Date: Thu, 5 Jun 2003 22:24:18 -0700 (PDT)
From: "J.M. Adams" <ringfingers-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: bell hooks and Brian Cliff on Postcoloniality and Essentialism


Following are two essays on essentialism, the first by
 Brian Cliff and the second by bell hooks.  The first
author comes to some conlcusions about essentialism
which may be helpful as well while recognizing the
paradoxes of the concept itself - indeed, perhaps at
times it may be useful to engage in a "strategic
essentialism" as they put it, but then even when this
is engaged in, do the engagers not recognize that they
are simply being strategic rather than "authentic"?
The second article argues that "the critique of
essentialism encouraged by postmodernist thought is
useful for African-Americans concerned with
reformulating outmoded notions of identity. We have
too long had imposed upon us, both from the outside
and the inside, a narrow constricting notion of
blackness. Postmodern critiques of essentialism which
challenge notions of universality and static
over-determined identity within mass culture and mass
consciousness can open up new possibilities for the
construction of the self and the assertion of agency."

***

Essentialism

by Brian Cliff

http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Postcolonial/Essentialism.html

One of the central modes of representation is
essentialism. Diana Fuss says that essentialism 
is most commonly understood as a belief in the real,
true essence of things, the invariable and fixed
properties which define the 'whatness' of a given
entity. . . . Importantly, essentialism is typically
defined in opposition to difference. . . . The
opposition is a helpful one in that it reminds us that
a complex system of cultural, social, psychical, and
historical differences, and not a set of pre-existent
human essences, position and constitute the subject.
However, the binary articulation of essentialism and
difference can also be restrictive, even obfuscating,
in that it allows us to ignore or deny the differences
within essentialism. (Essentially Speaking [1989]:
xi-xii). 


As evidenced by the range of the critics quoted below,
the term essentialism spreads across multiple fields
of study. The fact that this page exists as part of a
postcolonial studies web site points both to the
broad-based nature of postcolonial studies and to the
debate on where the borders of postcolonial studies
should be drawn, if at all. 



In a specifically postcolonial context, we find
essentialism in the reduction of the indigenous people
to an "essential" idea of what it means to be
African/Indian/Arabic, thus simplifying the task of
colonization. Nationalist and liberationist movements
often "write back" and reduce the colonizers to an
essence, simultaneously defining themselves in terms
of an authentic essence which may deny or invert the
values of the ascribed characteristics (see
discussions on reclaiming the term "Third World,"
particularly in Chandra Mohanty's "Introduction" to
Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed.
Chandra Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres [1991]
1-47). Edward Said argues against this inversion,
suggesting that "in Post-colonial national states, the
liabilities of such essences as the Celtic spirit,
négritude, or Islam are clear: they have much to do
not only with the native manipulators, who also use
them to cover up contemporary faults, corruptions,
tyrannies, but also with the embattled imperial
contexts out of which they came and in which they were
felt to be necessary" (Culture and Imperialism [1994]
16). 

Salman Rushdie describes essentialism as "the
respectable child of old-fashioned exoticism. It
demands that sources, forms, style, language and
symbol all derive from a supposedly homogeneous and
unbroken tradition. Or else" ("'Commonwealth
Literature Does Not Exist," Imaginary Homelands:
Essays and Criticism 1981-1991 [1991] 67). Wole
Soyinka strikes a similar note in his analysis of the
potential pitfalls of an essentialist movement such as
Négritude, which "stayed within a pre-set system of
Eurocentric intellectual analysis of both man and his
society, and tried to re-define the African and his
society in those externalized terms" (Myth, Literature
and the African World [1976] 129, 136). 

While Rushdie and Soyinka are right to point out the
potential for locking oneself within a framework set
in place by the colonizers, other writers insist that
some subversive, empowering force can come from the
employment of essentialist strategies. While she
recognizes the shortcomings, Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak also pays a great deal of attention to what she
calls "strategic essentialism," as engaged in by the
Subaltern Studies group (see her essay "Subaltern
Studies: Deconstructing Historiography," available
from at least five different sources). Trinh T.
Minh-Ha personalizes this dilemma for us: 


Every path I/i take is edged with thorns. On the one
hand, i play into the Savior's hands by concentrating
on authenticity, for my attention is numbed by it and
diverted from other important issues; on the other
hand, i do feel the necessity to return to my
so-called roots, since they are the fount of my
strength, the guiding arrow to which i constantly
refer before heading for a new direction. ("Writing
Postcoloniality and Feminism" in The Post-colonial
Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths,
and Helen Tiffin [1995] 268. 


