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One of the most pervasive myths in the story of American literature is that the all-pervasive whiteness is some sort of accident--unintentional, just how it was in the past, and to consider and discuss it is somehow anachronistic or unfair...
There's also the unquestioned and unspoken belief that artists can't be racists; that true artists can't also be white supremacists
Morrison, as people today have rightly pointed out, gave us the gift and the tool of PLAYING IN THE DARK to begin to understand that the absence wasn't some strange twist of fate but a deliberate misread
But I wonder what we could get out of literature and reading if we abandoned this childish belief in the universal, in the idea that a piece of art is at its zenith when it "speaks across barriers" which really means it speaks to white people
I remember finally reading LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW when I was teaching it and realizing the entire story is a panic about immigrants coming to New York and diluting the Dutch culture. Also, Black people exist in that story...but I don't know that it ever gets spoken of like that
I remember reading The Great Gatsby and realizing Tom Buchanon is a white nationalist who is reading eugenics books about the death of the white race throughout the whole novel--and my teacher telling me I was missing the novel's point for noticing...
and this is also a factor of how we position literature. Are The Age of Innocence or The Portrait of A Lady definitive novels of their time if we acknowledge that when they were published, the Great Migration and the genocide of Black southern communities was happening?
To recognize that those books were incapable of grappling with that giant historical moment breaks the myth of mastery, that those authors are "masters' and so we say it is irrelevant
and to recognize that those novels can't encompass the shift in consciousness occuring in that moment breaks the thirst for hegemony in a novel and so many are afraid to do so
I am nearing 40. For most of my life, the nationalist project in creating a canon and literature was unspoken because of US culture's lurch to the right under Regan and the collapse of the USSR, which left a reflexive arts discourse without the omnipresent boogieman of communism
to make the implicit explicit. Which is to say, for the last few decades the idea that literature is part of nation-making, specifically, racialized nation building, is pervasive but ppl assume that desire is out of date so it isn't directly challenged
Or...
Or...
that nationalist argument is co-oopted by Obama-types, who imagine the nation as multi-racial and therefore just, instead of questioning the idea of nation, empire, and citizenship--literary or otherwise
for myself, it's really hard to erase the term "master" from my arts discourse. I am sure there are some blurbs floating around out there from me that use it. It's hard to let it go--that there can be a benevolent meaning to that word in the world we currently inhabit...
which is impossible, or course. And I think how much the idea of "mastery" in arts discourse is linked to a closed-offness, a necessary deadening/silencing to suggest that you've conquered something and to acknowledge complications becomes...
not an invitation to continue the dance, not a call to sing or try a different tempo, but a threat, to be ignored, annihalated (sp?), ridiculed, "forgotten"
