Splitting the Difference: Black Studies’ Theory Wars and bell hooks’s “Postmodern Blackness”

It may be hard to fathom, but thirty years ago, it was very much an open question as to whether Theory and Black Studies were compatible as domains of university-based inquiry.1

In the late 1980s, the field of African American literary criticism was the terrain on which Black Studies played out its own Theory wars. On one side was the vanguard of the field, led by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Houston A. Baker, Jr., whose monographs and edited collections aimed to demonstrate how Theory shadowed black literary and cultural expression in ways that highlighted their formal complexity and aesthetic autonomy. On the other side were those who carried the banner of 1960s' and 1970s' student activism into the predominantly white space of the English classroom. For these critics, Theory, no matter how deconstructive of hierarchy, could not help but evoke a Eurocentric bias, and thus had limited analytic value for studying the black experience, including its literature and culture.

Things came to a head in 1987 when Gates's Figures in Black (published by Oxford), celebrated by many academics as a breakthrough in criticism, was opposed by Barbara Christian's essay "The Race for Theory" (published in Cultural Critique) and by Joyce A. Joyce's "The Black Canon" (published in New Literary History). Joyce's essay took the case directly to "Black poststructuralist criticism," arguing that "no matter how the Black man merges into American mainstream society, he or she [sic] looks at himself from an individualistic perspective that enables him or her to accept elitist American values and thus widen the chasm between his or her worldview and that of those masses of Blacks whose lives are still stifled by oppressive environmental, intellectual phenomena."2 The essay, which aligned Theory with a certain assimilationist black middle-class masculinity, elicited strongly worded responses by Gates and Baker, who accused Joyce of anti-intellectualism, shoddy scholarship, and playing to the biases of the journal's predominantly white readership. In turn, Joyce contended it was Gates and Baker's "hostile, warlike, ungracious" commentary that had aired dirty laundry by "fail[ing] to attack by subversion (to speak in such a way that the master does not grasp their meaning)—in other words, by not signifying."3 All of this appeared in a single issue of NLH, and its fallout was wide-ranging. Notwithstanding the pronoun slippage in Joyce's first essay, gender difference was constitutive to the disagreement, leaving much of that era's criticism divided between male theorists, on one side, and female historicists, on the other.

Which is why when bell hooks's "Postmodern Blackness" appeared in the inaugural issue of Postmodern Culture (Fall 1990), it felt like an intervention sent to overcome an interminable stalemate. Perhaps by critical necessity, the essay's act of mediation was itself mediated in a then novel way. As the first "electronic journal of interdisciplinary criticism," Postmodern Culture did not have a print component. Instead, as its opening editorial stated, the journal was "formatted as ASCII text (the character-code used by all personal computers)," which "permits the items in the journal to be sent as electronic mail." Coded as "electronic text," articles would be "more amenable to revision" and might "[foster] conversation more than printed publications can." The editors noted that issues could be downloaded "from the mainframe (where you receive your mail) to a wide variety of computers," and that, in a prefiguration of copy and paste, readers could "import [text] into most word-processing programs."4 Though widely known as an e-journal today, this was an innovative mode of publishing, distribution, and circulation in 1990. The affordances of electronic media, the editors believed, reflected the discursive potential of postmodern culture as such. In this light, hooks shifted the terms of the debate by virtue of where and how she published her piece. Appearing alongside essays by Andrew Ross, Laura Kipnis, George Yúdice, and Kathy Acker, "Postmodern Blackness" intervened in Black Studies' Theory wars sideways, addressing itself not to the partisans of the Theory wars in Black Studies but to anyone interested in postmodernism's value to their fields of study.

"The idea that there is no meaningful connection between black experience and critical thinking about aesthetics or culture must be continually interrogated."5 At the outset, hooks seems to side decisively with Gates and Baker. This may have been a surprising since, at that time, hooks, serving on the faculty at Oberlin College, was the most important black feminist theorist in the academy. Published before she turned thirty, hooks's study Ain't I a Woman? (1981) was already hailed as a classic of activist scholarship, and two other books on black feminism had come out since. But the alliance with Theory makes sense given the milieu in which hooks intervenes. She recounts being confronted at a dinner party where the "only...other black person present" said she was "wasting her time" with Theory, "that 'this stuff does not relate in any way to what's happening with black people.'" Her riposte was directed as much to the white onlookers as it was to her interlocutor: "racism is perpetuated when blackness is associated solely with concrete gut level experience conceived either as opposing or having no connection to abstract thinking and the production of critical theory." For hooks, limiting blackness to experience is not simply an error of interpretation; it is a category error that rehearses white stereotypes of blackness. Here the assumed white readership of the New Literary History debate finds some of its prejudgments explicitly called out rather than politely talked around.

