Cultural Studies

Volume 9 Issue 2: Special issue: Toni Morrison and the Curriculum, edited by Warren Crichton and Cameron McCarthy

Lawrence Grossberg, Janice Radway, Lawrence Grossberg, Janice Radway

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134805242
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Cultura popular en el arte

First published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

ARTICLES

POLITICIZING THE SPIRIT: ‘AMERICAN AFRICANISMS’ AND AFRICAN ANCESTORS IN THE ESSAYS OF TONI MORRISON¹

JOY JAMES

Within her non-fiction essays, Toni Morrison's dissection of racist paradigms is framed by a world view that testifies to African American ancestral spirits, the centrality of transcendent community, as well as her faith in the abilities of African American intellectuals to critique and ‘civilize’ a racist society. Reading Morrison as a cultural observer-practitioner, I share her Weltanschauung which privileges community and ancestors while confronting dehumanizing cultural representations and practices.

This reading of Morrison, which quotes extensively from her non-fiction, sketches a framework for viewing her observations on racist stereotypes and Black resistance. Even in its partiality, a sketch reveals clues for deciphering how Toni Morrison uncovers and recovers ground for ‘discredited knowledge’ in which ‘traditional’ and contemporary cultural beliefs held among African Americans are connected to political struggles.

The following outline of a conceptual site or world view is not an argument for Black ‘essentialism’—recognizing the political place of African American cultural views, which manifest and mutate through time and locations, neither constructs these views as quintessential or universal to everyone of African descent. Likewise, a passionate interest in African American intellectual and political resistance to anti-Black racism is not a synonym for indifference to non-African Americans or Black/non-Black accommodations to Eurocentrism and White supremacy.

‘American Africanisms’

My work requires me to think about how free I can be as an African-American woman writer in my genderized, sexualized, wholly racialized world. To think about (and wrestle with) the full implications of my situation leads me to consider what happens when other writers work in a highly and historically racialized society.

(Morrison, 1993:4)

Writers working in a highly racialized society often express an overt and covert fascination with Blackness. Morrison maintains that European Americans ‘choose to talk about themselves through and within a sometimes metaphorical, but always choked representation of an Africanist presence’ (Morrison, 1993: 17). This practice and its arsenal, which she labels ‘American Africanisms’, mirror (if not stem from) European Africanisms. The term ‘Africanism’ represents for Morrison:

the denotative and connotative blackness that African peoples have come to signify, as well as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and misreadings that accompany Eurocentric learning about these people As a disabling virus within literary discourse, Africanism has become, in the Eurocentric tradition that American education favors, both a way of talking about and a way of policing matters of class, sexual license, and repression, formations and exercises of power, and meditations on ethics and accountability.

(Morrison, 1993:6–7)

As a literary and political tool and vehicle, the Africanism ‘provides a way of contemplating chaos and civilization, desire and fear, and a mechanism for testing the problems and blessings of freedom’ (Morrison, 1993:4). The distinctive difference of the New World, writes Morrison, is that its claim to freedom coexisted with ‘the presence of the unfree within the heart of the democratic experiment’ (Morrison, 1993:48). It is arguably still the same. Morrison advises that we investigate ‘the Africanist character as surrogate and enabler’ and the use of the ‘Africanist idiom’ to mark difference or the ‘hip, sophisticated, ultra-urbane’. Her own investigations inform us that within the ‘construction of blackness and enslavement’ existed:

not only the not-free, but also with the dramatic polarity created by skin color, the projection of the not-me. The result was a playground for the imagination. What rose up out of collective needs to allay internal fears and to rationalize external exploitation was an [European] American Africanism—a fabricated brew of darkness, otherness, alarm, and desire that is uniquely American.

(Morrison, 1993:38)

Newly constructed beings and inhumanities, such as the White male as both exalted demigod and brutish enslaver, were sanctioned by literature. Morrison emphasizes the cultural aspects of dominance to critique the Euroamerican literary imagination:

cultural identities are formed and informed by a nation's literature… what seemed to be on the ‘mind’ of the literature of the United States was the self-conscious but highly problematic construction of the American as a new white man.²

(Morrison, 1993:39)

In the formation of this ‘new American’ identity, Blackness embodied in the African was indispensable to elevating Whiteness. In this elevation of Whiteness, the Africanist other became the device for ‘thinking about body, mind, chaos, kindness, and love; [and] provided the occasion for exercises in the absence of restraint, the presence of restraint, the contemplation of freedom and of aggression’ (Morrison, 1993:47–8). Within this framework, the boundaries of the conventional, literary imagination were set to ignore or rationalize enslavement and freedom-based-on-enslavement. Transgressing such boundaries is rarely encouraged. However, those determined to see themselves without mystification do transgress.