Ngugi Wa Thiong'o is certainly less troubled by this
quandary. Ngugi complicates the issue by placing the
question of language at the base of the debate: "[t]he
choice of language and the use to which language is
put is central to a people's definition of themselves
in relation to their natural and social environment .
. . by our continuing to write in foreign languages,
paying homage to them, are we not on the cultural
level continuing that neo-colonial slavish and
cringing spirit?" (Decolonising the Mind: the Politics
of Language in African Literature [1986] 4, 26).
Interestingly enough, where Ngugi would disagree with
Rushdie and Soyinka on issues of essentialism or
authenticity, he also differs on language: Ngugi has
chosen to reject English for Gikuyu and Kiswahili (in
fact, Decolonising the Mind is Ngugi's "farewell to
English"), whereas Rushdie and Soyinka have chosen to
write in English. 

These writers represent, at best, a mere cross-section
of those who concern themselves with questions of
essentialism and authenticity. Ironically, the very
process of selecting these writers and these
quotations depends on the use of essentialism and
representation. As Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean,
the editors of The Spivak Reader (1996), put it, one
"cannot simply assert, 'I will be anti-essentialist'
and make that stick, for you cannot not be an
essentialist to some degree. The critique of
essentialism is predicated upon essentialism" (7). One
of the many paradoxes encountered in postcolonial
studies. 

***

Postmodern Blackness
bell hooks 

[1] Postmodernist discourses are often exclusionary
even when, having been accused of lacking concrete
relevance, they call attention to and appropriate the
experience of "difference" and "otherness" in order to
provide themselves with oppositional political
meaning, legitimacy, and immediacy. Very few
African-American intellectuals have talked or written
about postmodernism. Recently at a dinner party, I
talked about trying to grapple with the significance
of postmodernism for contemporary black experience. It
was one of those social gatherings where only one
other black person was present. The setting quickly
became a field of contestation. I was told by the
other black person that I was wasting my time, that
"this stuff does not relate in any way to what's
happening with black people." Speaking in the presence
of a group of white onlookers, staring at us as though
this encounter was staged for their benefit, we
engaged in a passionate discussion about black
experience. Apparently, no one sympathized with my
insistence that 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. The idea that there is no meaningful
connection between black experience and critical
thinking about aesthetics or culture must be
continually interrogated. 

[2] My defense of postmodernism and its relevance to
black folks sounded good but I worried that I lacked
conviction, largely because I approach the subject
cautiously and with suspicion. Disturbed not so much
by the "sense" of postmodernism but by the
conventional language used when it is written or
talked about and by those who speak it, I find myself
on the outside of the discourse looking in. As a
discursive practice it is dominated primarily by the
voices of white male intellectuals and/or academic
elites who speak to and about one another with coded
familiarity. Reading and studying their writing to
understand postmodernism in its multiple
manifestations, I appreciate it but feel little
inclination to ally myself with the academic hierarchy
and exclusivity pervasive in the movement today. 

[3] Critical of most writing on postmodernism, I
perhaps am more conscious of the way in which the
focus on "otherness and difference" that is often
alluded to in these works seems to have little
concrete impact as an analysis or standpoint that
might change the nature and direction of postmodernist
theory. Since much of this theory has been constructed
in reaction to and against high modernism, there is
seldom any mention of black experience or writings by
black people in this work, specifically black women
(though in more recent work one may see reference to
Cornel West, the black male scholar who has most
engaged postmodernist discourse). Even if an aspect of
black culture is the subject of postmodern critical
writing the works cited will usually be those of black
men. A work that comes immediately to mind is Andrew
Ross' chapter "Hip, and the Long Front of Color" in
_No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture_;
though an interesting reading, it constructs black
culture as though black women have had no role in
black cultural production. At the end of Meaghan
Morris' discussion of postmodernism included in her
collection of essays _The Pirate's Fiance: Feminism
and Postmodernism_, she provides a bibliography of
works by women, identifying them as important
contributions to a discourse on postmodernism that
offers new insight as well as challenging male
theoretical hegemony. Even though many of the works do
not directly address postmodernism, they address
similar concerns. There are no references to work by
black women. 

[4] 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. This is especially the
case with works that go on and on about the way in
which postmodernist discourse has opened up a
theoretical terrain where "difference and otherness"
can be considered legitimate issues in the academy.
Confronting both the lack of recognition of black
female presence that much postmodernist theory
reinscribes and the resistance on the part of most
black folks to hearing about real connections between
postmodernism and black experience, I enter a
discourse, a practice, where there may be no ready
audience for my words, no clear listener, uncertain,
then, that my voice can or will be heard. 

