Black and Feminist Aesthetics

Black Aesthetics, Feminist Aesthetics, and the Problems of Oppositional Discourse
Author(s): Belinda Edmondson

Source: Cultural Critique, No. 22 (Autumn, 1992), pp. 75-98
Published by: University of Minnesota Press
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Black Aesthetics, Feminist Aesthetics, and the
Problems of Oppositional Discourse
Belinda Edmondson
In recent years American and, more particularly, Europ

feminists have sought to identify a "feminist aesthetics" or
purely "feminine" writing in order to distinguish the "true" f
male experience from its representation within canonical, patr
archal discourse. In the haste to identify and develop a discours
empowering to women, no particular distinction is made betwe
"feminine" and "feminist," since the former is understood to e
body the latter. And while the formulations of a feminist aesth
vary greatly among its advocates-the American school presu
poses a specifically female consciousness in its reading of canon
ical and noncanonical female-authored works while the French
school privileges formal and linguistic experimentation-the
mises upon which the formulations are based are the
namely, that an essentially female/feminist discourse exists
be created.
The polemics and political thrust of this line of feminist crit
icism strongly resembles arguments made by the Negritudinists
the 1930s for a pan-African aesthetic and, more particularly, ar
c 1992 by Cultural Critique. 0882-4371 (Fall 1992). All rights reserved.
75
76 Belinda Edmondson
guments of the (male) black literary theorists of the 196

1970s, who similarly sought to define that ephemeral thi
"black novel"-through the concept of a diasporically all-incl
"black aesthetics."
However, while many American feminists have linked th
political agendas of blacks and (white Western) women, and (in a
argument which brings uncomfortably to mind Freud's depictio
of [white] woman as the Dark Continent) feminist scientist Sand
Harding has gone so far as to suggest that blacks and (whit
Western) women share a common "worldview," no one woul
suggest that a feminist aesthetics and a black aesthetics are t
same thing. (Indeed, a culture-based aesthetics stands on sure
ground, I would think, than a gender-based aesthetics, thoug
even to claim that black aesthetics is grounded in culture and no
politics is to stand on shaky ground indeed.) Yet, as we have see
traits commonly identified as belonging to an intrinsically "fem
inine" discourse-that is, the fragmented, circular, or otherw
antilinear (some would call it "anti-phallocentric") narrative-a
also the bywords for the "black novel." The mutability of th
narrative category suggests that it might owe more to an oppos
tional tradition in literature than to a specifically culture-based o
gender-based aesthetic, and certainly some of the most rever
canonical works in the Western tradition arose out of a tradition
of "negative aesthetics."
The disconcerting similarity between these two "camps" is
further complicated by the recent advocacy by black feminist au
thors and scholars for a black feminist aesthetic, epitomized b
Barbara Smith's seminal essay "Toward a Black Feminist Criti-
cism." My intent, then, will be, first, to define and disentangl
these overlapping definitions of aesthetic criteria; my second, to
identify any critical differences in black and feminist formula-
tions; third, to connect the philosophical problems in formulatin
black and feminist aesthetics to the effort in recent Marxist schol-
arship to reconcile utopian political goals with the "realities" of
class and group consciousness; and finally, to elucidate whether in
fact such categories are useful to authors and scholars interested
in social transformation. I shall discuss the various versions of the
black aesthetics movement which have circulated within the dias-
pora and their correlative debates in recent feminist criticism;
Black Aesthetics, Feminist Aesthetics 77
from there I shall look at theoretical attempts by Rita Felski and

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.-with a quick comparison to Fredric Jame-
son's efforts on behalf of Marxist scholarship-to remedy the
problems of what Anthony Appiah calls "the classic dialectic" of
marginalized discourses.'
Locating Blackness: Negritude, Pan-Africanism, and the

Black Aesthetics Movement
Before proceeding to compare black and feminist aesthetics,

I need to clarify precisely what I mean by black aesthetics, whic
connotes different things in different contexts. The debate over
what constitutes the black aesthetic has dominated discussions of
Afro-American, African, and Caribbean literature; the problem
with the term is self-evident: it suggests a cohesiveness of culture
and context that simply does not exist, at least to the extent that a
orthodox application of the term would demand. Yet despite this
the term persists, and the debate continues because of the relativ
sameness of position that all black peoples find themselves in with
regard to white culture in the Western world, an ironic but pivot
factor in the formulation of the black aesthetic. As such, opposi-
tional racial politics is an intrinsic part of black discourse.
Like the French feminists, the Negritudinists-interestingly
enough, all French colonials of Africa and the Caribbean-also
emphasized an essential blackness grounded in biology, which
they argued, was reflected in black art and literature. Ironically,
Leopold Senghor-Senegalese poet, president, and a key figure
in the Negritude movement-cites the racial theories of the racist
French intellectual Gobineau and others when he insists that emo-
tion is the domain of black people (136, 141).2 And the poet Aime
Cesaire, one of the founders of Negritude, writes, "[T]here flows
in our veins a blood which demands of us an original attitude
toward life.... [W]e must respond, the poet more than any other,
to the special dynamic of our complex biological reality" (Taylor
173).3 As such, while the black aestheticians of the later period
stressed a shared history of suffering and resistance to white he-
gemony over any shared biological heritage, the result was the
same: the claim to a literature which possessed essentially black
discursive properties.
The cognizance of the political dimensions of Afri

