Frames of Friction

Carsten Junker entwirft ein Panorama afroamerikanischer Kulturkritik im 20. Jahrhundert. Er zeichnet wegweisende Debatten nach und schildert, wie sich einzelne Akteure darin Gehör verschafften. Der Essay steht dabei als Sprachrohr und zentraler Schauplatz gesellschaftspolitischer und kulturkritischer Auseinandersetzungen im Mittelpunkt seiner Betrachtung: Wie nutzten diejenigen das Genre, die rassistisch marginalisiert wurden? Wie setzten dagegen diejenigen den Essay strategisch ein, die gesellschaftliche Vorherrschaft verteidigten? Und wie wurde in diesem Zusammenhang das komplexe Wechselspiel von Rassismus, Sexismus und Homophobie verhandelt? Anhand dieser Fragen nimmt Junker eine Neubewertung des Essays als Rahmen der Kulturkritik vor.

Auteur

Carsten Junker, Dr. phil., lehrt American Studies an der Universität Bremen.

Échantillon de lecture
Negotiating a Black Aesthetic As Winston Napier points out in his introduction to the anthology African American Literary Theory, The formal beginnings of African American literary speculation are located in the early part of the twentieth century. Writing mainly in magazines established to report on their society, African American literary thinkers from the start displayed concern with the use of literature as a means to counteract traditional European characterization of blacks as less than human. (2000, 1) This reference to Black writers' occupation with literature as a means of counteracting "traditional European characterization of blacks as less than human" points toward the function of essay writing that I am concerned with here, namely the potential impact that writing has had on processes of what Omi and Winant have called "racial formation in the United States." What comes into focus, in other words, are the effects of writing on the ways in which "concepts of race are created and changed, [and] how they become the focus of political conflict" (1994, vii). I contend that the essay has been important in providing Black writers with - in a Foucauldian sense - "conditions of possibility" to claim a position in a white-dominated public discourse that had historically assigned Blacks the position of a constitutive Other and denied them access to political and cultural participation. In the course of the twentieth century, Black writers carved out a position of critical intervention against the backdrop of an ideology of white supremacy that provided speaking positions predominantly for white men and made artistic and intellectual work primarily thinkable with reference to white masculinity. It had to be established within a white framework of discourses on race, that is, within "oppressive regimes of knowledge and power" that had continuously stigmatized and excluded racialized subjects. Scientific discourses contributed to the reproduction of that white framework. At the turn of the twentieth century, legal, medical and other authoritative discourses on race were largely racist in the sense that they made truth claims about a biological foundation of race and racial differences and thus legitimized social stratifications grounded in racial hierarchies. As Arnold Rampersad points out, "[r]ace, and the idea of white racial supremacy, enjoyed the lofty status of a science at the turn of the century and down into the 1920s" (1997, xv). However, the predominance of scientific racism over biologistic interpretations of race was being contested by social scientists, anthropologists, and historians who gained ground in pointing out that race was not a natural given but a socially constructed and historically contingent category that served as a foundation in legitimizing social stratifications based on supposedly inherent racial differences. Richard King locates the demise of race as a valid scientific idea, particularly in the English-speaking world, in the first part of the twentieth century: "Several recent studies fix on the years between 1920 and 1945 as the period in which race, racial difference, and racial hierarchy were largely discredited among intellectuals and scientific elites" (2004, 1). That is not to say that a racist claim for racial differentiations did not continue to show its concomitant effects; the power structures that had been legitimized by racist discourse were not easily dismantled through the disavowal of its discursive foundations. One strategy of disendowing scientific racism with the credibility that race scientists had given the concept of race over the previous centuries was to validate cultural achievements by Black Americans and recognize them as worthy of study, as did, for example, white German-born anthropologist Franz Boas. "Leading the intellectual fight against doctrines of white supremacy, Boas's work, especially The Mind of Primitive Man (1911), was an indispensable part of the movement to reappraise African-American culture" (Rampersad 1997, xvii). This aim could only be achieved by constituting a field that defined what Rampersad would later call African-American culture, a task that was taken up by a small but growing number of white and Black scholars and writers. Among them was, for instance, Zora Neale Hurston, a student of Boas, who pursued ethnographic research in the U.S. American South and the Caribbean. Hurston's work followed a political agenda by challenging predominant conceptualizations of the value and significance of cultural production by African Americans. Generally, she challenged exclusionary and elitist preconceptions of what art was and who could create it, such that art would not be left the domain of white men. In a 1926 letter, the Black poet and diplomat James Weldon Johnson wrote to a white patron of Black artists, Carl Van Vechten, "that nothing can go farther to destroy race prejudice than the recognition of the Negro as a creator [of] and contributor to American civilization" (Gates 1987, xxiii). Johnson's observation points to a relationship between texts by Black writers and sociopolitical and cultural change that prefigures the assumption of a functional aspect of "Black" literature, namely that of establishing Black subjectivity and forging Black speaking positions, and using that position to challenge existing power structures. This question of function, which subsumes concerns of a formal, thematic and historical scope, becomes crucial in the material I consider in this chapter. In terms of a specific function that writing served Black Americans, Gerald Early has argued that "Black writers could not help but see their writing as political, since they saw their condition in these terms and their writing and their condition have been largely inseparable" (1992, x). Some of the dominant concerns of Black writers were questions of political empowerment and reform: "Starting life in the Americas with this sensibility," Napier argues, "African Americans tempered their desire to reconfigure conventional notions of race and inequality with a general concern for social acceptance and participation" (1). Black writers needed to gain access to publications to be able to address these issues, and white-owned publishing companies severely restricted or denied Blacks that access. What McDowell notes for the second part of the twentieth century applies to the turn to the twentieth century and the following decades to an even larger extent: "Even [] when African Americans of an enlarged black middle class attempted to found their own publishing houses for the express purpose of reaching a black audience, the economics of the publishing industry generally, along with distribution processes, still posed a formidable obstacle" (1995, 93). Further, what Black writers could and did write about depended on how receptive an audience was, whether it was comprised predom…