MA Studies – 2nd Semester – Race & Ethnicity – Dept. of English – Wasit University - 2020
Race and ethnicity
This section explores the following:
1. The emergence and formation of Critical Race Theory 2. Postcolonial literary theory and the notion of
hybridity
3. Identity and diasporic experience
4. The premise of doubleness
5. Black American
tradition of feminist scholarship 6. Women's double marginalisation 7. Diversity of women's experiences
p. 209. Critical Race Theory emerged in the 1970s in the USA, in particular out of a frustration with the
limited gains of the civil rights movement. Its beginnings were in legal studies [where] [p. 210] a key
intervention was [Derrick] Bell's forward to the Harvard Law Review's 1985 Supreme Court Issue. Instead
of a conventional report and analysis, Bell staged a series of conversations, the so-called 'Civil Rights
Chronicles', between himself as the voice of moderation, reason and slow progress and an imagined
firebrand opponent, Geneva Crenshaw, who exposes the self-deceptions and inherited racism of the law. The
'Civil Rights Chronicles' inaugurated the practice of storytelling and a recourse to the 'counter-narratives' of
participants which was to become a leading feature of Critical Race Theory in action, in judicial proceedings
and beyond. A contemporary development and supporting strategy could be found in the 'counter-stories'
shaping the fiction and prose memoirs in the 1970s and 1980s of writers such as Toni Morrison, Alice
Walker and Maya Angelou.
Critical Race Theory announced its formation as a movement at its first conference in 1989 and was in
the next decade to broaden its agenda to include different marginalised or subordinated ethnic groups; not
only African-Americans – although the distinction between black and white remained the perceived
governing binary divide in American society – but Latinos, Asian and native Americans. These groups, and
Critical Race Feminism, were in turn to form their own sub-organisations and agendas on types of
discrimination, immigration policy, abusive practices in work and in the home and of the body. […] A
related concept is that of 'intersectionality' which observes how identity can be comprised of the complex
of factors of gender, colour, sexuality [p. 211] or parentage as well as race, as in cases, for example, such as
a black lesbian mother, an Asian-American of Filipino descent or the child of Native-American and white
parents.
Postcolonial literary theory and criticism have often taken their lead on issues of race and ethnicity from
Cultural Studies, although the boundaries between these areas are symptomatically blurred. Some of
concepts such 'hybridity', 'doubleness' and 'interarticulation' discussed below also evidently join in a
conversation with the ideas of 'differential racialisation' and 'intersectionality' developed within Critical Race
Theory. Similarly, both fields view 'race' as a social construction rather than a biological given and wish
to distinguish it from ethnicity while rejecting the assumption in the use of either term of a unified subjective
or national identity. The concept of 'hybridity' is deployed to deconstruct such assumed unities. As used by
[…] Stuart Hall (1990) hybridity is an enabling metaphor in the theorisation pf 'black experience' as a
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MA Studies – 2nd Semester – Race & Ethnicity – Dept. of English – Wasit University - 2020
'diasporic experience' (both in Britain and the Caribbean) and brings to the fore the doubleness or doublevoiced structures which he sees as constitutive of his experience.
Hall's analysis of black diasporic cultural and aesthetic practices utilises the concept-metaphor
'hybridity' both to signify the complexity of the 'presence/absence of Africa' ('nowhere to be found in its
pure, pristine state' but 'always-already fused, syncretised, with other cultural elements') and to highlight the
'dialogue of power and resistance, of refusal and recognition', with and against the dominance of European
cultures. Hall does not use the term 'diaspora' in the 'imperialising', 'hegemonising' sense of 'scattered tribes
whose identity can only be secured in relation to some sacred homeland to [p. 212] which they must at all
costs return, even if it means pushing other people into the sea.' Instead, the diaspora experience is defined
'not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a
conception of 'identity' which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity'. Hall has always
seen Cultural Studies as an interventionist practice and the important essays 'Minimal Selves' (1988) and
'New Ethnicities' (1996) introduce the notion of a provisional, politicised ethnic identity (comparable to
Spivak's concept of 'strategic essentialism' to combat at once the free-floating, politically quietist
implications of more textualist conceptions of difference, and the conventional, reactionary nationalist
associations of the concept of ethnicity.
Paul Gilroy's analyses of 'modern black political culture’ focus on the doubleness or 'double
consciousness' of black subjectivity, emphasising that the constitutive experience of modern diasporic
identities is that of being 'in the West but not of it'. Gilroy, like Hall, points out that 'the contemporary black
English' stand 'between (at least two) great cultural assemblages, both of which have mutated through the
course of the modern world that formed them and assumed new configurations'. Gilroy is consistently antiessentialist, but like Hall seeks to avoid a modish, unhistoricised poststructuralism: 'European' and 'black'
are 'unfinished identities' which for modern black people in the West are not 'mutually exclusive'. For
Gilroy, cultures do not 'always flow into patterns congruent with the borders of essentially homogeneous
nation states', but his critical practice questions the popularity of theorisations of the 'space between' or of
'creolisation', 'mestizaje' or 'hybridity', not only because such terms keep in view ideas of cultural
boundedness and of common cultural conditions, but also because they are 'rather unsatisfactory ways of
naming the processes of cultural mutation and restless (dis)continuity that exceed racial discourse and
avoid capture by its agents'.
The idea of 'doubleness' (derived from theorisations of the pioneering African American historian, W. E.
B. Du Bois) is also a pivotal concept in the work of the influential African American critic, Henry Louis
Gates, Jr. Gates's [213] collection of essays, Black Literature and Literary Theory (1984), was critically
ground-breaking and much of his work in the 1980s (such as The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of AfroAmerican Literary Criticism, 1988) offered an innovative, deconstruction-influenced analysis of African
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MA Studies – 2nd Semester – Race & Ethnicity – Dept. of English – Wasit University - 2020
American literature. In these studies, Gates draws attention to the 'complex double formal antecedents, the
Western and the black' of African American literatures, and argues for recognition of the continuities
between black vernacular and literary traditions. In the 1980s, Gates's work developed a critical approach
which saw black literature as 'palimpsestic' and which released the 'black voice' to speak for itself,
returning to the 'literariness' of the black text. Gates advocated the close reading of black literature at a time
when 'theorists of European and Anglo-American literature were offering critiques of Anglo-American
formalism', because critical methodologies had 'virtually blocked out the 'literariness' of the black text'. As
Gates argues in his Introduction to the important collection of essays, ‘Race’, Writing, and Difference
(1985), 'I once thought it our most important gesture to master the canon of criticism, to initiate and apply it,
but I now believe that we must turn to the black tradition itself to develop theories of criticism indigenous to
our cultures'.
The problematics of identity are also taken up by Cornel West. West is a key theoriser of the formation
of (minority) postmodern cultural subjects (a 'fragmented subject pulling from past and present, innovatively
producing a heterogeneous product'), and he shares with Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy the desire to create a
discourse of cultural difference that struggles against ethnic fixity and represents a wider minority
discourse that incorporates issues of sexuality, religion and class. West's key contribution to such debates
has been his construction of a 'prophetic pragmatic tradition', [214] arguing that 'it is possible to be a
prophetic pragmatist and belong to different political movements, e.g. feminist, Black, chicano, socialist,
left-liberal ones' (The American Evasion of Philosophy, 1990).
In the Black American tradition of feminist scholarship, critical landmarks include Barbara Smith's
pioneering collection of essays, Towards a Black Feminist Criticism (1977), which sketches out the contours
and difference of black women's writing. In proposing a black feminist aesthetic, it also importantly
exposes and critiques the silencing of the black lesbian writer in both black male and white feminist
criticism. Alice Walker, in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1983), is similarly committed to a black
feminist literary criticism, but rejects the racial and relational phrase 'black feminism' in favour of the
concept of 'womanism'. Also in the early 1980s, bell hooks (Ain’t I A Woman, 1981) was among a number
of black feminist writers and critics who pointed to the 'double invisibility' suffered by black women: 'No
other group in America has so had their identity socialised out of existence as have black women . . . When
black people are talked about the focus tends to be on black men; and when women are talked about the
focus tends to be on white women.' In Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (1989), hooks
questions the feminist slogan 'the personal is political' and suggests that dwelling on the personal at the
expense of the political is dangerous. She advocates instead the need for coalitions, of working together
across differences.
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MA Studies – 2nd Semester – Race & Ethnicity – Dept. of English – Wasit University - 2020
Hazel Carby's Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro- American Woman Novelist
(1987) takes issue with any simple attempt to reconstruct a homogenous African American literary tradition
which articulates 'shared' experience, and stresses the need to look at historical and locational differences in
African American women's writing. Here too, Toni Morrison's work is of importance. Her essay,'
Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation' (1984), is concerned with the exclusions of women from writing,
but examines also the relationship of the artist to the community 'for whom they speak'. Morrison explores
these issues, including the relation of black writing to the hegemonic white tradition or canon, in both her
fiction and later essays. Notably, in Playing in the Dark (1992), she exposes the double exclusion or
marginalisation of black culture from a dominant white literary sensibility for which blackness has been a
denied, but defining, 'presence'. Like Gates [215] and others, therefore, her work explores the 'doubleness' or
'hybridity' of African American identity in a project committed to recovering its suppressed histories.
Much feminist work on the English and French-speaking Caribbean is similarly concerned to restore the
presence of women writers who have been submerged and obliterated by the critical privileging of their
male peers. The theme of women's 'double colonisation' (voiced so eloquently in Gayatri Spivak's essay
'Can the Subaltern Speak?', 1996) runs through and links various traditions of postcolonial feminist criticism
and attempts to develop 'new ethnic' cultural and national identities. Irish feminist critics have pointed out
that Irish women writers are forced to negotiate the mediations and violations of both patriarchy and
colonialism upon subjectivity and sexuality. In Canada, certain feminist critics have expressed the view that
the conventional designation 'ethnic women's writing' (given to writers whose first language is not English
or French) enforces a double marginalisation: on the grounds of both gender and ethnicity. The task of
negotiating a way out of this 'double burden' informs the feminist projects of indigenous women in
Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific region, East and West Africa, and of feminist movements in Southern
Africa.
In each of these cases, it might appear that the cultural or national identity of particular writers and
critics is being asserted as a pre-established position or a primary identity to the exclusion of other
constitutive features. But questions of identity and position are consistently problematised in international
feminism, as in the other areas considered above, and rarely is there an unselfconscious or uncompromised
appeal to essentialist identities. These are patently crucial issues for black, postcolonial and cultural
feminists like Trinh T. Minh-ha (Woman Native, Other, 1989), who are concerned that the generic [p. 216]
category 'woman' not only 'tends to efface difference within itself' but frequently assures white privilege.
Chandra Talpade Mohanty ('Under Western Eyes', 1991) has pointed out that feminist discourse does not
have clean hands when it comes to power, and Western feminism's construction of the 'third world
difference' frequently appropriates and 'colonizes' the 'constitutive complexities which characterise the lives
of women in these countries'. The demand that feminism confront its own heterosexist and racist
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MA Studies – 2nd Semester – Race & Ethnicity – Dept. of English – Wasit University - 2020
hegemonies and recognise that culturally and politically constituted identities are complex and multiple
has long been a driving force of black and anti-colonial feminist criticism. Contra white feminists, race (and
indeed age, class, religion, nation) is not an 'added' problem where racial and cultural articulations are
'mapped onto' sexual difference. Emphasis is placed on the 'interarticulations' of race, class and sexuality,
and notions of 'multiple identities' form a common link between many Asian, African-American, Black
British, Aboriginal Australian, 'women of colour' and working-class writers.
Donna Haraway's proposition that, '“women of color” might be understood as a cyborg identity' is a
further contribution to a poetics and politics of difference. Haraway's model of the cyborg as 'a potent
subjectivity synthesized from fusions of outsider identities' approximates, at certain key points, to Gloria
Anzaldúa's notion of la mestiza, an unbounded and flexible figuring of femininity which is at once
'cultured' and 'cultureless'. For Anzaldúa, a Chicano writer and teacher and self-identified 'border woman',
the new mestiza tolerates contradictions and ambiguities and 'learns to juggle cultures': she has a 'plural
personality' and 'operates in a pluralistic mode'. The work of mestiza consciousness is to transcend dualities:
the 'answer to the problem between the white race and the colored, between males and females, lies in
healing the split that originates in the very foundation of our lives, our culture, our languages, our thoughts'.
Anzaldúa's resistance to theorizing the [p. 217] subject as fixed and culturally bounded is enforced through
her allusion to Virginia Woolf's famous model of international sisterhood: 'As a mestiza I have no country . .
. yet all countries are mine because I am every woman's sister or potential lover.'
The idea of women's transcultural unity has received significant and insistent questioning by feminists
who do not regard themselves as part of Eurocentric cultural and political traditions. Gayatri Spivak's
important positioning of French feminism within an 'international frame' enables her to voice a deep
criticism not only of Anglo-American ('First-World', white) feminist criticism in its ethnocentricity, but also
of French theory (particularly Kristeva's About Chinese Women, 1977) in its willingness to export its
analysis to different political contexts without investigating either its own relation to other feminisms or its
tendency to espouse a belief in the revolutionary potential of the metropolitan avant-garde. In asking the
vital questions: 'not merely who am I? but who is the other woman? How am I naming her? How does she
name me? Is this part of the problematic I discuss?', Spivak launches a debate about positionality which
Cora Kaplan sees ('Feminist Literary Criticism', 1990) as resulting in Western feminist criticism becoming
'more aware than ever that the critic and text both need to be understood in relation to their position within
culture – any new reading practice . . . must first locate itself and in doing so must reflect on its limitations
and possibilities for the reader'.
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