American art is commonly held to have begun with the Black
Movement heralded by Amiri Baraka, Addison Gayle, and
Neal in the 1960s, but recently some African-American sc
have been arguing very persuasively that the very genesis of
can-American arts was itself political. According to bell h
whatever African-Americans created in music, dance, po
painting, and so forth, challenged racist beliefs that blacks w
uncivilized and that they were collectively incapable of cr
"great" art. Furthermore, she states, African slaves brought
them an aesthetic emphasizing kinship ties that helped to en
the survival of the community; as such, these ideas forme
basis of African-American aesthetics since cultural produ
and artistic expressiveness were also ways for displaced A
people to maintain connections with the past (105).
However, recently it has been argued that the earlier ef
of W. E. B. Du Bois and the later Harlem Renaissance writers to
formulate an African-American aesthetic was in effect a move not
only to counter white claims that blacks had no art and therefore
no culture but also to erect an African-American aesthetic as the
American aesthetic. This is similar to how white America itself
labored under a sense of its own lack of culture when compa
to Europe and therefore searched for a peculiarly American
aesthetic.4 As such, one might infer that though at one level th
aim of these African-American progenitors of the black aesthet
movement was to seek an African connection, at another, th
aim was to become an established influence in American society
a whole. There are echoes of this in J. Saunders Redding's obser
vation in the mid-'70s that "even while [African-American s
dents] sloganize 'Back to Africa' and form study groups and
rums as the means by which they will reclaim their Afric
heritage, they are saying in the words of... Langston Hughes, 'I
too, am America"' (46).
The impetus for a Caribbean aesthetic has similar politic
motives that strive to uncover an "authentic" and liberating Af
can-based culture from the stifling confines of European mo
and structures. Yet discussions of an authentic Caribbean aes-
thetic most often fall into a sort of orthodoxy of blackness. A c
in point: the Barbadian poet and scholar Edward Brathwaite
his definitive essay on Caribbean aesthetics, approvingly cites Ja-

maican scholar and author Sylvia Wynters's call for the West In-
dian writer to focus on the "anonymous mass of our people" who
have "absolutely no documented history at all," even as he notes
that she herself has not yet been able to capture that authentically
Caribbean "form" in which to do so. However, he adds, she is
working her way toward it, moving as she has from "Marxist
overtones and citations" to "African culture" ("Love" 27). Else-
where, in Contradictory Omens, he denies white Dominican writer
Jean Rhys admittance to the West Indian canon on the basis that
her writing does not adhere to an Afrocentric worldview, arguing
that her novels are more English than they are Caribbean. Brath-
waite's remarks embody the basic tenets of the Caribbean aesthet-
ics as they have been thus far defined: black, working-class culture
is the "authentic" culture of the Caribbean, and "authentic" Ca-
ribbean writing must utilize the creole languages and exhibit prin-
ciples of orality among other things (this is particularly ironic,
since most Caribbean writers come from the logocentric middle
class and are familiar, mostly from a distance, with working-class
oral black culture).
This codification of black reality is not confined to the Ca-
ribbean alone. Both Caribbean and African-American aesthetics
are based on the presumption of an African aesthetic, to be
covered whole under the layers of hegemonic European cultu
Yet, African scholars and writers have been wrangling for deca
over precisely this notion, inasmuch as an African aesthetic ma
be no more than a Yoruban aesthetic-something which Wo
Soyinka advocates even as he does not particularly "buy into" th
notion of an African or a black aesthetic-or a Gikuyu aesthetic
a Wolof aesthetic, and so on.
A number of texts on the subject attempt the sort of codif
cation Brathwaite displays in order to pin down what a "bla
text really is, and the most common traits cited are, as I no
above, the so-called "circular" narrative which makes use of a
"myth-based" "non-Western" time found in agrarian societies of
Africa,5 "orality" (the discursive representation of oral narrative
forms-a hard concept to pin down in a written document), re-
alist writing that is accessible to the uneducated reader and which
does not utilize any of the "elitist" stylistic innovations of the mod-
ernist and postmodernist schools, and, finally, the "auth

language of black people, whether African-American dialect
ribbean creole, or indigenous African languages.
Yet while these narrative traits are more or less observable in
several African texts the same cannot be said for "black novels"
from North America or the Caribbean, where the debates over
the "black" aesthetic were markedly different from their African
counterparts in that the debates tried to establish what a "black
novel" should do rather than determine to what extent the novels
actually did so. The Black Arts Movement in the United States
during the 1960s and the early 1970s attempted to lay down cri-
teria for black literature. What emerged was a body of literature
and drama of a didactic and historically specific nature, and not
often referred to in present debates on black discourse. And yet
art products are historical items, and any discussion of an all-
encompassing black aesthetic must take into account the historic-
ity of the black text rather than only ground it in an essence of
"blackness." Interestingly, the best examples of a black aesthetic as
it has been defined in these debates are to be found in the more
recent fiction of African-American women, such as Toni Mor
son's Song of Solomon. Much of this literature, ironically, is of
perceived as politically moderate or even conservative because
its indifference to analyzing or depicting white racism, focus
instead on the day-to-day lives of its black characters.
Feminist Aesthetics and the Question of Essence
Turning to the feminist sphere, one finds a similarly com

plex and factionalized debate over the constitution of a femin
aesthetic. These advocates of feminist aesthetics believe that cur-
rent aesthetic criteria are chosen solely because they endorse
dominant ideology; as Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn put it
"The criteria that have created the literary canon have, like th
traditional conception of history, excluded the accomplishments
not only of women but of people of races, ethnic backgrounds and
classes different from the politically dominant one, which is West
ern and white. Feminist criticism questions the values implicit in
the Great Works, investigating the tradition that canonized them
and the interests it serves . .." (22). As such, recognizing that art
is produced and given meaning through various ideological and
social formations, one might infer that the primary thrust of fem-
inist aesthetics advocates is to replace one set of political under-
pinnings with another.
Yet much of this scholarship argues, paradoxically, for an
ahistorical female essence, grounded in a biological imperative,
giving rise to an essentially female way of thinking (so the premise
goes) that in turn dictates a specifically female language, which
consequently manifests itself in a female way of writing: Luce
Irigaray's parlerfemme and Helene Cixous's l'ecriture fminine.6 To
confuse matters, feminine and feminist writing/language is con-
flated under this prescription, and because every woman must
write as a female and because female language is intrinsically
oppositional, it would follow that every female-authored docu-
ment is inherently feminist. Furthermore, as more than one out-
raged critic has pointed out, these theories depend on an essen-
tialist construction of woman to make sense, and as everyone
knows, essentialism is bad, bad, bad.7 Lost in the acrimony is the
most enduring point: any articulation of a female consciousness
necessarily involves an essentialist construction of the subject.
Black Aesthetics, Feminist Aesthetics: Are