[5] During the Sixties, black power movements were
influenced by perspectives that could be easily
labeled modernist. Certainly many of the ways black
folks addressed issues of identity conformed to a
modernist universalizing agenda. There was little
critique among black militants of patriarchy as a
master narrative. Despite the fact that black power
ideology reflected a modernist sensibility, these
elements were soon rendered irrelevant as militant
protest was stifled by a powerful repressive
*postmodern* state. The period directly after the
black power movement was a time when major news
magazines carried articles with cocky headlines like
"what ever happened to Black America?" This was an
ironic reply to the aggressive unmet demand by
decentered, marginalized black subjects who had at
least for the moment successfully demanded a hearing,
who had made it possible for black liberation to be a
national political agenda. In the wake of the black
power movement, after so many rebels were slaughtered
and lost, many of these voices were silenced by a
repressive state and others became inarticulate; 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. Radical postmodernist
practice, most powerfully conceptualized as a
"politics of difference," should incorporate the
voices of displaced, marginalized, exploited, and
oppressed black people. 

[6] It is sadly ironic that the contemporary discourse
which talks the most about heterogeneity, the
decentered subject, declaring breakthroughs that allow
recognition of otherness, still directs its critical
voice primarily to a specialized audience, one that
shares a common language rooted in the very master
narratives it claims to challenge. If radical
postmodernist thinking is to have a transformative
impact then a critical break with the notion of
"authority" as "mastery over" must not simply be a
rhetorical device, it must be reflected in habits of
being, including styles of writing as well as chosen
subject matter. Third-world scholars, especially
elites, and white critics who passively absorb white
supremacist thinking, and therefore never notice or
look at black people on the streets, at their jobs,
who render us invisible with their gaze in all areas
of daily life, are not likely to produce liberatory
theory that will challenge racist domination, or to
promote a breakdown in traditional ways of seeing and
thinking about reality, ways of constructing aesthetic
theory and practice. From a different standpoint
Robert Storr makes a similar critique in the global
issue of _Art in America_ when he asserts: To be sure,
much postmodernist critical inquiry has centered
precisely on the issues of "difference" and
"otherness." On the purely theoretical plane the
exploration of these concepts has produced some
important results, but in the absence of any sustained
research into what artists of color and others outside
the mainstream might be up to, such discussions become
rootless instead of radical. Endless second guessing
about the latent imperialism of intruding upon other
cultures only compounded matters, preventing or
excusing these theorists from investigating what
black, Hispanic, Asian and Native American artists
were actually doing. Without adequate concrete
knowledge of and contact with the non-white "other,"
white theorists may move in discursive theoretical
directions that are threatening to and potentially
disruptive of that critical practice which would
support radical liberation struggle. 

[7] The postmodern critique of "identity," though
relevant for renewed black liberation struggle, is
often posed in ways that are problematic. Given a
pervasive politic of white supremacy which seeks to
prevent the formation of radical black subjectivity,
we cannot cavalierly dismiss a concern with identity
politics. Any critic exploring the radical potential
of postmodernism as it relates to racial difference
and racial domination would need to consider the
implications of a critique of identity for oppressed
groups. Many of us are struggling to find new
strategies of resistance. We must engage
decolonization as a critical practice if we are to
have meaningful chances of survival even as we must
simultaneously cope with the loss of political
grounding which made radical activism more possible. I
am thinking here about the postmodernist critique of
essentialism as it pertains to the construction of
"identity" as one example. 

[8] Postmodern theory that is not seeking to simply
appropriate the experience of "otherness" in order to
enhance its discourse or to be radically chic should
not separate the "politics of difference" from the
politics of racism. To take racism seriously one must
consider the plight of underclass people of color, a
vast majority of whom are black. For African-Americans
our collective condition prior to the advent of
postmodernism and perhaps more tragically expressed
under current postmodern conditions has been and is
characterized by continued displacement, profound
alienation and despair. Writing about blacks and
postmodernism, Cornel West describes our collective
plight: There is increasing class division and
differentiation, creating on the one hand a
significant black middle-class, highly anxiety-
ridden, insecure, willing to be co-opted and
incorporated into the powers that be, concerned with
racism to the degree that it poses constraints on
upward social mobility; and, on the other, a vast and
growing black underclass, an underclass that embodies
a kind of walking nihilism of pervasive drug
addiction, pervasive alcoholism, pervasive homicide,
and an exponential rise in suicide. Now because of the
deindustrialization, we also have a devastated black
industrial working class. We are talking here about
tremendous hopelessness. This hopelessness creates
longing for insight and strategies for change that can
renew spirits and reconstruct grounds for collective
black liberation struggle. 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. 

