Profit and oppression

Abstract

Cashmore reviews "The Norton Anthology of African-American Literature" edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr and Nellie Y. McKay.

Headnote

Black culture was long denied recognition. The danger now is that it is being turned into another commodity

"You have to be careful, very careful, introducing the truth to the black man who has never previously heard the truth about himself, his own kind and the white man." Malcolm X issued this caution in 1964.

Today, it seems, no circumspection is necessary. Library shelves creak under the weight of almanacs, yearbooks, encyclopaedias and other volumes chronicling African-American cultural achievements. For years, it seemed, interest was confined to dramatic depictions of the epic history of bondage and driven rootlessness; the aesthetic products of the experience were largely ignored.

Then, in 1967, Ploski and Brown's The Negro Almanac opened the way for hundreds of comparable publications. African-American culture is well and truly open for business: the "invisible man", once written of by Ralph Ellison, now looms larger than life.

The Norton Anthology, ordered chronologically rather than by genre, runs from the mid-18th century to the present and covers novels, poems, essays, speeches, plays, song lyrics and other narratives. For the most part this is the work of compilers (they call it "a celebration"), not exegetists, still less critical appraisers. But it is also meant to serve didactic purposes: the selections are intended "to sustain classroom interest. . . to give instructors choices. . . to free the student from the need for reference books".

The collection opens with the fascinating story of the Senegal-born slave Phillis Wheatley who, in 1773, was subjected to an oral examination in a Boston court to determine whether a black person was capable of writing her exquisite poetry. The court decided in her favour and thus gave official recognition that culture was not the preserve of whites.

Wheatley was "the synecdoche for the African in western culture", the editors say. This is surprising when we read her verse: 'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan

land

Taught my benighted soul to understand

That there's a God, that there's a Saviour

too . . . Remember, Christians, Negros,

black as Cain

May be refin'd, and join th' angelic strain.

Other contributors show more reserve in their gratitude to America. Malcolm X's damnation of white devils all but scorches the page. The visions of black people restored to their pre-colonial greatness in the poetry of Claude McKay and Marcus Garvey's speeches are opprobrious evaluations of the Land of the Free. Passages by Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin maintain the denunciation, while the complex pieces from Zora Neale Hurston introduce the occasional ambiguity. Hurston, like Wheatley, suggests some agreeable aspects of America.

Elsewhere the collection includes critical poetry, such as Melvin Tolson's; and transcribed blues music, which remains unrivalled as a musical exploration of post-emancipatory despair; and rap's observations of a troubled society - tales of tragedy raised to Shakespearean levels, art as inextricable from life.

Here we have what the black scholar WE B Du Bois called "arealisation of that past, for which for long years we have been ashamed, for which we have apologised". Du Bois was writing of the artistic dignity that comes from suffering - the beauty that emerges from oppression.

African-American culture is not merely the product and practices of black artists; it is meant to convey something of a history in which racism condemned successive generations to servitude. It has been called a culture of compensation, a salve for the disempowered. A volume such as this almost demands the respect traditionally denied to black people. So what could possibly stop us welcoming it?

Only the motive that gives shape to the enterprise. "Precisely because `blackness' is a socially constructed category," write the editors, "it must be learned through imitation, and its literary presentations must also be learned in the same way - like jazz - through repetition and revision." This is why they feel the African-American literary tradition exists as a formal entity.

All peoples whose ancestors originated in Africa have lived through a distinct set of conditions that sometimes unifies them. They have had to contend with racism, in whatever form. Exile, enslavement and discrimination were all integral parts of the black experience. As a result the consciousness of colour fuses so much art, music and film.

Yet the history of culture is one of borrowings: applying the epithet "black" alerts us to the particular conditions under which it was produced, but it also imposes boundaries that are often artificial. For example, rap music, in this volume, has roots in the Black Arts poetry of the 1960s and 1970s. Rappers themselves have argued that it has origins in the work of the German band Kraftwerk. We could add that its commercial popularity was hastened by Run DMC's liaison with the white rock band Aerosmith.

Blues, often seen as a quintessentially black music, was indistinguishable from the kind of music played by white country musicians until the 1920s, when it was recorded and marketed by the phonograph industry as genuine black (or, in the early century, "race") music.

In Alice Walker we discover a lineage she believes descends from Wheatley; yet a wider reading of Walker discloses her debt to Flannery O'Connor and Virginia Woolf. Walter Mosley's crime novels have affinities with those of Rudolph Fisher and Chester Grimes, but more potent influences lie with Dashiell Hammett and Mosley himself acknowledged Albert Camus as an inspiration.

Collecting and celebrating the efforts of black writers and artists invites us both to appreciate them and to question the discourse that makes them possible: is there a black culture, or are there disparate groups who have shared destinies, but whose work draws the appellation "black" for non-artistic reasons?

In this book, as in many other so-called "genuine" artefacts of black culture, we are presented with something unique and authentic.

But authenticity is a definition imposed from the outside and typically functions in the interest of those who profit from selling commodified versions of culture. And this anthology iS a commodity; as if to remind us, it comes with a companion CD. "It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness," wrote Du Bois. "This sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of aworld that looks on in amused contempt and pity."

The pity might have gone, and the contempt diminished, but there is still amusement to be drawn from black culture. How else do we explain the proliferation of cultural products that bear the designation black or African-American?

The import of Du Bois' observation was that the accomplishments of black culture are the result of the conflict between American identity and subordination. Perhaps we should see this volume as yet another instance of that engagement packaging the world of black Americans, part of an enterprise geared to selling black culture to markets that are still predominantly white. If so, this volume provides more comfort than challenge.