The Source of Self-Regard - Toni Morrison Page 0,59

whose balustrades we view—even invite—the homeless; or markets where we permit ourselves to be auctioned, bought, silenced, and vastly compromised depending on the whim of the master and the going rate.

The distrust that race studies receive from the authenticating off-campus community is legitimate only when the scholars themselves have not imaged their own homes; have not unapologetically realized and recognized that the valuable work they do can be done in no other place; have not envisioned academic life as neither straddling opposing worlds nor as a flight from any. W. E. B. Du Bois’s observation is a strategy, not a prophecy or a cure. Beyond the outside/inside double consciousness, this new space postulates the inwardness of the outside; imagines safety without walls where we can conceive of a third, if you will pardon the expression, world, “already made for me, both snug and wide open, with a doorway never needing to be closed.”

Home.

Black Matter(s)

I HAVE BEEN thinking for some time now about the validity or vulnerability of a certain set of assumptions conventionally accepted among literary historians and critics and circulated as “knowledge.” This “knowledge” holds that traditional, canonical American literature is free of, unformed by, and unshaped by the four-hundred-year-old presence of first Africans and then African Americans in the United States. It assumes that this presence—which shaped the body politic, the Constitution, and the entire history of the culture—has had no significant place or consequence in the origin and development of that culture’s literature. Moreover, it assumes that the characteristics of our national literature emanate from a particular “Americanness” that is separate from and unaccountable to this presence. There seems to be a more or less tacit agreement among literary scholars that because American literature has been clearly the preserve of white male views, genius, and power, those views, genius, and power are removed from and without relationship to the presence of black people in the United States—a population that antedated every American writer of renown and was perhaps the most furtively radical, impinging force on the country’s literature.

The contemplation of this black presence is central to any understanding of our national literature and should not be relegated to the margins of the literary imagination. It may be that American literature distinguishes itself as a coherent entity because of and in reference to this unsettled and unsettling population. I have begun to wonder whether the major, much celebrated themes of American literature—individualism, masculinity, the conflict between social engagement and historical isolation—are not acute and ambiguous moral problematics, but in fact responses to a dark, abiding, signing Africanistic presence. The coded language and purposeful restriction by which the newly formed nation dealt with the racial disingenuousness and moral frailty at its heart are maintained in its literature, even through the twentieth century. A real or fabricated Africanistic presence has been crucial to writers’ sense of their Americanness. And it shows: through significant and underscored omissions, startling contradictions, heavily nuanced conflicts, and the way their work is peopled with the signs and bodies of this presence.

My curiosity has developed into a still-informal study of what I am calling American Africanism. It is an investigation into the ways in which a nonwhite, Africanistic presence was constructed in the United States, and the imaginative uses this fabricated presence served. I am using “Africanism” as a term for the denotative and connotative blackness African peoples have come to signify, as well as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and misreadings that characterize these peoples in Eurocentric eyes. It is important to recognize the lack of restraint attached to the uses of this trope. As a disabling virus within literary discourse, Africanism has become, in the Eurocentric tradition favored by American education, both a way of talking about and a way of policing matters of class, sexual license, and repression, the formation and the exercise of power, and ethics and accountability. Through the simple expedient of demonizing and reifying the range of color on a palette, American Africanism makes it possible to say and not say, to inscribe and erase, to escape and engage, to act out and act on, to historicize and render timeless. It provides a way of contemplating chaos and civilization, desire and fear, and a mechanism for testing the problems and blessings of freedom.

What Africanism became and how it functioned in the literary imagination are of paramount interest because it may be possible to discover, through a close look at literary “blackness,” the nature and even the source