“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.