They the Same Thing?
Are the persistent similarities in feminist and black aesthetics

the result of similar worldviews or similar desires for difference
and sameness? By way of answering, let me point out a precursor
of this connection between the interests of white women and
blacks in the transient yet significant coalition of the wom
movement and the Antislavery movement during the nineteen
century. As Angela Davis points out, white women invoked
analogy of slavery to express the oppressive nature of marriag
One might argue that the invocation of black people was strictly
political tactic to highlight their own condition, but certainly
highlighted a mutual source of oppression. Of the current
bates, it is conspicuously apparent that whereas white feminist
continuously link feminist oppositional practices to black oppo
tional practices, the reverse is definitely not the case. Inde

black scholars have traditionally remained ominously silent
this score; the connecting factor is, of course, the recent critic
by black feminists, but as we shall see, this does not necessari
explain the situation.
The progenitors of black aesthetics have left their mark o
today's black theorists, who, while negotiating issues of ge
and class, nevertheless adhere to a principle of blackness simil
to that of their predecessors. Yet each criterion they raise as
mulating part of an intrinsically black discourse is paralleled b
similar moves in the feminist sphere. Just as black scholars h
emphasized the personal narrative and the autobiography as pa
ticularly suited to black authors, so have feminist scholars claim
the same for (white) women. For instance, Selwyn Cudjoe claim
that "the Afro-American autobiographical statement is the m
Afro-American of all Afro-American literary pursuits" (6):
is because it is "bereft of any excessive subjectivism and mind
egotism," and represents the autobiographical subject emer
as an almost random member of the group, selected to tell his/
tale (9). As such, black autobiographical literature emphasizes t
commonality of black experience and its position as an alterna
history. Similarly, Rita Felski observes that, in its effort to do
ment a distinct women's history, "feminist confession . . . is
concerned with unique individuality or notions of essential
manity than with delineating the specific problems and exp
ences which bind women together. It thus tends to emphasize
ordinary events of a protagonist's life, their typicality in relatio
a notion of communal identity" (94).
Furthermore, just as black scholars, echoing W. E. B.
Bois's famous declaration that the black American possess
"double consciousness," argue for the innate double-voicedness
black speech, so do (white) feminists argue the same for fe
language. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., formulates this hypothes
The Signifying Monkey and used it to defend the rap group T
Live Crew on charges of obscenity by arguing that black spee
inherently double-voiced-that is, what sounds like obscenities
the nonblack ear are in reality an ironic commentary ("State"
(Gates's intellectual virtuosity notwithstanding, this black list
could discern no finely veiled irony in "make the pussy splat.
Similarly, Elaine Showalter states that "in the reality to which

we must address ourselves as critics, women's writing is a 'double-
voiced discourse' that always embodies the social, literary, and
cultural heritages of both the muted and the dominant" (263).
Rachel Blau Du Plessis (in a self-conscious essay which attempts to
simulate a "feminine" aesthetic through a fragmented narrative
style) claims even more unequivocally that this double-voicedness
is inherently female:
Insider-outsider social status will also help to dissolve an ei-

ther-or dualism. For the woman finds she is irreconcilable
things: an outsider by her gender position, by her relation to
power; maybe an insider by her social position, her class. She
can be both. Her ontological, her psychic, her class position all
cause doubleness. Doubled consciousness Doubled under-
standings. How then could she neglect to invent a form which
produces this incessant, critical, splitting motion. To invent
this form. To invent the theory for this form.
Following, the "female aesthetic" will produce artworks that

incorporate contradiction and nonlinear movement into the
heart of the text. (278)
However, Du Plessis does acknowledge that other writing-n

teenth-century Russian fiction, "high" modernism, and most
ticularly, the Negritude literature-exhibits the "nonhegem
tenets ("pointless" or "plotless" narratives, etc.) that she ha
signed to the feminine aesthetic, but she does not make this
servation in order to derail her argument, for she separates w
she perceives to be oppositional convergences from aesth
practices. This is most difficult to do when making comparison
black writers; nevertheless, she asserts, though blacks will
"affirm a connection to rhythms of earth, sensuality, intuiti
subjectivity," they will only "sound precisely as some women w
ers do" (286, my emphasis). The similarity, in other words
surface one.
Replacing Female Essence: The Feminist Public Sphere

Feminist scholar Rita Felski critiques the entire notion o
feminist aesthetics and instead advocates what she terms a femi-
nist public sphere as a better model from which to deve

counterdiscursive space for feminism. In Beyond Feminist Aesthe
Felski argues that it is impossible to define a feminist aesth
correctly pointing out that "women-centered" writings a
necessarily, ideologically speaking, feminist and that even
with an explicitly feminist agenda usually owe more to v
oppositional literary genres (for example, postmodernist, av
garde writing) than to a specifically feminist way of writin
deed, as Felski notes, the common equation of the feminine
the oppositional collapses crucial distinctions in ideology, cul
and class through an appeal to a common negativity (desc
oneself through what one is not), which in turn is equated wit
feminine-hardly the way, it would seem, to articulate a
theory of feminist aesthetics. Since the Western ontological
cept of Man has traditionally depended on such attributes
tionality and linearity, attempting to empower the catego
Woman by merely revaluing the antithesis of these would no
preserve but ironically reinforce this formulation of Man
thermore, this binary relation would then subsume every
that is not Man under the category of Woman; this logi
indeed permeated oppositional discourse to the point whe
ribbean feminist Elaine Boyce Davies feels compelled to re
Caribbean men that "women's issues, and development, ne
mean the further erosion of their manhood" ("Talking" xv
In concluding her critique of aesthetics, Felski notes
stylistic innovations, or any particular literary technique, fo
matter, can be used to generate conservative or radical mean
depending on the agenda at hand, and concludes that "[i]t is
increasingly implausible to claim that aesthetic radicalism eq
political radicalism and to ground a feminist politics of the t
an assumption of the inherently subversive effects of stylist
novation" (161). However, I am not sure that this is what fem
aesthetics-as a broad category-tries to do (the French sc
being an obvious exception). As is the case with black aesthet
seems that the focus is rather to retrieve radical meanings f
extant texts and to construct an aesthetics out of a literary
tion spanning different eras and stylistic genres.
Furthermore, having disposed of the premise for a fem
aesthetics, she then argues against the dissolution of aesthet
egories, stating that "this repoliticization of the aesthetic sphere

