Black Cultural Politics at the End of History

Extract

Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership, Erica R. Edwards. University of Minnesota Press, 2012.

More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States, Imani Perry. New York University Press, 2011.

In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era, Richard Iton. Oxford University Press, 2008.

In a series of searing essays published in the 1990s, political scientist Adolph Reed indicted scholars of cultural studies, and critics of African-American literature and culture in particular, for what he called “posing as politics”: the tendency to exalt black culture as vigorous political action while abdicating the effort “to alter the structure and behavior of institutions of public authority, what used to be called the state” (168). On this account, the language of resistance began to occlude state-centered politics while sustaining a putatively radical or progressive aura. Moreover, this mode of theorizing cultural politics, associated most notably with figures like Paul Gilroy and Robin D. G. Kelley, perpetuated the image of the Negro as a preternaturally expressive being who intervenes most effectively in the political sphere not by undertaking, say, the unglamorous minutia of labor activism, but by clutching a microphone in the poetry cipher. Other culprits included theorists of structuralist Marxism, left sectarianism, poststructuralism, and postmodernism, all of whom, in Reed's estimation, obscured the realities of class inequality (and even the possibility of objective truth), and proffered the sensibility that nothing can change unless everything is changed, thereby vitiating prospects for organized, progressive movements and class-based politics—for Reed, the only real politics. Reed's claims were not necessarily original, but few articulated them with such clarity and trenchancy—and, most importantly, with such concern for the apparently deleterious consequences of these avant-garde currents for the disenfranchised black majority.