“Talking Black: Critical Signs of the Times,” Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. wrote this essay to address the attitudes towards black literary criticism. There has been much confusion as to whether blacks writing literary criticism are leaning too closely towards following the dead European white men tradition or if they are writing purely from their own experience—and if their own experience affords enough “educated prose” to express their criticism at the same level of the typical white criticism. This question relates closely to what Christian wrote about, how she incorporated some of the Marxist theory into her writing on black feminist writing. It intrigues me how there is almost no separation between Marxist theory and ethnic/feminist writing—as if ethnic writing and feminist writing are automatically classified as low art, just because (let us use African-American writing as an example) the African-American writing does not employ the same type of vocabulary or expression that the white Europeans use. But how could they? It is an entirely different type of language—with different values packed into words and different words that describe the same values.
Another interesting topic within Gates’s essay is as follows: “We must learn to read a black text within a black formal cultural matrix, as well as its ‘white’ matrix. This is necessary because the existence of a black canon is a historically contingent phenomenon; it is not inherent in the nature of ‘blackness,’ not vouchsafed by the metaphysics of some racial essence.” There is only purpose for black literary criticism as long as there is black literature. Yes, blacks have been oppressed by slavery until recent history, but now they must speak up and learn to express their culture and background through a written vocabulary that, while it may not exactly follow the white European style, distinctly illustrates the essence of being black.

“The Highs and Lows of Black Feminist Criticism,” Barbara Christian

Christian’s essay contained a few voices of criticism—ethnic, feminist, and even Marxist theories. Going back to Alice Walker’s “In Search of Our Mother’s Garden,” Christian writes on how Walker suggests we stop looking only at high art to find our feminine voice, that we must begin to look at “low” art, the gardening, cooking, oral storytelling that our mothers have passed along as a part of our history because of the lack of access to high forms of art in the past. Christian suggests that “even as we moved [towards finding the right balance of female voice], the high, the low persisted, in fact moved further and further apart.” Like Showalter, Christian believes that we depend so much upon Freud, Foucault, and Derrida to define what feminist writing is that we totally negate the essence of women’s writing—which is, in fact, writing from the life-experience of being a woman. We continue to show the male world that we cannot define ourselves without them—that we depend primarily upon male characteristics of writing to measure what we are (or are not). It makes much more sense, instead, to define ourselves based on the characteristics that are uniquely woman, not just un-man. We need to focus on how we respond as a woman to different texts, whether they be the high and mighty art of the white dead males, or the so-called middle art of women novelists, or the so-called low art of our mother’s apple pie recipes. We have distinct female responses to all art, and we must recognize these responses as valid and true. As Christian writes, “as we look high, we might also look low, lest we devalue women in the world even as we define Woman. In ignore their voices, we may not only truncate our movement but we may also limit our own process until our voices no longer sound like women’s voices to anyone.”

“In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” Alice Walker

Alice Walker passionately writes about the interesting scenario and struggle of black women in this essay. Not only do black women have to fight against the racist forces of literature and try to accurately portray the plight of the African-American expression, they must also find their own female tongue within their specific ethnicity. To be totally honest, I’m not sure if this essay would fall more under a feminist critique identity or under an ethnic critique category…because it touches on both topics simultaneously.
I can say that as a woman, I could completely grasp the feminist critique effect of the essay. I especially identified with the following quote:
Yet so many stories that I write, that we all write, are my mother’s stories. Only recently did I fully realize this: that through the years of listening to my mother’s stories of her life, I have absorbed not only the stories themselves, but something of the manner in which she spoke, something of the urgency that involves the knowledge that her stories—like her life—must be recorded.
Women “absorb” the knowledge that their mothers impart, just as men absorb the knowledge that their fathers impart. This is true even if the mother or father is not present—the information comes out indirectly in how a person views the world and acts in different situations (as seen in family studies, etc.). We carry out in our own lives the stories of our mothers, some of whom did not have the privilege of recording their story through written word. This is where the essay moves towards African-American critique.
The freedom to tell the story through writing was essentially unavailable to African-American women, so they had to tell the story through song (linking with Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” with the blues/jazz tradition), or through gardening (like Walker’s mother), and other such methods. Yet these methods are not the methods which make a word or a person immortal. Much like Virginia Woolf and Shakespeare’s sister, Walker wonders if, because she was subject to slavery and silence by the whip, her ancestor was a genius bursting with creative storytelling ability but could not tell her story.

“Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness,” Elaine Showalter

Elaine Showalter surprised me in this essay. I did not expect her to critically evaluate feminist criticism of the past and synthesize a new suggestion regarding what form this criticism should assume. The one passage that impacted me the most is as follows: “Nonetheless, the feminist obsession with correcting, modifying, supplementing, revising, humanizing, or even attacking male critical theory keeps us dependent upon it and retards our progress in solving our own theoretical problems.” The quote really helped me to answer one of the questions I posed in my blog site, which I posted after reading excerpts from Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own.” I have often wondered if feminist theory continues to be helpful after generations of considering how women can distinguish themselves in history and present times. That being said, my past question was, “With the coming and going of each generation since Woolf first published "A Room of One's Own," do we take greater heed to her lecture?” In other words, are women writers trying to move past the dependency upon male critical theory and are they trying to finally progress in the solving of our own theoretical problems, as Showalter writes?
I have often been dissatisfied with the continual dependency upon male critical theory. Therefore, I rejoiced when I read Showalter’s essay, which brought up her idea of “gynocritics,” or the study of women’s writing as our primary subject rather than looking at men’s writing. I loved her emphasis on finding the distinction of women’s writing from all other kinds of writings. When we focus on defining women’s writing based solely on its characteristics, and not defining it according to what women’s writing is not, I begin to agree with Showalter: that “we may never reach the promised land at all; for when feminist critics see our task as the study of women’s writing, we realize that the land promised to us is not the serenely undifferentiated universality of texts but the tumultuous and intriguing wilderness of difference itself.”

Peter Wasamba

Dr. Peter Wasamba, a professor specializing in the study of African Oral Literature at the University of Nairobi, visited Messiah College on March 31st, 2008, to discuss the importance of oral literature to the Kenyan nation. In a small group setting, Dr. Wasamba explained how oral history brings change to our communities, and shared how he is using it to address several socioeconomic issues within the Kenyan nation.

Dr. Wasamba told the group that he uses oral history to approach the constant poverty problem in Kenya. There is a history in Kenya—and, of course, in many other nations—of problems arising when new social or political policies are introduced. Many times, these policies are insensitive to lower-level classes. Dr. Wasamba expressed that instead of the upper-class citizens making policies that do not directly affect them, those who do feel the weight of the policies should have a say in policy-making. In this way, Kenyans would be forced to look at the past effects of policies as a way of correcting and building the present.

How does this happen? Dr. Wasamba has taken it upon himself and a group of others to gather oral testimonies from the locals. The locals hold a wealth of knowledge that would otherwise be lost, if it were not for the sharing of their testimonies. These oral testimonies give the necessary proof of whether certain policies worked or whether power was abused in seeing them out. The oral testimonies are two-fold: they provide information to the testimony-gatherers (like Dr. Wasamba) to relay to officials if necessary; and also, they provide a platform for the locals to vent their frustrations and anger about wrongdoings performed against them (in a sort of therapeutic method), making someone else aware of the corruption within the government. This transfer of information through the sharing of oral testimonies builds a sense of camaraderie among the people of Kenya, which is important in a time when most feel alone and abused by the government.

kolodny

As I read Kolodny I realized that she was answering the question I raised when I wrote on Virginia Woolf: is her essay "A Room of One's Own" worth studying over and over when most women (and men) are aware of the male gender's suppression of females? Kolodny's answer is that "feminist criticism very quickly moved beyond merely 'exposing sexism in one work of literature after another,' and promised, instead, that we might at last 'begin to record new choices in a new literary history'" (2147). And Kolodny's essay is exactly that--less of an exposure of how awful the female condition has been and more of a call for men and women to change the way they view literature.

This essay is a form of criticism with which I can deal. I like that Kolodny doesn't approach feminism strictly as a binary opposition to male dominance. Rather, she places responsibility on men and women to interpret women's writings in a whole new way. For feminism, which aims to place so much emphasis on equality but is typically understood to be a bashing of all things male, I believe that this essay finally reaches the equilibrium of what feminism is--both sexes trying to read women's writing with the understanding that it stands separate from male writing, yet holds the same weight as far as aesthetics and canonical standings are concerned.

on langston hughes...

I found the essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" by Langston Hughes extremely interesting. Hughes expresses that he has seen many an African-American artist who is afraid of being his/herself. He writes that "no great poet has ever been afraid of being himself" (1313). This is true for all ethnicities. We always write from what we know, from what we have experienced. Even when we write about what we don't know, our imaginative thinking has been shaped by our backgrounds, our education, our culture, our histories. How can we ever fully express ourselves if we hold back that element of our beings that make us who we are?

With most of Hughes' poetry, there is either a sense of or a direct reference to African-American culture--and mainly within the Harlem Renaissance setting. And I think since Hughes was so deeply connected with this African-American movement, it would be ridiculous if he didn't write about jazz or the life of the "Negro Artist."

I found one of his poems, "The Weary Blues," on the net, and also a video on YouTube that is a great representation of the jazz/blues music and feeling of the Harlem Renaissance. Check it out.