does not imply, in my view, that aesthetic categories are to be
interpreted as a direct reflection of the interests of a political
ideology, or that literary meaning is limited to its current political
use-value for the women's movement" (175). She goes on to assert
that the correct relationship between aesthetics and ideology is "a
continuum in which the aesthetic function may be more or less
dominant but always intermeshes with the ideological conditions
governing the text's own historical location" (177).
However, I should point out that it would be an injustice to
Felski and a misreading of her very thorough argument to lump
her in with the orthodox poststructuralists who believe that any
conception of the subject is founded on an inevitable phallocen-
trism because it must necessarily involve the repression of other
groups or ideas. And unlike those poststructuralists who critique
the very premise of race- and gender-based discourses, Felski sees
the need for a conception of subjectivity in feminist discourse
even as she warns against its becoming dissociated from its origins
as a political construct erected to address particular strategic con-
cerns:
[T]o expose critically the inadequacies of the rat

self-sufficient individualism of liberal political
thereby to argue that subjectivity should be aba
category of oppositional political thought, nor
centering of the subject in contemporary theor
discourses which appeal to an experience of self
anachronistic. Subjectivity remains an ineradicab
modern social experience . . ." (68)
And furthermore:
[E]ven the most subjective feminist writing... appeals to a notion of

communal identity which differs significantly from the literature of
bourgeois individualism. (78, my emphasis)
Yet elsewhere she argues that there is no archetypal female sub-

ject and warns that "[t]he ambiguous status of subjectivity in co
temporary women's writing will become apparent . . . [in] th
possibility that the very pursuit. of authenticity can become a sel
defeating process" (75). This last clause is crucial to under

ing Felski's notion of subjectivity, and is the basis of what
a fundamental contradiction in her position, which is symp
atic of a larger tension in feminist and black discourse in g
(a problem I shall address later in this paper).
Felski does, however, put forward some useful ideas fo
rehabilitation of the notion of subjectivity in her analysis
so-called death of the subject in postmodern society. She
that reconstitution of the subject does not have to entail the
replacement of the white heterosexual Western bourgeo
subject with the black/non-Western/lesbian/female subj
problem here is in our very notion of what constitutes subje
As a solution, she advocates the creation of a feminist coun
public sphere, modeled on the Habermasian definition
public sphere of bourgeois white Western men of the eight
century, where all men were equalized by their participa
rationalism and enlightenment. In this countersphere, the
factions of the feminist movement would be united by their
mon gender and oppressive status to men:
Like the original bourgeois public sphere, the feminist publi

sphere constitutes a discursive space which defines itself in
terms of a common identity; here it is the shared experience o
gender-based oppression which provides the mediatingfactor intende
to unite all participants beyond their specific differences. .... [T]h
"we" of feminist discourse is intended to represent all women as col
lective cosubjects. As a consequence, the women's movement
can accommodate disparate and often conflicting ideological
positions, because membership is conditional ... on a mor
general sense of commonality in the experience of oppres
sion. (166-67, my emphasis)
While I find Felski's notion of feminist public sphere u

in theory, and certainly desirable in practice, it has univer
overtones which gloss over difference: that is, is common f
status enough to generate a conversation, especially when th
conception of womanhood is at issue? I am thinking particu
of black women's relationship to feminism and of the histo
womanhood in the Western world, where black women-and
men, for that matter-were in a sense degenderized altogether.
As Hazel Carby notes, the cult of true womanhood in nineteenth-

century America, which drew ideological boundaries to exclude
black women from "woman" (woman being that which is virtuous,
chaste, etc.), is reflected in twentieth-century notions on the sub-
ject (39). We might infer the same of manhood, which could never
be achieved by black men because as slaves they could not protect
and make inviolable the body of the black woman, a necessary
prerequisite of manhood (35). Correspondingly, there was very
little division of labor on the slave plantation, and certainly
throughout most of the twentieth century Western black men and
women have been in the work force in comparatively equal
numbers.9 As such, current calls for the dissolution of gender
roles will not have the same effect in communities where such
roles still have the aura of luxury. There is also a certain iro
her choice of model, in that membership to the public spher
the eighteenth century required rational thought, of w
women and, more particularly, nonwhites were deemed t
none.
Moreover, debate within a public sphere is

tingent upon possessing common social status
the same language, and I am not altogether
should be taken as a given in feminist discour
that the very language of feminism is fiercely
stance, although Felski acknowledges that the
nal gendered identity generated by the femin
can be viewed negatively as ideology insofar as
grips with the material reality of class-and
ety" (169), she then argues that radical criti
nists, such as bell hooks's, presuppose and are
through a preexisting ideal of a feminist p
claims to represent all women (168). And wh
to a certain extent, it does not take into accou
generated within particular groups that do
stream" feminism; consider, for instance, Toni Morrison, an
African-American author much cited in feminist and black liter-
ary criticism, who rejects unequivocally feminism as the preroga-
tive of white women as well as the notion of an all-inclusive black
aesthetic, arguing that "[b]lack men don't write very differently
from white men" but that there is an "enormous difference" in
the narratives of black and white women.'? Morrison is in the

