“Race,” Writing, and Difference: A Meditation
“Race,” Writing, and Difference: A Meditation
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“种族”、写作和差异：冥想
DOI：
10.1632/pmla.2008.123.5.1516
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发表时间：
2008
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
F. Griffin
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
F. Griffin
《种族》、《写作》和《差异》首次出现在1986年。那年秋天，我进入了耶鲁大学的研究生院;我仍然把这本书和那些令人兴奋的时代联系在一起。小亨利·路易斯·盖茨在我到达之前，他离开了大学，但他的影响仍然存在，我们研究生都关注他的一举一动。我们还怀着极大的兴奋阅读和辩论了他那本书中的文章。这本书使我们对知识的关注合法化，并描绘了一系列我们在整个研究生生涯中都会追求的问题。音量设置了高标准，帮助我们为未来的任务做好准备。这些日子里，我们期待和迎接盖茨，休斯顿贝克，小，霍尔滕斯斯比勒斯，西尔维亚温特，和科内尔韦斯特几乎一样多的兴奋，几年前伴随着释放录音的史蒂夫旺德和地球，风，火。我们中的许多人是通过这些杰出的非裔美国人文学和文化理论家来了解雅克·德里达、米歇尔·福柯、雅克·拉康和保罗·德曼的。这是一个令人兴奋的时代：这一时期还产生了黑人文学和文学理论;盖茨、贝克和乔伊斯·安·乔伊斯在《新文学史》上痛苦的交流;黑兹尔·卡比的《重建女性身份》和斯皮勒斯的《妈妈的宝贝，爸爸的也许：一本美国语法书》。此外，通过他的著作《黑人文学和文学理论》、《黑色人物》和《象征的猴子》，盖茨不仅为非裔美国人文学的研究提供了一个理论框架，他还提出了一个智力议程，他将在一些项目中将其制度化，特别是《诺顿非裔美国人文学选集》和哈佛的非洲和非裔美国人研究系。事实上，盖茨的PBS系列《非裔美国人的生活》也可以被视为这一更大项目的一部分，因为它通过科学证据展示了种族的虚构，而不否认其决定美国黑人生活经历的力量。尽管出现了诸如理查德·赫恩斯坦和查尔斯·默里的《钟形曲线》等文本（以及其他经常出现的关于种族生物学基础的论点），但很少有人会不同意"种族"、写作和差异的基本前提：种族不是固定的或自然化的，而是社会和历史构建和制度化的。
“Race,” Writing, and Difference first appeared in 1986. That Fall, I entered graduate school at Yale University; I still associate the book with those intellectually heady times. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., left the university before my arrival, but his influence was still felt, and we graduate students followed his every move. We also read and debated the essays of his volume with great excitement. The collection legitimated our intellectual concerns and delineated a set of questions that we would pursue throughout our graduate school careers. The volume set the bar high and helped prepare us for the task ahead. These were the days when we anticipated and greeted the appearance of works by Gates, Houston Baker, Jr., Hortense Spillers, Sylvia Wynter, and Cornel West with almost as much excitement that years earlier accompanied the release of recordings by Stevie Wonder and Earth, Wind, and Fire. Many of us came to Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Paul de Man through these brilliant theorists of African American literature and culture. Those were intellectually exciting times: the period also produced Black Literature and Literary Theory; the painful exchange between Gates, Baker, and Joyce Ann Joyce on the pages of New Literary History; Hazel Carby's Reconstructing Womanhood, and Spillers's “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Furthermore, through his books Black Literature and Literary Theory, Figures in Black, and The Signifying Monkey, Gates not only provided a theoretical framework for the study of African American literature, he also set forth an intellectual agenda that he would institutionalize in a number of projects, especially The Norton Anthology of African American Literature and the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard. In fact, Gates's PBS series African American Lives might be seen as part of this larger project as well in that it demonstrates the fiction of race through scientific evidence without denying its power to determine the lived experience of those identified as black in the United States. Despite the appearance of texts such as Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve (and other arguments for the biological basis of race that rear their heads every so often), few people would disagree with the fundamental premise of “Race,” Writing, and Difference: that race was not fixed or naturalized but instead socially and historically constructed and institutionalized.