Revising
“Self-discovery in Racialized Space: Comparative Study of The Outsider and Invisible
Man”
Commentary for a young Chinese scholar
Your comparative study of novels by Richard Wright and Ralph
Ellison is a worthwhile project, especially in light of an intertextuality between
Invisible Man and The Outsider that is not immediately
apparent. Despite his denial of artistic indebtedness to Wright’s novella “The
Man Who Lived Underground,” Ellison did elaborate some features of Wright’s
story. Use of the underground or the underworld
as a location (or space) for gaining knowledge that is unavailable on the
surface of the earth is a very old strategy in world literature. Ellison made good use of the strategy to
create a frame for his nameless narrator’s journey of discoveries and a site
for reflection on the episodes that constitute the journey. Although Wright and
Ellison both use urban space, the city, for African American male characters to
make self-discoveries, it must be noted that Ellison employed a rural space to
begin discussion about race and abuse of power in Invisible Man. That choice was necessary, because the consequences
of South to North migration are so important in his novel. Wright, on the other hand, used a less iconic
form of migration (Cross Damon’s flight from Chicago to New York) as a
background for his main character’s existential quest for “absolute freedom” in
shaping his identity and destiny against those imposed upon him by racialized
American society.
The vastly different intentions Wright and Ellison had in
writing their novels must be accounted
for through close reading of
their texts, careful structural analysis,
and interpretation that is informed by knowledge
about the diverse ways African Americans negotiated their “space-time
experiences” in racialized and segregated spaces. I stress the importance
of close reading of the text prior to selecting any theory as a guide for interpretation. You have claimed in your
abstract that you endeavor “to analyze black people’s self-discovery in
racialized space from the perspective of Foucault’s space theory, in an attempt
to revel the black writers’ effort of seeking identity and national cultural
way for the black through the struggle of power in spatial practices.” Your claim is based on a dreadful belief that
theory can do what it cannot do. African Americans like Chinese peoples are tremendously diverse; they are not a
unified group that can be explained by one theory or another. Provision
conclusions about how individuals from an ethnic group arrive at “self-discovery”
have to be derived by using reliable methods from the domains of psychology and
sociology not from methods employed in literary and cultural studies. Moreover, literature may engender ideas that
people use in making “self-discoveries,” but literature does not give us
directives for resolving the entanglements of the human condition. Your claim is in need of radical surgery.
Efforts to use
identity theories (the Self and the
Other) and space theories as articulated by Michel Foucault and others can
produce blindness rather than desirable insights about how Wright, Ellison, and
other African American novelists have fictionalized the historical experiences
of black people. And when such theories are yoked with DuBois’s now much abused
and outdated theory of “double consciousness,” the probability of producing
dazzling nonsense is increased. It is crucial to refer to how in his book The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau challenges Foucault’s
thinking about space. It is even more
crucial in dealing with Ellison and Wright to know what Valerie Smith
“theorized” in Self-Discovery and
Authority in Afro-American Narrative (Harvard University Press 1987), what
Farah Jasmine Griffin said about navigating the urban landscape in “Who Set You Flowin’?: The African American
Migration Narrative (Oxford
University Press 1995) , what Abdul R. JanMohamed explored in The-Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright’s
Archaeology of Death (Duke University Press 2005) and what Robert
O’Meally revealed about Ellison’s
narrative techniques in The Craft of
Ralph Ellison (Harvard University Press 1980). Attention to Eurocentric
theory without giving notice to what African American scholars have contributed
to our understanding of Wright and Ellison is tantamount to asking a chicken to
plead for its life in a court in which the judge and the jury are foxes.
In a 1977 interview on truth and power, Foucault himself
said something we need to keep in mind as we engage in scholarship and
criticism. Referring to the questions
raised by “the political status of science and the ideological functions which
it could serve,” Foucault said “…a whole number of interesting questions were
provoked. These can all be summed up in
two word: power and knowledge.” He then commented on why dealing with
theoretical physics or organic chemistry and “ its relations with the political
and economic structures of society” might invite one to pose “an excessively
complicated question.” The question, he
proposed is easier to resolve if one focused on “a form of knowledge (savoir)
like psychiatry.” (See Foucault, Michel.
Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and
Other Writings 1972-1977. New York:
Pantheon, 1980). Foucault was talking
specifically about science in general and his planning as he prepared to write Madness and Civilization. There is a
noteworthy lesson to be learned from what he says about questions.
