Tradition and the Black Atlantic by Henry Louis Gates

Author:Henry Louis Gates
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2010-07-06T04:00:00+00:00

Some people might describe this utopian moment as the externalization of the quest romance. But note the emergence here of the familiar historicist dialectic of subversion and containment: That power produces its own subversion is held to be a fact about the constitution of the subject itself. And some will be skeptical about the notion of a revolutionary literature that is implicit here. If Said made of Fanon an advocative of post-post-modern counter-narratives of liberation, if JanMohamed made of Fanon a Manichean theorist of colonialism as absolute negation, and if Bhabha cloned, from Fanon’s theoria, another third world post-structuralist, Parry ’s Fanon (which I generally find persuasive) turns out to confirm her own rather optimistic vision of literature and social action. “This book, it is hoped, will be a mirror,” wrote a twenty-six-year-old Fanon, and in rereading these readings, including Bhabha’s own recent revisioning of Fanon as prophet of our post–cold war post–9/11 world order, I find it hard to avoid a sort of tableau of narcissism, with Fanon himself as the other that can only reflect and consolidate the critical self.

And perhaps we can hear a warning about the too uncritical appropriations of a Fanon in Spivak’s famous rebuttal to the criticism concerning the recuperation or effacement of the native’s voice. The course we’ve been plotting leads us, then, to what is, in part, Spivak’s critique of Benita Parry’s critique of Abdul JanMohamed’s critique of Homi Bhabha’s critique of Edward Said’s critique of colonial discourse.

Now, in Spivak’s view, Parry “is in effect bringing back the ‘native informant syndrome’ and using it differently in a critique of neo-colonialism.”32 When Benita Parry takes us—and by this I mean Homi Bhabha, Abdul JanMohamed, Gayatri Spivak—to task for not being able to listen to the natives or to let the natives speak, she forgets that we are natives, too. We talk like Defoe’s Friday, only much better.33 Thus, in straining for a voice of indigenous resistance, we can succumb to another quest romance, this time for the transparent “real” voice of the native. This has so many of the properties of a somewhat displaced model in the 19th century class stratified management of the culture of imperialism, that I believe that it is my task now to be vigilant about this desire to hear the native. Also, let me tell you that the native’s not a fool and within the fact of this extraordinary search for the “true” native which has been going on for decades, perhaps even a century or more, the native himself or herself is aware of this particular value.34

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.