On indebtedness

It is not an overstatement to say that I owe my livelihood to Black studies — and thus, of course, to Black people, Black lives, Black activism, and Black minds. Although I was hired to teach Asian American literature at Ohio State, much of my graduate training focused on African American literature and culture. My dissertation advisor, Black studies scholar Brent Hayes Edwards, gallantly agreed to chair my dissertation on Filipinx American literature when I switched topics on a dime after my candidacy exams. That project’s transnational and diasporic framework was deeply influenced by my director’s own scholarship and advising, as was the revised book that eventually come out of that initial research. Beyond intellectual influence and mentorship, Black literary studies has materially kept me employed since I continue to teach English courses in the field. And, finally, at the level of inter/disciplinary infrastructure, Asian American studies owes its very existence to the Black-led student activism in 1968-1969 that led to the creation of the first School of Ethnic Studies and eventually to the race/culture-specific departments, programs, and centers that have been institutionalized around the country.

In this time of renewed calls to affirm Black lives, I am compelled to acknowledge these multiple levels of indebtedness to Black studies through the medium that I have learned it most emphatically through — writing. It’s not much, but I’m aware of my own assets (such as they are) and limitations (much as they are). So while I continue to do the research toward the Asian American literature book that I’m supposed to be working on, I will, at the same time, be writing brief pieces on the manifold ways that African American literature, culture, and scholarship has been and continues to be integral to my understanding of and self-positioning within the world.

Another incitement to this prefatory note: I’ve seen a number of folks circulating on social media syllabi and lists of books and articles and videos to read and watch in order to learn about the long history and contemporary manifestations of anti-Black racism, intersectional forms of oppression and privilege, and strategies for affirmation, allyship, and advocacy. These assemblings of resources are necessary, important, and useful, and there are so many available online — many of them temporarily free to the public during the COVID-19 pandemic — that I won’t even try to reproduce them here. While I appreciate being informed about their existence and often consult them myself, I do wonder sometimes about the limits of lists without annotations, descriptions, or robust engagements. It kind of comes off to me as the equivalent of solidarity statements — cringey articulations of “I see you, I hear you” — without any evidence of that recognition. Here is my way of engaging publicly with Black intellectual culture.

If there’s one anti-Black stereotype that, I think, informs and governs so much anti-Blackness writ large, it is the derogatory assumption of Black intellectual inferiority. Select Black people in the U.S. are praised for their athletic prowess and musical abilities but only rarely for the use of their minds. This odious idea goes back centuries. Discussing 18th and 19th-century slave narratives in her essay “The Site of Memory” (1987), Toni Morrison, for example, writes:

One has to remember that the climate in which they [fugitive/former enslaved people] wrote reflected not only the Age of Enlightenment but its twin, born at the same time, the Age of Scientific Racism. David Hume, Immanuel Kant and Thomas Jefferson, to mention only a few, had documented their conclusions that blacks were incapable of intelligence. Frederick Douglass knew otherwise, and he wrote refutations of what Jefferson said in “Notes on the State of Virginia”: “Never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration, never see even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture” — a sentence that I have always thought ought to be engraved at the door to the Rockefeller Collection of African Art. Hegel, in 1813, had said that Africans had no “history” and couldn’t write in modem languages. Kant disregarded a perceptive observation by a black man by saying, “This fellow was quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he said was stupid.” (89-90)

Part of what is so striking about Beloved (1987), the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that Morrison was working on when she delivered this lecture-cum-essay, is how she uses the roving third-person narrative voice to dip in and out of her characters’ consciousnesses and allows us glimpses into their perceptive observations and thinking. Here, for example, is young Denver, Sethe’s sole child after her brothers Buglar and Howard’s flight and the crawling-already baby’s death, yearning for the exquisite, if fickle, look from Beloved, the young woman who might be an abused runaway, a survivor of the Middle Passage, or Denver’s older sister resurrected, and whom Sethe takes in and cares for:

It didn’t have to happen often, because Beloved seldom looked right at her, or when she did, Denver could tell that her own face was just the place those eyes stopped while the mind behind it walked on. But sometimes — at moments Denver could neither anticipate nor create — Beloved rested cheek on knuckles and looked at Denver with attention.

It was lovely. Not to be stared at, not seen, but being pulled into view by the interested, uncritical eyes of the other. (139)

Since such moments of looking are rare as Beloved gives more and more of her attention to Sethe and Sethe seeks to appease her demands in search of forgiveness, Denver has to “step off the edge of the world” (281) and seek help for her deteriorating household from the community that has shunned them. She finds its initial expression in the teacher Lady Jones’s blessing: “Oh, baby”: “Denver looked up at her. She did not know it then, but it was the word ‘baby,’ said softly and with such kindness, that inaugurated her life in the world as a woman” (292).

Such power of intersubjective recognition can only be given and received intracommunally. My efforts here are much more modest, suited to my roles as appreciator, conduit, and perennial student of African American literature. Consider the forthcoming series, then, written in the tradition of Douglass’s refutations of Black intellectual deficiency and in the spirit of amplifying the Black literary and scholarly voices that demonstrate otherwise.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. 1987. Vintage, 2004.

Morrison, Toni. “The Site of Memory.” Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, edited by William Zinsser, Houghton Mifflin, 1995, pp. 85-102.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *