the 19th century is work on slavery, and I'm saying it's

about time we paid attention to blacks in the so-called free north. For more explicitly feminist perspective, I seek to intervene in and fill that empty space where race and gender intersect, where all the women are white, all the blacks are men, but some of us are brave. And define the vocabulary with which to conceptualize the brave. I believe that we need to further specify the relationships that existed between white women and black men on the one hand and the brave on the other. We need to re-examine the presumed antagonistic relationship based on racial and material difference between white and black women, and to investigate the extent to which they might well have shared common cultural goals in their commitment to the politicization of domestic economy in the antebellum period. Similarly, we need to re-evaluate the once again presumed antagonistic relationship based on gender and economic difference between black men and women, and to examine the extent to which they were able to cooperate in a shared program of racial uplift in the decades

before the Civil War. How then can we begin to conceptualize African-American culture in the antebellum north? We need, first of all, to recognize how the fact of colonization tends to privilege the category of space over that of time. And many of my metaphors from here on in in this talk are going to be geographical. The line time-wrote into space by the Australian poet Les Murray suggests how colonized people have so often found their national history abrogated by imperialist forces, and have needed in turn to disrupt hegemonic notions of history and their place in it. Geography is thus of central importance to the history of African-Americans, and what Edward Said has asserted as paradigmatic for externally colonized people is equally pertinent to them. What radically distinguishes the imagination of anti-imperialism is the primacy of the geographical in it.

African-American after all is an act of geographical violence through which virtually every space in the world is explored, charted, and finally brought under control. For the native, the history of his or her colonial servitude is inaugurated by the loss to an outsider of the local place whose concrete geographical identity must thereafter be searched for and somehow restored historically and abductively from the deprivations of the present. So the question is then to focus on the local space and to see how this local space can be restored. The local space is double, of course. On the one hand, it's the place in Africa from which blacks were kidnapped and brought to America. On the other hand, it's that very space in America where they had to reconstitute a home for themselves. And this home, this local space, I think, can be looked at in two ways. On the one hand, we can follow a critic like Foucault who talks of the carceral continuum and the panoptic space which encloses people whose bodies have to be disciplined, surveilled

and so forth. On the other hand, African-Americans very much sought to make this local space, this local place a home for themselves. And that's what I focus on, the notion of home, how to constitute a home. The home, first of all, for the population that I'm talking about is in the urban north. And I'm locating myself geographically, or these women are very much located in urban settings. In Carl Smith, Rosenberg's words, the 19th century city was more processed than geographic place. African-Americans fully participated in this process. Her description of the city is a place of chaos, basically, in the antebellum period where you have incredible shifts in class mobility, economic, social instability, and so forth. And African-Americans were part of this. Their population was heterogeneous and shifting as were their experiences. Heterogeneity within the African-American community was marked, first of all, by class

stratification, by a division between subaltern and elite groups. The former rooted in oral and folk culture, the latter characterized by literacy and adherence to more, quote, bourgeois values. Among the group I study, the subaltern class is best represented by the female evangelists Mariah Stewart and Serena Lee. These women remained by and large on the margins of the nascent capitalist economy. They refused to integrate themselves into the urban working class and thus allowed there a labor to be alienated and transformed into exchange value, the surplus of which would benefit the merchant or industrious alone. At a more personal level, they rejected full commitment to a nuclear family structure in which their bodies and household service would be appropriated in the interest of patriarchy. Instead, they chose to inhabit the spiritually and geographically liminal spaces of religious evangelism opened up by the second grade awakening. If the subaltern is defined as the oppressed subject whose consciousness is irretrievable

because she cannot speak, but who ceases to be a subaltern the moment she is in a position to name, then the entrance of female evangelists into the culture of literacy marks their transition to a more elite class whose membership included Frances Parker, Marianne Shadcary, Sarah Parker Ramonde and Charlotte Fortin. These latter women followed conventional religious practices, remembers a fairly stable household and participated to a greater extent in the dominant market economy, commodifying their skills as seamstresses, teachers, lecturing agents and most particularly writers. More importantly, they and their male counterparts were the chief architects of a program of racial uplift, which has been interpreted as an effort on the part of the black elite to replicate the values of the hegemony and assimilate into white middle class culture. Indeed, through this ideology, the African-American leadership self-consciously asserted its distance from both the degraded northern free poor and southern slaves, articulated its aspirations

to a middle class social and economic status by means of improved education and absorption into Euro-American civilization and proclaimed its adherence to the dominant culture's ethic of hardware, self-help and moral purity. But to critique the ideology of racial uplift as bourgeois or assimilationist is to misunderstand the generic limitations imposed upon social change under conditions of internal colonization as well as the specific historical circumstances of anti-bellum African-Americans. Francois non himself has written of the need for a revolutionary elite who have come up from the people to acknowledge its its estrangement from the masses before joining with them to undertake their political education, opening their minds, awakening them and allowing the birth of their intelligence. For over not only did the Black elite see to teach this a bolterine class, it also recognized the imperative for the imperative need for racial solidarity, identified with the people

over whom weary ages of degradation have passed, wrote Harper in 1857, whatever concerns them as a race concerns me. Far from identifying anti-bellum racial uplift efforts with the accommodationist mentality of a Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. DeBoys characterized it as a determined effort at self-realization and self-development despite an inverning opinion and argued that these early leaders had in fact inaugurated a new period in African-American history in which the assertion of manhood rights of the Negro by himself was the main reliance and the single most important goal became ultimate assimilation through self-assertion and on no other terms. Indeed given the fact of internal colonization and of the irretrievable loss of local place, these early African-American leaders were only too well aware of their de-racination and of their consequent need to come to terms with and define their Americanness and incorporate

it into their lives. Once again we can turn to Fennel for an acute analysis of the colonized elite's difficulty in defining its national culture. Once it has acknowledged the impossibility of returning to a utopic pre-colonized condition and of claiming an originary authentic culture, and this is a quote from Fennel. We must not therefore be content with delving into the past of a people in order to find coherent elements which will counteract colonialism's attempts to falsify and harm. And national culture is not a folklore nor an abstract populism that believes it can discover the people's true nature. And national culture is the whole body of efforts made by a people in the sphere of thought, to justify, describe, and praise the action through which that people has created itself and keeps itself in existence. If the culture of Anti-Belm Northern Black centered around the ideology of racial uplift, its institutions and literary productions, it also included other modes of self-expression

such as dance, music, song, parade, ceremonies, religious rituals, cooking, family networking, et cetera. It is to these forms that we should look to retrieve some of the more purely African forms of expression through which Black Americans to maintain their ties to the past and restore their sense of local place. Africanisms were, of course, most present in slave culture, for example, in secular and religious slave songs in the shout, in the Sabbath Congo dance, in the Junkanau's Christmas ritual. But examples can also be found in the north, in the pinkster parades of election day, in cooking and perhaps most importantly in family networks. The task of recovering such evanescent cultural forms is, however, extremely difficult. For unlike writing, these forms are gradually disappearing and have left few traces except through writing. In contrast, Anti-Belm Black writing can be said to have been the African-American cultural form, most shared with the dominant culture, given its adoption of the latter's language.

Its acknowledgement of the inevitable constraining presence of a white audience, whether implied or not. And finally, its participation in capitalist modes of exchange were by the book becomes a commodity and its dissemination of money transactions subject to the vagaries of the marketplace. The whole problem here, of course, is how did we define African-American and to really focus in on that hyphen that exists between African on the one hand and American. And yes, blacks were in American. There are certain forms that participation in the dominant culture and yet Africanism do survive, I think less in writing than in other cultural forms. The problem then, of course, is how do we talk about black writing? We need further to characterize black writing or more generally black discursive formations in the Anti-Belm period. One common 18th century myth held that enslaved blacks were but talking apes, whose ability to speak had become the very cause of their enslavement.

In contrast to those left behind in the jungle, who had refrained from speaking in order to avoid being made slaves. And this is kind of a reversal of skipgases, notion of the signifying monkey, which he loves to see as an ironic reversal where the black can turn back and talk back. But the problem is, I think, also that in the adoption of the discourse of the dominant culture, the risk of alienation or of possible enslavement. But of course, Anti-Belm African-American discourse cannot be dismissed as mere aping of the dominant discourse that inevitably leads to enslavement to the values of the hegemony. On the contrary, it constitutes a kind of fukodian counter-discourse, which enabled the African-American community to begin to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or naturality be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was disqualified.

One of the things that I've noted is this real desire on the part of certain African-American critics to form a canon of our own. And to say, these are texts that are good and that deserve to be studied, we can make our own literary tradition, which would start, say, maybe with Phyllis Wheatley and go up to Tony Morrison or whatever. And what I would think that we ought to do is not unquestionally adopt notions of canon and literary tradition, but question why we want to do this, why we want to have a canon and a literary tradition, and what does it mean? It means, first of all, that one of the questions would be, what are the criteria? I mean, what criteria are we using to put a text, a black text, in our canon, and leave one out?

And we really haven't done this. We've kind of automatically said, well, of course, Frederick Douglass is 1845 narrative belongs in our black canon, and so does incidents in the life of a slave girl. But we won't put in Douglass's 1855 narrative and the role kinds of other things. So I think the first thing we ought to do is be a little bit more self-conscious about the process of canon making and wanting a literary tradition. Why do we want this and how are we going to go about doing it? Are we going to use the paradigms of the dominant culture? And in that case, our travel narratives are going to get left out, our addresses, speeches are going to get left out. I think they're all these questions. Another question is, can we really, are we really in the position to create a canon or a literary tradition right now when I suspect there's still many undiscovered texts that are still lost to us and that we have to recover? And if we recover those, the canon might indeed have quite a different shape than the one that we're in the process of constructing now.

Cannons are always constructed, literary traditions are always constructed, they're made, they don't appear out of nowhere, and so one of the questions are, who's doing the construction? And the construction of the canon, I think, rests right now in the hands of a very few. You could probably name them on fingers of one hand, literary critics, and is that what we want? To go on, another question is once we, the other thing though is I don't think that anybody can do literary criticism or we can't talk about culture in a sense without having a canon. I mean, after all, you do need a syllabus. You need to go in there and say to the students, we're going to study something. And a syllabus is in a sense when you construct a syllabus, that is your little mini canon for the 14 or 15 weeks that you're teaching. So I don't think we can do without a canon in a sense or the construction of a tradition, and I think maybe we can be more self-conscious about the way in which we go about doing it. The guest on Forum today has been Dr. Carla Peterson of the University of Maryland at

College Park, where she teaches English and Comparative Literature. As part of the lecture series, multicultural approaches to literary studies, she presented problems in history and theory in African-American studies. The views expressed on this program do not necessarily reflect the views of the University of Texas at Austin or this station. Technical producer for Forum, Cliff Hargrove, production assistants, Christine Draver and Elliott George Garcia. I'm your producer and host, Olive Graham. The set copies of this program are available and may be purchased by writing, Forum Cassettes, Longhorn Radio Network, Communication Building B, UT Austin, Austin, Texas, 78712. That's Forum Cassettes, Longhorn Radio Network, Communication Building B, UT Austin, Austin, Texas, 78712.

From the Center for Telecommunication Services, the University of Texas at Austin, this is the Longhorn Radio Network. This week on Forum, history and theory in African-American studies. The point that I think I started out making first was that there's been this whole movement to recover lost African-American texts of the 19th and 20th century. The question is, once we've recovered them, what do we do? Dr. Carla Peterson, this week on Forum.