I urge you to
concentrate on “self-discovery” in a
literary work as a form of knowledge rather than trying to deal the
impossibly large problem of “racialized space in America,” which requires
empirical investigation and which ought not be reduced to a simple black/white
binary. For several hundred years,
indigenous peoples (Native Americans), European Americans, African Americans,
and Asian Americans have negotiated space both separately and jointly, and
space theory is an afterthought about what they were doing historically. Theory
has to be corrected by history. Or, how
could one talk about racialized space and ignore that women function in those spaces?
Generalized discussion of “heterotopias”
casts dim light on gender issues. Both Ellison and Wright wrote masculine
fictions that, according to feminist thinkers, keep women in the shadows or
objectify them. We can’t talk about
Ellison and Wright and ignore gender. Remember that Foucault warned us to avoid
the “excessively complicated question.”
Rethinking what you
need to say in your abstract
First, if you focus on the use of space in the novels by Richard Wright and
Ralph Ellison, you must understand that Ellison refers to action in rural space
(an imagined Alabama) and urban space (the city --New York) and that Wright
deals exclusively with urban space (the cities of Chicago and New York). It is unfortunate that you do not know enough
about African American novels and space to detect that Ellison’s book reminds
us of what Paul Laurence Dunbar did with rural and urban spaces and the matter
of migration from the South to the North in The
Sport of the Gods (1902). The discussion has to focus on how the two
authors use real, historical, American racialized spaces as opposed to the
theorizing about the abstract concept of space promoted by Foucault and others. Despite all the shortcomings that have been
noted about Gunnar Myrdal’s An American
Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944), that book describes
American cultural geography (racialized spaces) in terms which were a part of
Wright and Ellison’s lived experiences. One of the dangers of theory is its
power to seduce thinkers and make them forget history.
In your abstract, you need to specify
very concisely what is your research
question. How to frame and refine the research question is handled with
precision in The Craft of Research
(1995) by Wayne Booth, Gregory Colomb, and Joseph Williams, the book I use when
I offer research seminars at Central China Normal University. The research
question usually takes the form
I am studying (X)
because I want to find out (Y)
in order to help my reader
understand better (Z)
If “X” is African American Self-discovery in Racialized Space, you have to
be aware that conclusions about self-discovery in The Outsider and Invisible
Man apply only to Cross Damon and the nameless narrator. Any conclusions
that you reach do not describe the behaviors of real African American
males. What is depicted in novels is
merely a refraction of real actions
not a reflection of what has
occurred in real time to real human beings. An attempt to argue or suggest otherwise is a confusion of literary
representation with vulgar, imprecise sociology. Literature generates questions
that have to be answered by non-literary disciplines. I leave identification of what is Y and Z to
you.
I urge you to attend very carefully
what is being said about “heterotopia” in the following commentary, as you
analyze the texts of the novels. It is
important that you match the various spaces referred to in the novels with the
types of heterotopia they may represent.
Doing so will help you with formulating a new outline for your chapter.
Heterotopia (space)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Heterotopia is a concept in human geography elaborated
by philosopher Michel Foucault
to describe places and spaces that function in non-hegemonic conditions. These are spaces of otherness,
which are neither here nor there, that are simultaneously physical and mental,
such as the space of a phone call or the moment when you see yourself in the
mirror.
A utopia is an idea or an image that is not real but represents
a perfected version of society, such as Thomas More’s book or Le Corbusier’s drawings.
Foucault uses the term heterotopia to describe spaces that have more layers of
meaning or relationships to other places than immediately meet the eye. In
general, a heterotopia is a physical representation or approximation of a
utopia, or a parallel space that contains undesirable bodies to make a real
utopian space possible (like a prison).
Foucault uses the idea of a mirror as a metaphor for the duality and
contradictions, the reality and the unreality of utopian projects. A mirror is
metaphor for utopia because the image that you see in it does not exist, but it
is also a heterotopia because the mirror is a real object that shapes the way
you relate to your own image.
Foucault articulates several possible types of heterotopia or spaces that
exhibit dual meanings:
·
A ‘crisis heterotopia’ is a separate space
like a boarding school or a motel room where activities like coming of age or a
honeymoon take place out of sight.