According to Morrison, historically an exceptional few, exceptionally brave European American writers attempted to free themselves of entrapment in Whiteness. Describing the courage of Herman Melville's tormented struggle to demystify ‘Whiteness’ in Moby Dick, she observes:

[T]o question the very notion of white progress, the very idea of racial superiority, of whiteness as privileged place in the evolutionary ladder of humankind, and to meditate on the fraudulent, self-destroying philosophy of that superiority, to ‘pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges,’ to drag the ‘judge himself to the bar,’—that was dangerous, solitary, radical work. Especially then. Especially now.

(Morrison, 1988:18)

Today, this ‘dangerous, solitary, radical work’ is discouraged by claims that ‘race’ or discussions of racism politicize and so pollute literary work:

When matters of race are located and called attention to in American literature, critical response has tended to be on the order of a humanistic nostrum—or a dismissal mandated by the label ‘political’. Excising the political from the life of the mind is a sacrifice that has proven costly. I think of this erasure as a kind of trembling hypochondria always curing itself with unnecessary surgery.

(Morrison, 1993:12)

This surgery is also selective, usually performed only upon those deviating from the dominant ideologies. Literary works derive their meaning from world views which intend political consequences. World views carry cultural values as well as political agendas. Only by replicating or naturalizing the dominant political ideologies, in effect reproducing the racialized hegemony, can writers claim to be apolitical. Morrison clearly identifies her work as a practical art with a political focus, writing in ‘Rootedness: the ancestor as foundation’:

I am not interested in indulging myself in some private, closed exercise of my imagination that fulfills only the obligation of my personal dreams — which is to say, yes, the work must be political. It must have that as its thrust. That's a pejorative term in critical circles now: if a work of art has any political influence in it, somehow it's tainted. My feeling is just the opposite; if it has none, it is tainted.

(Morrison, 1984:344–5)

These writings enable critical discussions in a society guarded against analyses of White supremacy. Her critical thought, invigorating analyses despite increasing calls for the irrelevance of ‘race’, is particularly important in a society which routinely rejects such critiques as politically uncivil. Racial discourse seems directed or pulled by marionette strings working to curtail anti-racist critiques. As Morrison notes:

For three hundred years black Americans insisted that ‘race’ was no usefully distinguishing factor in human relationships. During those same three centuries every academic discipline, including theology, history and natural science, insisted ‘race’ was the determining factor in human development. When blacks discovered they had shaped or become a culturally formed race, and that it had specific and revered difference, suddenly they were told there is no such thing as ‘race,’ biological or cultural, that matters and that genuinely intellectual exchange cannot accommodate it. In trying to come to some terms about ‘race’ and writing, I am tempted to throw my hands up. It always seemed to me that the people who invented the hierarchy of ‘race’ when it was convenient for them ought not to be the ones to explain it away, now that it does not suit their purposes for it to exist. But there is culture and both gender and ‘race’ inform and are informed by it. Afro-American culture exists and though it is clear (and becoming clearer) how it has responded to Western culture, the instances where and means by which it has shaped Western culture are poorly recognized or understood.

(Morrison, 1988:3)

African American culture exists within the world views which shape and inform it. This culture and its traditional practices reappear in Morrison's work. For instance, typical of the African (American) call-and-response tradition, Toni Morrison receives the call to testify to world views greater than White myths and to demystify, and thereby resist, a Frankensteinian Blackness.

Politicized by and politicizing the spirit, she issues her own charge to intellectuals and educators. The spirit which Morrison politicized is one of Black resistance to oppression, a resistance historically rooted in the African American community, elders and ancestors. The spirit she politicizes fuels current social debates. The world view that shapes her politics is rooted in traditional African culture. This world view coexists with and influences other world views within the dominant culture.

