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| Iceberg Slim chillin |
I've had the privilege of being the
only black male in a class full of white liberals speaking about
race. It always seems like it is the white liberal's responsibility
to face underprivileged communities with the heaping loads of their
valuable pity and dignified ignorance. Just as quickly as one person
may point out the problems with Law Enforcement, another would point to
the flagrant gang culture found in rap music. Becoming the black
representative in this kind of environment is easily the most
stressful part of the semester, but even after this discourse is had
the burden of all these people's unrecognized ignorance hurts. The
one thing that makes it it worse is when these discussions are
spawned by reading black writers that are a part of academia. Writers
like James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston
and Richard Wright are all accepted as great BLACK writers. Writers
who speak against Jim Crow, against the dominant white culture that
has kept them repressed. Now there is no denying the power of James
Baldwin or Richard Wright, but their writings ,as well as the many
other names I listed above, have become accepted within an
academically constructed black literary canon.
I don't think it would be too radical
to say that the majority of black writers published over the years
remain unknown. Alice Walker's recent rediscovery of Zora Neale
Hurston proves there are masterpieces left to be uncovered. While it
is so easy for white liberal academics to hold up a Toni Morrison
novel as evidence of their diversity, they are ignoring the greater bias
within the publishing industry. Academics can't see beyond their
Eurocentric culture and values to notice that there is an implicit favoring
of a certain kind of representation.
The great cultural critic, bell hooks points out in her essay "Postmodern Blackness" that academics calling themselves
"postmodernist" always attempt to call attention to the experience of
difference and otherness. However, postmodern studies are so Eurocentric, they never acknowledge the concrete problems of the black underclass. It not on;y is through the dominant discourse that racial essentialist attitudes are disseminated but also the academic subculture in universities as well. To bring closer attention to the helpless "Other", and to challenge the dominant white supremacy in American culture, hooks advocates creating new subjective representations of the black living. While there is no doubt that there is an explosion of black talent hitting shelves in the 21st century, there is still very little
understanding of our past. hooks' hope has only partially come true. The problem of color blindness in American culture has created a new impediment for achieving a full acknowledgement of the issues that attack the vulnerable black underclass.
I am not sure if any Pan African
Studies department is doing any work to uncover the neglected works by black
writers. I am not sure if anyone really cares. Its just that the mold for a black writer was so narrow and still is narrow. The subjective experience of the ghetto is mostly being published by independent publishers as street lit. The black avant garde is still too weird to draw much sales or praise. I am thinking of Charles Wright's
zany avant garde satire The Wig. I am thinking of about the gritty and
inflated autobiography Pimp by Iceberg Slim.
So,consider this a kind of preface to a series of reviews on neglected novels from the black community. Here is a list of novels I hope to review this summer:
Donald Goines: Dopefiend, Black
Gangster, Black Girl Lost, Daddy Cool
Iceberg Slim: Pimp, Trick Baby, The
Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim
Charles Wright: The Wig, The Messenger
Clarence Cooper Jr. : Weed, The Black
Messenger, The Scene, The Farm
Ann Petry: The Streets
Herbert Simmons: Corner Boy
Charles Perry: Portrait of a Young Man
Drowning
