Black Cultural Criticism, the New Politics of Difference, and Religious Criticism
VICTOR ANDERSON
Cultural criticism is a confused idea, meaning different things to different people. It describes expressive acts such as music, art, literature that constitute creative forms of life. It also exposes ways that the “real interests” of people and their social aspirations are advanced by their cultural productions and operations of power and privilege. So, cultural criticism can be both descriptive, insofar as it describes expressive activities, and socially constructive, insofar as it commends activities worthy of pursuing in the interest of a person’s and group’s cultural fulfillment.
I take culture as a social system of interconnected and interdynamic practices that include economic, political, moral, religious, artistic, and linguistic formations that are socially symbiotic, mutually assuring. This description theoretically commits the critic to reject any account of cultural criticism that divides cultural meanings between the “real” and “ephemeral” or “epiphenomenal.” Following Clifford Geertz: “Believing … man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning. It is explication I am after, construing social expressions on their surface enigmatical.”1
The social practices that constitute culture operate as a system of signs and symbols that communicate human interests and purposes, which are open to interpretation and analysis, given methodologies appropriate to distinct cultural spheres. Any dichotomous critique of culture that positions the subjective over the material basis of social life or the material over the subjective needs of individuals is inadequate. Rather, cultural criticism requires a phenomenological grasping of the intersubjective meanings of our cultural practices. It recognizes that these practices are reflexive, integrative systems of purposive activities. They are social projects and culture makers themselves. Therefore, the critique of culture is oriented toward analyzing the ways that culture both “forms” and “expresses” our socially imagined, socially articulated, and socially constructed needs, ends, and values that operate throughout the cultural spheres.
The formative and expressive aspects of culture are mobilized in discursive and nondiscursive practices within differentiated social spaces that range from simple to very complex formations that include clans and families, religions and societies, classes and castes, labor and markets, and states and governments. While culture displays complex organizations of social practices, their formations are directed toward satisfying the basic needs, ends, and values that culture-producers require for a fulfilled life. As a communicative system of interests, needs, ends, and values, culture integrates the satisfaction of persons’ basic needs (life, safety, work, leisure, knowledge) with their subjective needs (friendship, peace of mind, integrity of conscience, and spiritual strivings). I call this reflexive integration of persons’ basic and subjective needs “cultural fulfillment.”2
Cultural criticism is concerned with the processes of successful cultural fulfillment and the conditions by which it is either satisfied or frustrated. Cultural criticism is an interpretative, that is, hermeneutical, discipline, but if it is only descriptive, it will not be very emancipatory of the creative powers of persons directed toward correcting and advancing their projects of cultural fulfillment. Therefore, cultural criticism is also a socially constructive discipline that renders ambiguous social relations meaningful and maps social problems and contexts for the purpose of establishing a common moral universe.3 An adequate theory of cultural criticism is not merely content to describe the dark sides of our cultural formations but also affirms creative possibilities for cultural fulfillment by seeing within social regimes of power possibilities for realizing our political, social, and spiritual strivings. Theory: imagining, articulating, and socially constructing such forms of transcendence in the worlds of black experience are the work of black cultural criticism.
Black cultural criticism emerged from insurgent movements within black culture itself such as Black Power, the New Black Arts, and the Black Student Movements. A number of factors contributed to the possibility of these movements. They include: (1) increasing social and economic differentiation within black culture itself due to higher enrollments of black students in American colleges and universities beyond the traditional sites of two-year community colleges, trade-technical schools, and historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs); (2) greater access to higher education through the GI Bill and progressive liberal reforms in federal funding by guaranteed students loans and other grants; and (3) the media explosion of televised violence, genocide, race riots, and assassinations of political and religious leaders in the United State and South Africa.
From the shadow of black insurgent movements in the late 1960s and 1970s emerged black studies, Afro-American studies, African American studies or Africana studies, and black cultural studies. Black cultural studies is intrinsically interdisciplinary and has developed greatly since the late 1960s from a few black studies programs and departments at notable universities such as San Francisco State, Cornell, University of California (Berkeley), Harvard, Wesleyan University, and Yale.4 While only a few universities actually have departments of black studies or African American studies (for example, Yale, Temple, Indiana-Purdue), Black cultural studies is largely located in departments of language, literature, communications, sociology, and American studies. Consequently, what is loosely called black cultural criticism is the deployment of critical theories immanent within these humanities and social science fields to create a counterdiscourse on the politics of Difference. Black cultural criticism is regulated by hegemonic regimes of discourse that define and subjugate black experience under the representational force of white supremacy and its formations in the social and cultural productions of race. Black cultural studies produced a new politics of race, symbolized by Blackness. Difference equaled Black: Black Power, black arts, black expressive culture, the black church, and a black theology of liberation.
However, a certain irony prevailed in the countercultural discourse of the black arts movement and black cultural studies as they critiqued the dominant literatures and representations of black experience overtheorized by assimilation and decadence or pathology and retheorized by asserting a new radical, militant, and Africanized black consciousness. The black feminist critic Barbara Christian argues that black cultural criticism and its politics of difference turned back on itself, replicating and reinscribing forms of black identity that totalized into a singular set of cultural images in the Afro, Dashikis, and head dress and Motown’s productions of Aretha Franklin’s “R.E.S.P.E.C.T.,” James Brown’s “Say it Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud,” and Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On.”
Black expressive culture registered signs and symbols of black empowerment and a near “monolithism” of blackness itself. “It is true that the Black Arts Movement resulted in a necessary and important critique both of previous Afro-American literature and of the white-established literary world. But in attempting to take over power, it, as Ishmael Reed satirizes so well in Mumbo Jumbo, became much like its opponent, monolithic and downright repressive,” says Christian.5 She continues: “Inevitably, monolithism becomes a metasystem, in which there is a controlling ideal, especially in relation to pleasure. Language as one form of pleasure is immediately restricted, and becomes heavy, abstract, prescriptive, monotonous.”6 Black cultural criticism and its politics of race consciousness displayed not only a tendency toward monolithism but also a repressive monotheism, says Christian. It formed an iconography of an essentialized blackness that raised “Blackness” itself to the divine and registered all other expressive modes of difference in black culture as manifestations of Black Power.
By the late 1980s and early 1990s, black cultural criticism was in search for a new politics of difference, and the philosopher and cultural critic Cornel West theorized it. The new cultural politics of difference points toward the rejection of “the monolithic and homogeneous in the name of diversity, multiplicity and heterogeneity; a rejection of the abstract, general, and universal for the concrete, specific and particular; and it signifies commitment to writing that privileges the historic, contextual, and plural by emphasizing the contingent, provisional, variable, shifting, and changing.”7 It points toward the celebration of tradition, but it also celebrates multiculturalism. It recognizes that no adequate account of the self can be gained from a grand narrative about the nature and destiny of humanity in general. Rather, the new cultural politics of difference privileges the historical, cultural context as the locus for self-understanding and meaning. Politically, it sets itself in opposition to the politics of domination. It enables openings in our political culture that provide the vocabulary and vision for the self-determination, self-realization, and self-conscious reflection of the situated subject. Therefore, the new cultural politics of difference is not satisfied with the cultivation of a critical consciousness that only sets itself to the task of disclosing the dark side of modernity. Rather, it proposes a political praxis that results not only in critical enlightenment but also in emancipatory practices that celebrate the potentialities of situated subjects. In the new cultural politics of difference, multiplicity of cultural expressions contributes to a transformation of our life together and explodes our preoccupation with the so-called Other, while celebrating difference: race, gender, sexuality, cultural, national, political, and religious.
However, a word of caution is in order for those of us who make the symbol of difference controlling in our theorizations of black cultural criticism. As the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah cautions, even difference itself can dangerously slip over into reifications, monolithisms, and monotheisms. He warns that difference, including the politics of race, “can harden into something fixed and determinate, a homogeneity of Difference. But I don’t know what to do about such perils, aside from pointing them out, and trying to avoid them.”8 When race discourse marshals a politics of difference that reifies race itself into a monolith, a monotheism, the new cultural politics of difference enters black cultural criticism as a mode of “religious criticism.”
In religious criticism, the critic’s thoughts and actions, explanations and judgments of culture, are informed by, but not necessarily derived from, his or her appropriations and interpretations of their particular religious community’s beliefs and ritual practices. This is not to determine the black religious critic as a black theologian or a professional theologian concerned with the explication and transmission of a religious community’s beliefs and faith; in the case of the black theologian such a community is the black church. However, religious criticism may draw interpretative and critical judgments about formations of the social economy by making use of theological and religious vocabularies in the critique of a society’s cultural formations.
There are some postmodern critics who would separate cultural criticism from any form of religious criticism altogether and exorcise the “religious” from cultural criticism by means of a thoroughgoing secular criticism. The philosopher Richard Rorty, for instance, suggests that cultural critics who want a hearing today would do well to show that the divine is worldly and that what parades as religious objectivity, including our social constructions of race, is permeated thoroughly by textuality. Social and cultural critics would do well to see their discourse as “descriptive” and “edifying,” if not cognitively or morally regulative. Rorty proposes that “we try to get to the point where we no longer worship anything, where we treat nothing as a quasi divinity, where we treat everything—our language, our conscience, our community—as a product of time and chance. To reach this point would be in Freud’s words, to ‘treat chance as worthy of determining our fate.’ ”9
Rorty is joined by the literary critic Edward W. Said, who sees the religious as the privatization of spiritual ends, otherworldliness, epistemological certainty in morals, the dogmatism of group solidarity and communal belonging, and the cultural products and institutions whose purposes are to successfully perpetuate such religious intentions. Religious intentions are not necessarily and exceptionally expressed in religions and theology; they are also expressed as cultural motives widely open to other spheres—even in the dogmatism of so-called militant secularists from Marx and Walter Benjamin to Daniel Bell, radical feminists, psychoanalysts, neopragmatists, and other so-called promoters of edifying discourses who may stress “the private and hermetic over the public and social,” says Said.10 For him, wherever we see the tendency for “the secure protection of systems of belief (however peculiar those may be) and not for critical activity or consciousness,” we are met with the religious.11 Said’s aims are to promote a form of secular criticism that eschews the temptations of religiosity, whether in politics, literary criticism, morals, or the politics of race. He envisions a form of cultural criticism that will rob “Culture” itself of totalizing possibilities.
However, I propose that religious criticism cannot be successful if it regards itself as radically oppositional to rather than expressive of linguistic openings, not only in the black cultural critic’s own culture but also in his or her own religious community and tradition. Religious criticism shares much with secular criticism insofar as it is guided by an iconoclastic rigor that robs every mode of discourse, whether race, sexuality, gender, nation, or other formations of culture, of totality, monolithism, or monotheism. It fulfills its iconoclastic role by exposing the demonic present even in those forms of theology that parade as liberating and revolutionary projects, including black preaching, black theology, womanist theology, or black church studies. In black cultural criticism, religious criticism remains suspicious both of black cultural heroism and idolatries of black expressive culture that mark performances of music, art, poetry, and literature with a distinct black essence or genius. However, because religious criticism is a form of black cultural criticism, it also attempts to disclose emancipatory aspects of individuality or difference that every person has a legitimate right to expect of cultural fulfillment. In this regard, religious criticism can be both iconoclastic and utopian. But the iconoclastic role of religious criticism can be so overdetermined that its operations can breed nihilistic traits that would foreclose, in our democratic society, the prospects of African American cultural fulfillment in whose interest it is theorized.
What is the relation of religious criticism to theology? Religious criticism is not theology, except in a loosely defined sense in which every theologian who possesses faith in some object that he or she finds worthy of ultimate devotion and loyalty can be said to be generally religious. However, as a vocation, theology requires more to establish the legitimacy of its discourse than loose generalities about religious languages. If all that is meant by theology is the general understanding that anyone who has ever held beliefs about what is of ultimate concern, devotion, and value is a theologian, then nothing particularly exceptional about theology is advanced beyond more general philosophical claims about the world and human life. Theology requires more than a general, ordinary preoccupation with religious matters and languages, that is, unless the theologian understands herself to be a philosopher of religion or an academic religionist, whose specialty lies in explaining the phenomena of religion under methodologies peculiar to sociology, cultural anthropology, cultural linguistics, and history. Black theology, however, is associated with at least two normative and specific tasks that are not required of religious criticism. It reflexively integrates the differences of black Christians’ beliefs under governing categories that isolate object(s) of ultimate concern, devotion, and loyalty, such as God’s preferential option for the poor; and it gives meaning to black Christians’ individual practices in light of black solidarity in common beliefs and liturgical practices. Black theology serves the black church, symbiotically assuring its identity as a community of liberation and social justice.
The form of religious criticism that I defend may be described as a religious pragmatism that does not require that religious criticism be congruent with the beliefs and practices of the black church, although some of the doctrinal and ritual actions that characterize that institution may inform the critical vocabulary of the black cultural critic. In religious criticism, the black cultural critic is organically related to the particular beliefs and moral vocabularies that may define his or her religious community and may bring his or her own faith to bear on the critique of culture. The insights, prejudices, fears, anxieties, hostilities, affirmations, and ground motives that black cultural critics acquire by participation in religious community are all viable sources for black cultural criticism. However, the legitimacy of religious criticism is not justified in terms of the critic’s ecclesiastical affiliation or by whether the belief system with which the critic identifies is internally satisfying. Moreover, the legitimacy of black cultural criticism does not depend on the critic’s devotion to forms of difference, racial, sexual, or gendered, that commend a “monolithism” and “monotheism” as marks of the cultural authenticity and solidarity that signified the politics of difference in the Black Power, the black student, and the black arts movements and their corresponding black church with its black theology of liberation. Rather, the legitimacy of black cultural criticism, its new politics of difference, and its iconoclastic and utopian forms of religious criticism depend on whether it genuinely contributes to or frustrates the social and cultural conditions, processes, and possibilities for cultural fulfillment. This is the test of adequacy in theorizing black cultural criticism.
NOTES
1. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 5.
2. Victor Anderson, Beyond Ontological Blackness (New York: Continuum, 1995), 27.
3. Mostafa Rejai, “Ideology,” in Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. Philip Wiener (New York: Scribner’s, 1973), 2:558.
4. Nathan Huggins, Afro-American Studies (New York: Ford Foundation, 1985), 5–30.
5. Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory,” in The Black Feminist Reader, ed. Joy James and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000), 18.
6. Ibid., 19.
7. Cornel West, “The New Cultural Politics of Difference,” in The Cornel West Reader (New York: Basic Civitas, 1999), 119.
8. Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), xvi.
9. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 22.
10. Edward W. Said, The World, the Text and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 292.
11. Ibid.