curious position of disavowing a feminist aesthetic and a black
aesthetic yet affirming a black feminist-or rather, female-
aesthetic. At what point does-or can-a position such as hers
enter the feminist public sphere? Can Morrison inhabit a posi-
tion within the feminist public sphere when for all practical pur-
poses she does not believe it to exist? This dilemma would
also seem to highlight the problem of reading as a critical com-
ponent of the feminist aesthetic, but it is one I will not be address-
ing here.
As a parallel issue in black aesthetics, we must also ask our-
selves how, in fact, can black women's writing be "blacker" than
that of the men? Since, according to Morrison, black men's writ-
ing is structurally indistinguishable from white men's, does this
mean that black women's writing embodies the "authentic" black
experience? Morrison's logic seems grounded in the sort of es-
sentialism which views women as "natural" bearers of culture, and
therefore black women writers as possessing cultural intuitiveness
that "transcends" the adversarial (as I think she would see it)
phallocentric writings of black men, even though the latter are
engaged with racial politics.
Nor does Felski's formulation address the fact that, as it is,
the parameters of the debate within feminist discourse are them-
selves defined by power relations among its participants. This is so
much the case that black feminist criticism, for example, is mar-
ginalized within the discourse by being categorized either as
merely "celebratory" because of its emphasis on the personal ex-
periences of black women, or as solely "political," a symbol or
signifier for white feminist theory but not theoretical in and of
itself. 1
These reservations notwithstanding, I find Felski's theory of
a feminist public sphere convincing enough to apply its logic to
the black aesthetics debate. If Felski's arguments against the es-
sential properties of art or discursive formations hold true for
feminism and its constituents, should this not also hold true for
black aesthetics and its constituents? This is an issue which logi-
cally leads to my overarching concern of whether all oppositional
social movements are not in some key sense overturned by a dis-
mantling of a discourse which is vitally bound together by an
essential-and yes, essentializing-concept of its own subjectivity,

on which aesthetic theories are inevitably based.
Reading Blackly: Black Aesthetics and the

Post-structuralist Debate
At this point it might be useful to outline current debat

among black literary theorists on how to explicate the black tex
since the issues raised here about the terms of admission to the
public sphere parallel those concerns of theorists of black dis-
course. Felski's observations on the problem of defining a feminist
aesthetic bear an important resemblance to the questions being
asked among black studies scholars (indeed, some of the issues
noted are identical) as to whether there is indeed such a thing as
a "black novel" or a black aesthetic; at stake in this debate is the
idea that if one relinquishes the concept of a black aesthetic, such
a declaration would have far-reaching negative political implica-
tions for the black diaspora. I would like to discuss the idea of a
feminist aesthetic in terms of this debate to see if it can provide
any solutions short of dispensing with the category altogether, a
move which Felski favors.
Insofar as theories are text-specific, for many of these schol
ars, the study of black texts requires a fundamentally black lite
ary theory. Perhaps the most famous of these theorists is Henr
Louis Gates, Jr., who, after spending a good deal of time defen
ing deconstruction and post-structuralist theory generally to ske
tical black critics,12 recently has written that theory "is not mu
good at exploring the relations between social identity and polit
ical agency" ("Racism" 12) and defends the creation of the bla
subject in black literature against the "universalizing antiuniver
salism" hegemony of these theoretical enterprises:
The constitution of the Western male subject, after all, has

enjoyed quite a different history from that of its racial or
sexual others. Consider the irony: precisely when those
"others" gain the complex wherewithal to define a counter-
vailing subjectivity in the republic of Western culture, our
theoretic colleagues declare the subject to be mere mystifica-
tion. It is hard not to see this as the critical version of the

grandfather clause, the double privileging of categories that
happen to be, as it were, preconstituted, a position that seems
to leave us nowhere, invisible and voiceless. The universalism
that undergirds poststructural antiuniversalism is finally seen
in its inability to comprehend the ethnos as anything other
than mystification, magic or mirage-or what once would
have been called false consciousness. ("Racism" 13)
There are echoes in Gates's complaint of the dictum that to b

black intellectual is to be de facto marginalized from the bla
community; this reflects the dilemma of many black academ
who feel that in order to be admitted to the public sphere
intellectual debate, they must subscribe to a particular way
thinking, engage a particular set of analytical tools, use a partic
ular language-a way of thinking, a language which, by its ve
nature, cuts them off from the very thing that they are seeking
bring into the academic sphere: the black experience. If we co
sider the issue of language then we see a parallel dilemma inher-
ent in Felski's conception of the feminist public sphere.
In The Signifying Monkey Gates advocates an updated version
of black aesthetics, declaring that black texts must be analyz
with a "vernacular ideology," which black critics must construct
from the peculiarly "black" ideology embedded within the black
text. This is necessary, he says, because insofar as all theories of
literature are text-specific, "black" literature needs a specifically
"black" theory of literature for its explication, an idea with the
disquieting implication that a text is understood only with t
analytical tools that are the product of its own cultural mod
that is, a modernist text can only be understood within the conte
of New Criticism, and so forth. Gates's ideas on the subject
indigenously black principles of criticism could be said to contai
a certain racial determinism-for instance, that black people thin
blackly13-which is of course the thing which theorists (not leas
of all Gates himself) struggle against. There is here, on the o
hand, the desire to transcend that difference which has ke
blacks out of the academy so long: blackness as an essential e
sence, tied to intellectual inferiority, or capable only of unde
standing itself-that is, parochial. On the other hand, there is
desire to hold on to that essence, to view it as that which gave th
black critic the wherewithal to see and deconstruct the hierarchies

