Jan Mohd.
Jan Mohd.
Jan Mohd.
Discourse
Author(s): Abdul R. JanMohamed
Source: boundary 2 , Spring - Autumn, 1984, Vol. 12/13, Vol. 12, no. 3 - Vol. 13, no. 1,
On Humanism and the University I: The Discourse of Humanism (Spring - Autumn,
1984), pp. 281-299
Published by: Duke University Press
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boundary 2
Abdul R. JanMohamed
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Ill
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Desire
That is longing for the moon
Where the moonlight's but a spotlight
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Then playing upon the use of drugs by musicians and music as a nar
cotic, Hughes concludes with a stanza about pain as the source of
blues and jazz: the trumpeter
My old mule,
He's got a grin on his face.
He's been a mule so long
He's forgot about his race.
I'm like that old mule-
Black-and don't give a damn!
You got to take me
Like I am.
Not only is this poem a confident and calm affirmation of the Blac
self, but in its positive comparison of a Black to an animal it
deliberately subverts the racist strategy of denigrating the Black man
by comparison with animals; and in this subversion Hughes also
implicitly rejects the Blacks' reliance on white definitions, including,
one must assume, "humanism." In "Still Here" Hughes celebrates the
determination and tenacity of an oppressed minority:
292
It would seem that in the face of adversity Hughes does not protest or
attempt to find hope in some notion of common humanity. Rather he
seems to rely on a simple but firm existential assertion of self.
However, in the context of Hughes's abundant and brilliant use of the
Black folk tradition, of the blues and jazz forms, it is clear that his
assertion is in fact an affirmation of an alternate tradition and, in its
celebration of marginality, it points toward an alternate hegemony.
A good example of the third group of essays, Trudier Harris's
examination of the writings of Sarah E. Wright, Alice Walker, and
Paula Marshall stresses the use of Black folk tradition as an alternate
culture and a source of Black identity. In spite of her accurate appre
ciation of the sources of an alternate hegemony in the works of the
three writers (in fact she has clearly chosen these writers because
their novels possess this characteristic), Harris's essay illustrates the
pressures from the prevailing hegemony which prevent her from de-
veloping her insights to their logical conclusion. If one feature of
ideology can be defined (negatively) as that which, by forestalling the
release of contradictions within the subject, helps to secure the
existence of the dominant social relations of production, then this
essay provides an interesting example of such ideological closure.
Trudier Harris begins by observing quite accurately that due to
enforced illiteracy Blacks were obliged to define themselves through
folk or oral cultures, which in fact became an alternate culture. She
cites Ralph Ellison's succinct summation of this fact: folk culture
"describes those boundaries of feeling, thought and action which that
particular group has found to be the limitation of the human con-
dition. It projects this wisdom in symbols which express the group's
will to survive; it embodies those values by which the group lives and
dies." Black folklore, "evolving within a larger culture which regarded
it as inferior, was an especially courageous expression. It announced
the Negro's willingness to trust his own experience, his own sensi-
bilities as the definition of reality, rather than allow his masters to
define these crucial matters for him."''5 Ellison valorizes a specific
version of "the human condition," the specificity of which is marked,
first, by the experiences of racism, slavery, and prolonged exclusion
from and oppression by the dominant culture and, second, by the cor-
responding development of perseverance, the will to survive, and the
celebration of the marginal human condition. If these features are
ignored, the specificity of Black culture and literature evaporates.
Harris's essay not only appreciates this specificity but also clearly
demonstrates that in Wright's This Child's Gonna Live, Walker's The
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NOTES
1 Chinua Achebe, "The Black Writer's Burden," Pr6sence Africaine, 31, no. 59
(1966), 135.
2 R. Baxter Miller, ed., Black American Literature and Humanism (Lexington: The
Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1981), hereafter cited in the text as BALH.
4 Paul Elmer More, The Demon of the Absolute (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press,
1928), pp. 26-28.
5 Irving Babbitt, Literature and the American College (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1908), p. 101.
298
7 Robert Maynard Hutchins, The Higher Learning in America (New Haven: Yale
Univ. Press, 1936), p. 73.
8 See, for instance, Stuart P. Sherman's The Genius of America (New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1923).
9 Stuart P. Sherman, The Main Stream (New York: Charles Schribner's Sons,
1927), pp. 138-39.
11 Paul Elmer More, Aristocracy and Justice (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915),
pp. 58-59.
15 Cited by Harris, BALH, p. 51. For the original see Ralph Ellison, Shadow and
Act (New York: Signet, 1966). Other Black writers such as Langston Hughes and
Richard Wright have also stressed the importance of this source.
16 Alice Walker, The Third Life of Grange Cope/and (New York: Avon, 1971), p. 216.
18 Peter Faulkner, Humanism in the English Novel (New York: Harper and Row,
1967).
19 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, trans. Robert Brinkley, "What is a Minor
Literature?" Mississippi Review, 11 (Spring 1983), 13-33.
22 Addison Gayle, Jr., The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America
(Garden City: Anchor Press, 1975).
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