Race and literary theory: From difference to contradiction

Abstract

Like all passageways between past and present, the threshold to the 21st century conceived as a crisis-point presents both a danger and an opportunity: a danger of the solid gains of the civil rights struggles in the Sixties being dissolved in an unprecedented social amnesia, an opportunity to learn from experience and advance race relations in an emancipatory, counter-hegemonic direction. Change, as everyone knows, always proceeds unevenly. Despite the call for a return to the old dispensation, with the Great Books of the Western World summoned to fill the gaps in the national "cultural illiteracy," progress toward liberating us from Eurocentric, male-dominated learning can be discerned in such reforms as, for example, the presence in recent textbooks of Black women writers (Walker, Petry, Morrison) and token American Indian and Chicano writers. This would not have been possible without such collective efforts as Radical Teacher, the Project on Reconstructing American Literature, and numerous individual initiatives. The agenda then was to problematize the canon and transform it—but for whose benefit? on what grounds?