of race and culture in the first place: that is, one can critique the
modes of hegemonic ideology by the very experience of being
black.
Again, there are obvious parallels to the tensions produced
in Felski's argument against feminist aesthetics and her concom-
itant argument in favor of what can only be described as an ideo-
logically aware subjectivity, or a subjectivity that understands that
it is a product of social and ideological formations and as such not
a fixed and absolute entity. One must seriously question whether
it is possible for such a thing to ever exist except theoretically.
Why, then, to come back to Gates's apparent contradiction in
position, is there a suspicion of post-structuralism, why the belief
that it can actually sever the connection between social identity-
subjectivity-and political agency in its dismantling of the notion
of the subject? In a parallel argument, Felski points out that post-
structuralism has been a boon to feminism because its iconoclastic
notions of life/literature have made it possible to remove the
power of those hegemonic institutions and have identified the
text as a site of resistance to ideology, only to make it more dif-
ficult to harness theory to the necessarily more determinate in-
terests of oppositional politics.
Gates's contradictions of position stem from a wider tension
indicative of those who have traditionally worked outside of the
institution trying to get into it. Consequently, there is a suspicion
that a theory created by the dominant group, which dismantles all
claims to power through difference (difference which derives
meaning and force in part through its very exclusion from the
dominant culture/ideology), is simply another strategy to hold
on to power. Thus Gates's much-quoted claim that black people
have been deconstructing before Derrida does not make much
difference, particularly when the deconstructionists have the
power to transform their theory into a form of hegemony. (I am
generalizing trends here: this is by no means meant to reflect on
Derrida's intentions at all!) Gates's apparent ambivalence on the
question of the subject points to an appreciation, on one hand, of
the revolutionary potential for black people and their relation to
power in the death of the subject; on the other, he is aware that
the subject was not killed for this purpose and perhaps suspects,
since post-structuralist theory appears to have covered all bases

the "grandfather" clause in its universalizing antiuniversali
that it might even have been tailored to prevent it.
Subjectivity and the Marxist Dilemma
If we consider Gates's contortions from the wider sphere

oppositional politics, we see that the same problem resurfaces
slightly altered forms. Fredric Jameson in The Political Unconsc
wrestles to rescue the notion of Utopia from the post-structura
fragmentation of the subject and eternal difference. His proje
an obvious one: as a Marxist critic, he has a vested interest in
believing in the collective, in collective action, in collective will, for
without these there can be no social revolution and, consequently,
no utopian moment.
As a result, he offers up a most curious assessment of Utopia
when he claims that the ideological is also necessarily utopian;
taken to its logical conclusion, fascism becomes, even though dys-
topian, an expression of collective will representative of a re-
pressed utopian ideal (289-90). Jameson defends this somewhat
bewildering position by arguing that whereas the universalism of
the liberal worldview is predicated on a separation of the political/
ideological and private/individual spheres, the brand of univer-
salism he advocates realizes a fusion of ideological (collective) and
individual (subject) consciousness. Class consciousness in what-
ever form consequently becomes utopian because it represents
this fusion of the individual and the collective belief systems. In a
related argument, he posits that there is no distinction between
the ideological and the thematic substance of the text (which in-
terestingly echoes Houston Baker, a proponent of the Black Aes-
thetics movement of the 1960s and '70s who states that in black
literature, meaning and expression are one, a position in contra-
distinction to that of post-structuralists, who generally deduce ide
ology in the form of the narrative alone.
Through strategic position-taking, Jameson hopes to rescue
the radical post-structuralist notion of an ideology of narrativ
structure in textual analysis and its correlative assessment of the
ideological and constructed nature of cultural icons and hege-
monic institutions, and to do so without forfeiting a political de-

terminism, the loss of which, as he sees it, would negate any pos-
sibility of change. As such, Jameson's conception of revolutionary
subjectivity is embedded within a unifying essence of class, nation,
and/or culture, the realization which ironically contradicts the
aims of orthodox Marxism, which typically would find the very
epitome of false consciousness in aristocratic collectivity or in
bourgeois ideology embedded in a nationalism not based on
Marxist principles of revolution. Like Gates, Jameson juggles sev-
eral contradictory lines of analysis: on the one hand, he recog-
nizes the necessity of retaining a form of Marxist determinism to
effect political agency; on the other, he holds to the post-structur-
alist critique of (bourgeois, humanist) subjectivity, useful as it is
for dismantling a hegemonic worldview from within society. And
between the two, he argues the presence of the utopian impulse
within various opposing social factions, which, if harnessed prop-
erly, can effect the utopian (I take it to be Marxist) vision. The
notion of subjectivity is important here because it is the element
that can do the harnessing; as Jameson reflects, the collectivity
needs incentives for ideological adherence.
As such, one can only deduce, from such a bewildering va-
riety of positions and contradictions within each of their dis-
courses, that Gates and Felski want to have their cake and eat it
too, since the notion of subjectivity they perceive as necessary for
harnessing political agency is also one they would like to elimi-
nate at another level. While Gates clearly contradicts himself,
Felski attempts to use her model to negotiate a fine line by advo-
cating a form of identity politics while acknowledging the con-
structedness of that identity; either way, the problem is the
same-they both desire the benefits of essentialism without being
essentialist.
Diana Fuss, in her excellent book on the "problem" of essen-
tialism in oppositional discourses, makes a crucial intervention
when, attempting to debunk the essentialist/antiessentialist cate-
gorization of feminist theorists, she characterizes most feminist
theorists as both essentialists and constructionists (121). All sides of
the debate make the same mistake of treating "essentialism" as if
it has "essence" in and of itself, when the only real essence of
feminism is politics (21, 37). Fuss points out that many post-struc-
turalists have resolved the problem by revaluing essentialism

temporary strategy or recontextualizing it as a "discour
resistance," and while she expresses "serious reservations
what point does this move cease to be provisional and be
permanent?"), ultimately she approves of this strategy beca
the determining factor ... is dependent upon who practices

it: in the hands of a hegemonic group, essentialism can be
employed as a powerful tool of ideological domination; in the
hands of the subaltern, the use of humanism to mime (in the
Irigarian sense of to undo by overdoing) humanism can rep-
resent a powerful displacing repetition. The question of permis-
sibility, if you will, of engaging in essentialism is therefore framed and
determined by the subject-position from which one speaks. (32, my
emphasis)
However, while I will agree that highlighting positionality as