This evident alliance with Gates and Baker is not unconditional, however. In the essay, hooks clearly articulates the need to be critical of Theory too, and specifically from a black feminist perspective. "The failure to recognize a critical black presence in the culture and in most scholarship and writing on postmodernism compels a black reader, particularly a black female reader, to interrogate her interest in a subject where those who discuss and write about it seem not to know black women exist or to even consider the possibility that we might be somewhere writing or saying something that should be listened to, or producing art that should be seen, heard, approached with intellectual seriousness." If black resistance to Theory comes from an assumption of common experience, Theory's resistance to blackness comes from an ignorance of different experiences. Though these positions seem opposed, in fact hooks draws our attention to how neither side reckons with the embodied intellectuality (or standpoint) of black women and, by extension, black feminism.

By claiming black women's standpoint within feminist theory, hooks's essay splits the difference in Black Studies' Theory wars. She does this by theorizing the political valences of postmodern blackness. Where Gates and Baker, in 1987, embraced Theory as a bulwark against sociological reductionism and "politicized" readings of literature, hooks contends that postmodernism is a condition, not merely a reading strategy, and thus must be theorized at the level of the social. At the same time, hooks pushes back against romanticized notions of 1960s' struggle, claiming that "black power ideology reflected a modernist sensibility" that was "rendered irrelevant as militant protest was stifled by a powerful repressive *postmodern* state [formatted with asterisks in the original]." In other words, recourse to notions of authenticity and self-possession in Black Power discourse was no match for the capillary, internetworked, and hyperreal ways in which the state hollowed out the movement from within. This "loss of political grounding" has been an object of melancholic attachment for activists ever since. But for hooks, proving herself as deft a thinker as Jameson, Harvey, or Spivak, this loss opens up a unique opportunity: "it has become necessary to find new avenues for transmitting the messages of black liberation struggle, new ways to talk about racism and other politics of domination...We must engage decolonization as a critical practice if we are to have meaningful chances of survival." Anticipating the argument laid out by Homi K. Bhabha in The Location of Culture (1994), decolonization, for hooks, is not simply a mode of collective resistance in extant frames of representation but a reimaging of black subjectivity as such in the field of representation.

In this way, hooks makes the deconstruction of identity — what she calls "the postmodernist critique of essentialism" — compatible with and a requirement of liberatory struggle. As important as the Black Power movement was, its "reinscription of modernist master narratives of authority which privilege some voices by denying voice to others" must be let go. Here hooks's critique of identity echoes black feminist critiques of the movement's misogyny and homophobia. But what comes after identity? For hooks, it is postmodern experience itself:

The overall impact of the postmodern condition is that many other groups now share with black folks a sense of deep alienation, despair, uncertainty, loss of a sense of grounding, even if it is not informed by shared circumstance. Radical postmodernism calls attention to those sensibilities which are shared across the boundaries of class, gender, and race, and which could be fertile ground for the construction of empathy — ties that would promote recognition of common commitments and serve as a base for solidarity and coalition.

We might blush at hooks's seemingly naïve recourse to "empathy," but the name she applies to that desire for connection — "yearning" — would not only become the focus of her subsequent intellectual output but also inspire a wave of politically informed, feminist-driven affect theory.6 This is hooks's effort, in other words, to theorize Left collective resistance to postmodernism from within. The point, for her, is not to deny our subjection to that condition but to pursue our own lines of flight made possible by it.

In this short but powerful essay, hooks reconciles Theory with Black Studies in a way that opens up narrowly interpretive position-takings to broader questions of ethics and epistemology. She foregoes the representational shell game of suggesting which interpretation is "blacker." Instead, hooks poses a meta-critical question that reframes Spivak's own effort, in 1983, to reconcile Theory with minority-oriented historicism. In 1990, the question hooks asks is not, Can the subaltern speak?, but, Who's asking, and why? The flux of the postmodern condition, according to hooks's reading of Black Power, rendered obsolete the notion that minority subjects could somehow be true to their representation. Instead, the critical project moving forward is to take people's multidimensional experience of that flux as a new starting point for "solidarity and coalition."

In its time, "Postmodern Blackness" remediated Black Studies' Theory wars by showing that the value of Theory's critical perspective, when (self-)interrogated, could be traced to its embodied praxis, and that such praxis, far from being self-evident, emerged out of the ungroundedness of formerly colonized identities. The essay was by no means the only work to posit this, but it was the most influential in laying the groundwork for the Theory in Black Studies to come — work that, from Hartman to Moten to Edwards to Weheliye,7 has found political meaning in the internal variegation of black literary and cultural expression.

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Kinohi Nishikawa is Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies at Princeton University. His first book, Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2018.

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