[9] "Yearning" is the word that best describes a
common psychological state shared by many of us,
cutting across boundaries of race, class, gender, and
sexual practice. Specifically in relation to the
postmodernist deconstruction of "master" narratives,
the yearning that wells in the hearts and minds of
those whom such narratives have silenced is the
longing for critical voice. It is no accident that
"rap" has usurped the primary position of R&B music
among young black folks as the most desired sound, or
that it began as a form of "testimony" for the
underclass. It has enabled underclass black youth to
develop a critical voice, as a group of young black
men told me, a "common literacy." Rap projects a
critical voice, explaining, demanding, urging. Working
with this insight in his essay "Putting the Pop Back
into Postmodernism," Lawrence Grossberg comments: The
postmodern sensibility appropriates practices as
boasts that announce their own--and consequently our
own--existence, like a rap song boasting of the
imaginary (or real--it makes no difference)
accomplishments of the rapper. They offer forms of
empowerment not only in the face of nihilism but
precisely through the forms of nihilism itself: an
empowering nihilism, a moment of positivity through
the production and structuring of affective relations.
Considering that it is as a subject that one comes to
voice, then the postmodernist focus on the critique of
identity appears, at first glance, to threaten and
close down the possibility that this discourse and
practice will allow those who have suffered the
crippling effects of colonization and domination to
gain or regain a hearing. Even if this sense of threat
and the fear it evokes are based on a misunderstanding
of the postmodernist political project, they
nevertheless shape responses. It never surprises me
when black folk respond to the critique of
essentialism, especially when it denies the validity
of identity politics, by saying "yeah, it's easy to
give up identity, when you got one." Though an apt and
oftentimes appropriate comeback, this does not really
intervene in the discourse in a way that alters and
transforms. We should indeed be suspicious of
postmodern critiques of the "subject" when they
surface at a historical moment when many subjugated
people feel themselves coming to voice for the first
time. 

[10] Criticisms of directions in postmodern thinking
should not obscure insights it may offer that open up
our understanding of African- American experience. The
critique of essentialism encouraged by postmodernist
thought is useful for African-Americans concerned with
reformulating outmoded notions of identity. We have
too long had imposed upon us, both from the outside
and the inside, a narrow constricting notion of
blackness. Postmodern critiques of essentialism which
challenge notions of universality and static
over-determined identity within mass culture and mass
consciousness can open up new possibilities for the
construction of the self and the assertion of agency. 

[11] Employing a critique of essentialism allows
African-Americans to acknowledge the way in which
class mobility has altered collective black experience
so that racism does not necessarily have the same
impact on our lives. Such a critique allows us to
affirm multiple black identities, varied black
experience. It also challenges colonial imperialist
paradigms of black identity which represent blackness
one- dimensionally in ways that reinforce and sustain
white supremacy. This discourse created the idea of
the "primitive" and promoted the notion of an
"authentic" experience, seeing as "natural" those
expressions of black life which conformed to a
pre-existing pattern or stereotype. Abandoning
essentialist notions would be a serious challenge to
racism. Contemporary African- American resistance
struggle must be rooted in a process of decolonization
that continually opposes reinscribing notions of
"authentic" black identity. This critique should not
be made synonymous with the dismissal of the struggle
of oppressed and exploited peoples to make ourselves
subjects. Nor should it deny that in certain
circumstances that experience affords us a privileged
critical location from which to speak. This is not a
reinscription of modernist master narratives of
authority which privilege some voices by denying voice
to others. Part of our struggle for radical black
subjectivity is the quest to find ways to construct
self and identity that are oppositional and
liberatory. The unwillingness to critique essentialism
on the part of many African-Americans is rooted in the
fear that it will cause folks to lose sight of the
specific history and experience of African- Americans
and the unique sensibilities and culture that arise
from that experience. An adequate response to this
concern is to critique essentialism while emphasizing
the significance of "the authority of experience."
There is a radical difference between a repudiation of
the idea that there is a black "essence" and
recognition of the way black identity has been
specifically constituted in the experience of exile
and struggle. 