Traditional world views

[In Song of Solomon] I could blend the acceptance of the supernatural and a profound rootedness in the real world at the same time with neither taking precedence over the other. It is indicative of the cosmology, the way in which Black people looked at the world. We are very practical people, very down-to-earth, even shrewd people. But within that practicality we also accepted what I suppose could be called superstition and magic, which is another way of knowing things. But to blend those two worlds together at the same time was enhancing not limiting. And some of those things were ‘discredited knowledge’ that Black people had; discredited only because Black people were discredited therefore what they knew was ‘discredited.’ And also because the push toward upward social mobility would mean to get as far away from that kind of knowledge as possible. That kind of knowledge has a very strong place in my work.

(Morrison, 1984:342)

Distinguishing world view from superstition requires sketching the cosmology that grounds Toni Morrison's work. What some call ‘superstition’ or ‘magic’, in Traditional African Religions and Philosophies John Mbiti describes as aspects of a cultural world view:

Most [traditional] peoples…believe that the spirits are what remains of human beings when they die physically. This then becomes the ultimate status…the point of change or development beyond which [one] cannot go apart from a few national heroes who might become deified [Wo]Man does not, and need not, hope to become a spirit: [s]he is inevitably to become one, just as a child will automatically grow to become an adult.

(Mbiti, 1969:79)

Mbiti notes that historically African world views maintain nonlinear time in which the past, present and future coexist and overlap (this view is also held in other cultures and in some scientific communities). Traditional African cosmology sees the non-duality of time (as past, present, and future) and space (Mbiti, 1969). Rather than suggest a monolithic Africa, Mbiti's work describes the diversity of religions throughout the continent. Yet, he maintains, various organizing principles are prevalent despite ethnic and societal differences. The cosmology he documents rejects the socially constructed dichotomies between sacred and secular, spiritual and political, the individual and community characteristic of Western culture. This specific cosmology described by Mbiti reappears in African American culture. World views or values are not deterministic. One may choose. In fact, Mbiti, an African theologian trained in European universities, depicts Christianity as ‘superior’ to traditional African religions, religions which he notes share Christianity's monotheism. One may elect to reject the traditional world views shaping African cultures, as Mbiti does, or s/he may reaffirm these values, as Morrison does. Stating that ‘discredited knowledge’ has ‘a very strong place’ in her work, Morrison refuses to distance herself from a traditional African/African American cultural world view, despite the fact that academic or social assimilation and advancement ‘would mean to get as far away from that kind of knowledge as possible.’

Without considering the validity of this ‘discredited knowledge’ or academically marginalized belief system, some may perceive and portray Morrison's work as romantic, ungrounded mysticism. Outside of a world view that recognizes the values mirrored in her work, it is difficult to perceive of Toni Morrison as something other than exotic. Morrison's fiction is not mere phantasm. As her non-fiction essays explain, she writes within the framework of African American cultural values and political-spiritual perspectives.

Morrison's work clearly relies upon African-centered cultural paradigms, paradigms documented by academics, theologians, philosophers and sociologists. For centuries these paradigms have been derided by European colonization and Eurocentric thought, dismissed as primitive superstition. The dismissal of these values and their frameworks is traceable to European colonization on several continents for several centuries. Historically European racial mythology constructed people whose physiology and ancestry designated whether they create theory, philosophy and cosmology or merely ape superstition. Today, the dismissal of ‘discredited knowledge,’ held by not fully assimilated African Americans, branches from the historical disparagement of the African origins of these views. As Congolese philosopher K.Kia Fu-Kiau notes in The African Book Without Title:

Africa was invaded…to civilize its people…[‘civilization’] having ‘accomplished’ her ‘noble’ mission African people are still known as people without logic, people without systems, people without concepts African wisdom hidden in proverbs, the old way of theorizing among people of oral literature [cannot be] seen and understood in the way [the] western world sees and understands [a proverb] For us… proverbs are principles, theories, warehouses of knowledge…they have ‘force deloi,’ [the] force of law.

(Fu-Kiau, 1980:62–3)

A people whose traditional culture is ‘known’ to be illogical, without complex belief systems, are generally received in racialized societies as dubious contributors to intellectual life or theory. Spoken and unspoken debates about their epistemic ‘sub-culture’ range ideologically from reactionary conservatism to progressive radicalism.

Toni Morrison's writings are radical, precisely because (while cognizant of the value of aspects of European culture) they reject the Eurocentric mandated label of ‘primitive’ for traditional African cosmology and the epistemological aspects of African Ameri...