Opening the Floodgates

Abstract

The very title of this book demands that we begin to revalue the progress of contemporary post-structuralist theory by standing outside its "modernist" European canon-Mallarm6, Joyce, Bataille, Beckett, Celine. Black Literature and Literary Theory attempts not only to articulate the former in terms of the latter; to apply the rules of an innovative, adversarial method to the "miscreants" of its culture to produce an alternative counter-culture. For the theoretical problem raised by the title of this volume-implicit in the essays themselves-is resistant to the polarities and complicities of "culture and counter-culture." Black Literature, with its Afro-American heritage is implacably "two-toned" or double-voiced as Gates and his band of improvising, innovating contrapunctualists ably demonstrate. What is black, as cultural sign or social text, cannot be contained within an essentialist or Romantic myth of the literary as the expression of "authenticity and sincerity," as Trilling called it. Nor will it be appropriately represented in those grand nineteenth century narratives of social, national mimesis. Blackness, these writers insist, is itself a signifying trope with origins in the Yoruba figure of the Signifying Monkey and its tradition of Trickster Tales, revised and relocated in those re-sounding repetitions of the oral traditions of slave narratives. What emerges is an Afro-American "indeterminacy" that has a natural affinity with the post-structuralist trope of textuality as double inscription, or dissemination. Blackness, like the signifier, is neither the One thing nor the Other; its doubleness, traditionally misread as the duplicitous utterance of slave and native, breaks the mold of the binary divisions of Subject (Self/Other) and Sign (Signifier/ Signified). Like the differance of signification itself, Blackness becomes the trope of the entre, playing its tricks of meaning and