·
‘Heterotopias of deviation’ are institutions
where we place individuals whose behavior is outside the norm (hospitals,
asylums, prisons, rest homes, cemetery).
·
Heterotopia can be a single real place that
juxtaposes several spaces. A garden is a heterotopia because it is a real space
meant to be a microcosm of different environments with plants from around the
world.
·
'Heterotopias of time' such as museums
enclose in one place objects from all times and styles. They exist in time but
also exist outside of time because they are built and preserved to be
physically insusceptible to time’s ravages.
·
'Heterotopias of ritual or purification' are
spaces that are isolated and penetrable yet not freely accessible like a public
place. To get in one must have permission and make certain gestures such as in
a sauna or a hammin.
·
'Heterotopia has a function in relation to
all of the remaining spaces. The two functions are: heterotopia of illusion
creates a space of illusion that exposes every real space, and the heterotopia
of compensation is to create a real space--a space that is other.
·
Human geographers often
connected to the postmodernist
school have been using the term (and the author's propositions) to help
understand the contemporary emergence of (cultural, social, political,
economic) difference and identity as a central issue in larger multicultural
cities. The idea of place (more often related to ethnicity and gender
and less often to the social class issue) as a heterotopic entity has been
gaining attention in the current context of postmodern, post-structuralist
theoretical discussion (and political practice) in Geography and other spatial
social sciences. The concept of a heterotopia has also been discussed in
relation to the space that learning takes place in (Blair, 2009). There is an
extensive debate with theorists, such as David Harvey,
that remain focused on the matter of class domination as the central
determinant of social heteronomy.
Foucault's elaborations on heterotopias were published in an article entitled Des
espaces autres (Of Other Spaces). The philosopher calls for a society with
many heterotopias, not only as a space with several places of/for the
affirmation of difference, but also as a means of escape from authoritarianism
and repression, stating metaphorically that if we take the ship as the utmost
heterotopia, a society without ships is inherently a repressive one, in a clear
reference to Stalinism.
The geographer Edward Soja
has worked with this concept in dialogue with the works of Henri Lefebvre concerning
urban space in the book Thirdspace.
In Utopia and The Village in South Asian Literatures, Anupama Mohan
extends and reworks Foucault's concept of heterotopia as a way to understand
the impulses of 21st century literatures of South Asia that are focused on the
village or the rural as a literary trope. Mohan revives the conceptual
ambivalence latent in utopia as good-place
and no-place in order to theorize key ruptures within Foucault's
explanations of heterotopia. For Mohan, heterotopia helps to recuperate as well
as distinguish utopia from what she calls homotopia, or visions of
social collectivization whose claims to utopia are built on homogenizing
features or bases such as a common religion, language, or culture.
Heterotopian Studies is a website launched May 2012 and
devoted to exploring Foucault's ideas on heterotopia.
Rethinking your introduction and discussions
of the novels
It is no surprise that
Foucault does not enable you to define “racialized space.” You will find a model for creating the
definition in Chapter 3 of Griffin’s “Who
Set You Flowin’?”: The African American Migration Narrative.
I find that the current
organization of your chapter can be much improved by not trying to talk about
Other, self-discovery, and resistance as subtopics. Instead, I recommend that after presenting an introductory discussion of
the focus on cities or urban spaces in African American literature and the
challenges one might find in the novels of Wright and Ellison, you should write
about each novel separately and then write about your tentative conclusions in
a third segment. The new organization might
assume this form----
I.
Introduction
II.
Self-discovery and racialized space in Ralph
Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952)
III.
Self-discovery and racialized space in
Richard Wright’s The Outsider (1953)
IV.
Unanswered questions about integration and
nihilism generated by Ellison and Wright
V.
Conclusion
Your chapter should analyze (1) how Ellison
frames his narrative with the underground prologue and epilogue, but situates
the unnamed narrator's quest to understand who he is
rural and urban spaces and (2) how Wright depicts Cross Damon's existential
journey
from Chicago (where he has a defined identity in the spaces of home and labor)
to New York (where he uses lies and deceptions to fashion a new identity for
himself in the arena of radical politics; it is relatively easy to fashion
multiple identities in a space where one is virtually unknown ). After the
discussions of Invisible Man and The
Outsider,
the third segment of the chapter must deal with the two novels as catalysts for
continuing exploration of race, new forms of segregation in the United States,
and space.
January 5, 2014