a way of determining the use-value of "essentialist" categories is
helpful in some respects, it is perhaps more dangerous than oth-
ers: the question then becomes, just who gets to use essentialism?
Who inhabits that moral high ground where one can employ es-
sentialist concepts without being infected, as it were, with essen-
tialist beliefs? Can we separate beliefs from practices? And does this
not return us to the privileging of "biological insiderism"? The
significance of essences is their status as belief systems: their use as
political strategies comes after that fact, not with it and particularly
not before it.
I find myself in an awkward position here. While theoreti-
cally I agree enthusiastically with Felski's analysis (but with the
significant reservations noted earlier), I find myself by default
trying to make a case for what are in some ways essentialist views
on aesthetics, if only to highlight the practical problems of Felski's
model (and indeed of all extant models). Just how does one use the
continuum to which she refers in any meaningful application? Is
it possible to manipulate subjectivity in the strategic manner
which she advocates without losing it? And would this not then
reduce subjectivity to a generalized oppositional consciousness, a
proposition which sounds particularly bland and impotent? For,
while there are indeed significant correlations in the assessments
of Felski and Gates, they are not after the same things, even
though their struggles may interlock at points. And it is, ironi-
cally, that difference which, in its implications, Felski's analysis is in
danger of erasing. While strategically I find it important-even
crucial-for them to be linked politically, in the final analysis what
gives meaning to black and feminist discourse is an autonomous
sense of self, of essence, which is what they are struggling not
simply to articulate and validate but to preserve.
Yet even that self is a site of contestation. Does this mean,
then, that aesthetic categories are always to be interpreted as a
direct reflection of the interests of an explicit political ideology,
which, once the historical moment is gone, become obsolete and
inapplicable? And that, apart from their political confluence,
texts of the black diaspora or texts by women have nothing to say
to each other? As I stated at the beginning of this article, I think,
for obvious reasons, that a culture-based discourse stands on
surer ground than a gender-based discourse; yet without an ac-
knowledgment of the differences inherent in the formulation of a
black aesthetic, such discourse is doomed to the sort of unrealistic
revolutionary orthodoxy in which Marxist and other oppositional
discourses have become mired.
Notes
1. In "The Uncompleted Argument," Appiah contends that Du Bois is held

in thrall by two equally intractable principles of the Other's discourse:
The thesis in this dialectic-which Du Bois reports as the American
Negro's attempt to "minimize race distinctions"-is the denial of
difference. Du Bois' antithesis is the acceptance of difference, along
with a claim that each group has its part to play; that the white race
and its racial Other are related not as superior but as complemen-
taries; that the Negro message is, with the white one, part of the
message of humankind.
I call this pattern the classic dialectic for a simple reason: we find it
in feminism also-on the one hand, a simple claim to equality, a
denial of substantial difference; on the other, a claim to a special
message, revaluing the feminine Other not as the helpmeet of sex-
ism, but as the New Woman. (25)
2. This point is summarized in The Narrative of Liberation, 172.
3. However, there is some dissent about Senghor's and Cesaire's beliefs in a
biological blackness; in The Collected Poetry of Aime Cesaire, translators Eshleman
and Smith write, "Senghor was understood-perhaps wrongly-to consider
black culture as the product of a black nature.... CUsaire seems to have sha
Senghor's view in the early part of his career ... In an interview with Jacqu
Leiner in 1978, however, he maintained that for him black culture had ne
had anything to do with biology and everything to do with a combination
geography and history: identity in suffering, not in genetic material, determ
the bond among black people of different origins" (6).
4. See Kenneth W. Warren, 178-80.
5. These tenets are delineated explicitly by Bonnie J. Barthold in parts one
and two of Black Time.
6. See Helene Cixous's contributions in The Newly Born Woman and Luce
Irigaray's This Sex Which Is Not One, 34. Both positions are summarized in chap-
ter one of Fuss, "The 'Risk' of Essence" (1-21), and in chapter four, "Luce
Irigaray's Language of Essence" (55-72).
7. See Toril Moi's Sexual/Textual Politics, 139 and 147-48, and Monique Pla-
za's "'Phallomorphic Power' and the Psychology of 'Woman"' for some of the
more well-known criticisms leveled at Irigaray in particular. These charges are
summarized by Fuss (56-57).
8. See chapter two, "Anti-Slavery Movement and the Birth of Women's
Rights," in Women, Race and Class, 33. For more on the relationship, see also
chapter four, "Racism in the Woman Suffrage Movement."
9. For an analysis of the role of gender in the division of plantation labor, see
chapter one, "'My Mother Was Much of a Woman': Slavery," in Labor of Love,
Labor of Sorrow, by Jacqueline Jones.
10. See 122-23, Black Women Writers at Work, ed. Claudia Tate. For a discussion
of Morrison's position on feminism see pp. 299-324, "The Women's Movement
and Black Discontent," in When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on
Race and Sex in America, by Paula Giddings.
11. I am reminded of an incident that took place at the opening ceremonies of
a feminist graduate students' conference I attended, where the white opening
speaker set the tone for the conference by describing in reverential detail Maya
Angelou's appearance on stage the day before.
"Picture, if you can," she said, "a SIX-FOOT, BIG, EBONY BLACK
WOMAN, wearing a red, yellow, and green caftan and a headdress." She paused
in emphatic silence.
"It was an empowering experience."
Empowering indeed, but for whom? That was the last word I heard on black
feminism for the next three days.
12. See the debate between Gates ("'What's Love Got to Do with It?"') and
Baker ("In Dubious Battle"), on the one hand, and Joyce Joyce ("The Black
Canon"), on the other, in the Winter 1987 issue of New Literary History. Joyce
advocates a return to the black scholarship of the 1960s and 1970s, which "saw
a direct relationship between Black lives-Black realities-and Black literature"
(338), and scolds those whom she sees as "sell-outs," such as Gates and Baker,
who have cast in their lot with the post-structuralists who seek to dismantle that
relationship (as she sees it). They, on the other hand, dismiss her position as one
of "minstrel simplicity" and feel that by opening up black literature and expe-
rience to the rigors of post-structural theoretical critique, it is possible to bring it
into the realm of theoretical debate on an equal footing.
13. Gates actually has been accused of a form of racial determinism: see
Tzvetan Todorov, "'Race,' Writing, and Culture," 376.
Works Cited
Appiah, Anthony. "The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of

