Content area
Full Text
Abstract
Responding to what he sees as the "nihilist threat" to African-American culture, Cornel West has called for a "politics of conversion" (West, 1993: 18). Though subject to reproach from critics seeking particular forms of practical political intervention as response to the decay of black civil society, West's existential critique invites consideration of the historical function of violence and negativity in the historical formulation of African-American revolutionary vision. This essay proposes a model for such exploration by linking ante-bellum poet Phillis Wheatley and Black Consciousness activist Malcolm X as writers seeking to appropriate the personal and collective trauma of diasporic experience as sites for both resistance and regeneration. Through careful readings of Wheatley's "To the Earl of Dartmouth" and Malcolm's Autobiography, we can follow the specific figurative and narrative itineraries by which a discourse of insurgency and realization, at once self-effacing and self-constructive, has been forged from slavery to the modernity.
I. Black Avowal: The "Nihilismus Scream"
In the lead essay to Race Matters, referring to what he sees as "the despair and dread that now flood the streets of black America," Cornel West declares that the "most basic issue now facing black America is the nihilistic threat to its very existence" (West, 1993: p. 12). After noting that in previous generations black society created various cultural structures to "ward off the nihilistic threat," West proceeds to call for what he terms a "politics of conversion" as a way to cure this nihilistic affliction, to produce (he says) "a chance for people to believe that there is hope for the future and a meaning to struggle" (18).
West's argument has elicited a flurry of critical retorts, from Eric Lott's branding of West's evocation of nihilism as what Albert Murray calls the "fakelore of black pathology," to Stephen Steinberg's dismissal of West's proposed solution of a "politics of conversion" as a vapid sham, so much preacherly hand-wringing without any practical politics. To some extent, West courts suc h reproaches by the deliberate distancing of his discourse from both "philosophic doctrine" (14) and detailed political analysis, favoring instead an avowedly "existentialist" critique of such elusive phenomenological constructs as angst and care, agency and rage, pleasure and love, as they find embodiment in the "lived experience"...