[12] When black folks critique essentialism, we are
empowered to recognize multiple experiences of black
identity that are the lived conditions which make
diverse cultural productions possible. When this
diversity is ignored, it is easy to see black folks as
falling into two categories--nationalist or
assimilationist, black-identified or white-
identified. Coming to terms with the impact of
postmodernism for black experience, particularly as it
changes our sense of identity, means that we must and
can rearticulate the basis for collective bonding.
Given the various crises facing African-Americans
(economic, spiritual, escalating racial violence,
etc.) we are compelled by circumstance to reassess our
relationship to popular culture and resistance
struggle. Many of us are as reluctant to face this
task as many non-black postmodern thinkers who focus
theoretically on the issue of "difference" are to
confront the issue of race and racism. 

[13] Music is the cultural product created by African-
Americans that has most attracted postmodern
theorists. It is rarely acknowledged that there is far
greater censorship and restriction of other forms of
cultural production by black folks--beginning with
literary and critical writing. Attempts on the part of
editors and publishing houses to control and
manipulate the representation of black culture, as
well as their desire to promote the creation of
products which will attract the widest audience, limit
in a crippling and stifling way the kind of work many
black folks feel we can do and still receive
recognition. Using myself as an example, that creative
writing I do which I consider to be most reflective of
a postmodern oppositional sensibility--work that is
abstract, fragmented, non-linear narrative--is
constantly rejected by editors and publishers who tell
me it does not conform to the type of writing they
think black women should be doing or the type of
writing they believe will sell. Certainly I do not
think I am the only black person engaged in forms of
cultural production, especially experimental ones, who
is constrained by the lack of an audience for certain
kinds of work. It is important for postmodern thinkers
and theorists to constitute themselves as an audience
for such work. To do this they must assert power and
privilege within the space of critical writing to open
up the field so that it will be more inclusive. To
change the exclusionary practice of postmodern
critical discourse is to enact a postmodernism of
resistance. Part of this intervention entails black
intellectual participation in the discourse. 

[14] In his essay "Postmodernism and Black America,"
Cornel West suggests that black intellectuals "are
marginal--usually languishing at the interface of
Black and white cultures or thoroughly ensconced in
Euro- American settings" and he cannot see this group
as potential producers of radical postmodernist
thought. While I generally agree with this assessment,
black intellectuals must proceed with the
understanding that we are not condemned to the
margins. The way we work and what we do can determine
whether or not what we produce will be meaningful to a
wider audience, one that includes all classes of black
people. West suggests that black intellectuals lack
"any organic link with most of Black life" and that
this "diminishes their value to Black resistance."
This statement bears traces of essentialism. Perhaps
we need to focus more on those black intellectuals,
however rare our presence, who do not feel this lack
and whose work is primarily directed towards the
enhancement of black critical consciousness and the
strengthening of our collective capacity to engage in
meaningful resistance struggle. Theoretical ideas and
critical thinking need not be transmitted solely in
the academy. While I work in a predominantly white
institution, I remain intimately and passionately
engaged with black communities. It's not like I'm
going to talk about writing and thinking about
postmodernism with other academics and/or
intellectuals and not discuss these ideas with
underclass non-academic black folks who are family,
friends, and comrades. Since I have not broken the
ties that bind me to underclass poor black community,
I have seen that knowledge, especially that which
enhances daily life and strengthens our capacity to
survive, can be shared. It means that critics,
writers, academics have to give the same critical
attention to nurturing and cultivating our ties to
black communities that we give to writing articles,
teaching, and lecturing. Here again I am really
talking about cultivating habits of being that
reinforce awareness that knowledge can be disseminated
and shared on a number of fronts, and the extent to
which it is made available and accessible depends on
the nature of one's political commitments. 

[15] Postmodern culture with its decentered subject
can be the space where ties are severed or it can
provide the occasion for new and varied forms of
bonding. To some extent ruptures, surfaces,
contextuality and a host of other happenings create
gaps that make space for oppositional practices which
no longer require intellectuals to be confined to
narrow, separate spheres with no meaningful connection
to the world of every day. Much postmodern engagement
with culture emerges from the yearning to do
intellectual work that connects with habits of being,
forms of artistic expression and aesthetics, that
inform the daily life of a mass population as well as
writers and scholars. On the terrain of culture, one
can participate in critical dialogue with the
uneducated poor, the black underclass who are thinking
about aesthetics. One can talk about what we are
seeing, thinking, or listening to; a space is there
for critical exchange. It's exciting to think, write,
talk about, and create art that reflects passionate
engagement with popular culture, because this may very
well be "the" central future location of resistance
struggle, a meeting place where new and radical
happenings can occur. 


 


===="The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule...power no longer has today any form of legitimization other than emergency."  

- Giorgio Agamben, Means Without Ends: Notes on Politics, 1996

For cutting-edge analysis of contemporary war visit http://www.infopeace.org

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