Race." 'Race,' Writing, and Difference. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1986. 21-37.
Baker, Houston A., Jr. "In Dubious Battle." New Literary History 18.2 (Winter
1987): 363-69.
Barthold, BonnieJ. Black Time: Fiction of Africa, the Caribbean and the United States.
New Haven: Yale UP, 1981.
Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration
in the Caribbean. Mona, Jamaica: Savacou, 1978.
. "The Love Axe (1): Developing a Caribbean Aesthetic, 1962-1974."
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Literature. Ed. Houston A. Baker, Jr. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1976. 23-37.
Carby, Hazel. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American
Woman Novelist. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987.
Cesaire, Aime. The Collected Poetry ofAime Cesaire. Trans. Clayton Eshleman and
Annette Smith. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1983.
Cixous, Helene. The Newly Born Woman. Trans. Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 1986.
Cudjoe, Selwyn R. "Maya Angelou and the Autobiographical Statement." Black
Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation. Ed. Mari Evans. New York:
Anchor/Doubleday, 1984. 6-24.
Davies, Carole Boyce. Preface. "Talking It Over: Women, Writing and Femi-
nism." Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature. Ed. Carole Boyce
Davies and Elaine Savory Fido. Trenton: Africa World P, 1990. ix-xix.
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Rights." Women, Race and Class. New York: Random, 1981. 30-45.
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York: Random, 1981. 70-86.
Du Plessis, Rachel. "For the Etruscans." The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on
Women, Literature and Theory. Ed. Elaine Showalter. New York: Pantheon,
1985.271-91.
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bridge: Harvard UP, 1989.
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London: Routledge, 1989.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. "'What's Love Got to Do with It?': Critical The
Integrity, and the Black Idiom." New Literary History 18.2 (Winter 198
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"Racism in the Profession." African Literature Association Bulleti
(1989): 11-21.
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Oxford UP, 1988.
. "State of Florida vs. Luther Campbell." Rpt. in Passages: A Chronicle of the
Humanities 1 (1991): 3.
Giddings, Paula. "The Women's Movement and Black Discontent." When and
Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America. New York:
Bantam, 1985. 299-324.
Greene, Gayle, and Coppelia Kahn, eds. Making a Difference: Feminist Li

Criticism. London: Methuen, 1985.
Harding, Sandra G. "Other 'Others' and Fractured Identities: Issues fo
temologists." The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca and London: Corn
1986. 163-96.
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Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter with
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Jameson, Fredric. "The Dialectic of Utopia and Ideology." The Political Uncon-
scious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981. 270-95.
Jones, Jacqueline. "'My Mother Was Much of a Woman': Slavery." Labor of Love,
Labor of Sorrow. New York: Vintage, 1986. 11-43.
Joyce, Joyce Ann. "The Black Canon: Reconstructing Black American Literary
Criticism." New Literary History 18.2 (Winter 1987): 335-44.
Moi, Toril. SexuallTextual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. New York: Methuen,
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Morrison, Toni. Interview. Black Women Writers at Work. By Claudia Tate. New
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Plaza, Monique. "'Phallomorphic Power' and the Psychology of 'Woman."' Ide-
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Pantheon, 1985. 243-70.
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Black Aesthetics, Feminist Aesthetics, and the Problems of Oppositional Discourse

Author(s): Belinda Edmondson

In recent years American and, more particularly, Europ

c 1992 by Cultural Critique. 0882-4371 (Fall 1992). All rights reserved.

guments of the (male) black literary theorists of the 196

from there I shall look at theoretical attempts by Rita Felski and

Locating Blackness: Negritude, Pan-Africanism, and the

Before proceeding to compare black and feminist aesthetics,

The cognizance of the political dimensions of Afri

his definitive essay on Caribbean aesthetics, approvingly cites Ja-

ernist and postmodernist schools, and, finally, the "auth

Feminist Aesthetics and the Question of Essence

Turning to the feminist sphere, one finds a similarly com

Black Aesthetics, Feminist Aesthetics: Are

Are the persistent similarities in feminist and black aesthetics

tional practices, the reverse is definitely not the case. Inde

Similarly, Elaine Showalter states that "in the reality to which

Insider-outsider social status will also help to dissolve an ei-

Following, the "female aesthetic" will produce artworks that

However, Du Plessis does acknowledge that other writing-n

Replacing Female Essence: The Feminist Public Sphere

nist public sphere as a better model from which to deve

egories, stating that "this repoliticization of the aesthetic sphere

[T]o expose critically the inadequacies of the rat

[E]ven the most subjective feminist writing... appeals to a notion of

Yet elsewhere she argues that there is no archetypal female sub-

defeating process" (75). This last clause is crucial to under

Like the original bourgeois public sphere, the feminist publi

While I find Felski's notion of feminist public sphere u

As Hazel Carby notes, the cult of true womanhood in nineteenth-

Moreover, debate within a public sphere is

the narratives of black and white women.'? Morrison is in the

essential-and yes, essentializing-concept of its own subjectivity,

Reading Blackly: Black Aesthetics and the

At this point it might be useful to outline current debat

The constitution of the Western male subject, after all, has

tion. It is hard not to see this as the critical version of the

There are echoes in Gates's complaint of the dictum that to b

black critic the wherewithal to see and deconstruct the hierarchies

since post-structuralist theory appears to have covered all bases

Subjectivity and the Marxist Dilemma

If we consider Gates's contortions from the wider sphere

monic institutions, and to do so without forfeiting a political de-

turalists have resolved the problem by revaluing essentialism

the determining factor ... is dependent upon who practices

However, while I will agree that highlighting positionality as

1. In "The Uncompleted Argument," Appiah contends that Du Bois is held

Appiah, Anthony. "The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of

Greene, Gayle, and Coppelia Kahn, eds. Making a Difference: Feminist Li

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