The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (85 page)

So I conceive of home as a moveable feast of identity that I’m constantly feeding on. Because of the many communities in which I’m involved, I’m constantly rethinking who I am. In a way, I’m also constantly trying to get back home to Detroit, perhaps in a more spiritual than physical manner, since I go back fairly frequently to preach and visit my mother and brothers. There’s an elusive state of contentment that you nostalgically associate with home even when it was a turbulent and trying place. Detroit was, in many ways, such a place far me, but it also provided so much joy and fulfillment, and it gave me a sense of the appropriate things to grasp hold of in life, beyond the material blessings one might seek. It was a great beginning, and as I heard Toni Morrison once say, beginnings are important because they must do so much more than start. While starting is crucial, beginnings also propel us along paths of influence whose real impact we may not be able to detect for years and years to come. That’s certainly the case with me.

Detroit has become for me a metaphor of the complex convergence of fate and human volition. It’s a symbol for me of how destiny is at best partly determined by living one’s life in a meaningful, coherent fashion. That’s most acutely obvious to me in grappling with my brother’s imprisonment and my quest for improvement in every sphere of my life, including my professional life, my spiritual infrastructure, and my moral landscape. Home is a complicated place for me now, which is why nostalgia is inevitable, pleasurable, even desirable—and quite problematic, perhaps dangerous at points. Nostalgia, of course, is crucial to the project of black identity, largely as a defensive move against the brutal memories of suffering we endured at the hands of those outside our communities, and from within. Nostalgia, at least in that light, is an attempt to exercise sovereignty over memory, to force it into redemptive channels away from the tributaries of trauma that flood the collective black psyche. It is the attempt to rescue ethical agency and hence manage and control the perception of suffering—from the fateful forces of racial terror. One of the most bruising racial terrors is to have the dominant culture determine what memories are most important to the dominated minority.

In that case, nostalgia is an attempt to take back the political utility of memory. After all, if you remember a horrible experience as something from which you can squeeze some good, then you’ve refused the hegemonic power the prerogative to define your fate. By remembering the same event with different accents, with different social purposes, through different eyes, one gives memory a racial and moral usefulness that can challenge dominant culture. I suspect that’s at stake when black folk wax nostalgic about segregation and the sort of relatively self-determining culture we were able to carve out of Jim Crow apartheid. You hear it as black folk say, “When we were forced to live together under segregation, we had more unity, we lived in the same neighborhoods, we helped each other more, economically and spiritually, and we did not depend on white patronage but promoted black self-reliance. Now under desegregation we’ve lost the power we had. Our colleges have suffered a brain drain to elite white schools. Our black businesses that catered to black needs suffered when we were able to buy white. And our neighborhoods were turned over to the poor and destitute when ‘white flight’ was mimicked by ‘black track’ to the suburbs.”

The downside of such nostalgia is that it fails to explicitly engage the radical inequality of such segregated arrangements. It also tends to exaggerate the moral differences between generations, especially as the rose-colored tint of the black past is not used to cast an eye on the present or the future, for that matter. The net result is that one’s own generation is made golden, while those following are seen as tarnished by the surrender to urges, forces, and seductions that were heroically resisted in the past. Hence jazz was great and hip-hop is awful. People believe that even though earlier black generations thought jazz was terrible and preferred religious music. But there were problems there too, since many blacks felt that religious music too easily compromised its purity by integrating elements from secular blues. And it goes on and on. Then too, we’ve got to be careful not to ultimately justify or legitimate the oppression by nostalgically recalling its good effects. Nostalgic blacks end up reinforcing what may be termed subversive empathy from the dominant culture, which, after all, provided the conditions under which our race and culture could thrive under segregation, even if those conditions were harmful and oppressive.

Subversive empathy is similar, I suppose, to anthropologist Renato Rosaldo’s notion of imperialist nostalgia, where hegemonic culture destroys an indigenous minority tradition and then has the gall to weep with those folk over the destruction of their culture. In subversive empathy, the dominant culture empathizes with our need to restore the conditions of our relative prospering under Jim Crow. While not explicitly invoking a return to the racist past, it nevertheless puts forth arguments and supports practices that have the same effect. That’s why black folk have to be especially cautious about supporting Bill Bennett’s partnership with C. Delores Tucker in combating hard-core hip-hop. They appeal to a golden age: nostalgic belief about the black family that is turned viciously against us in Bennett’s conservative cosmology. For that matter, we ought to be careful about uncritically celebrating Bill Clinton’s nostalgic appeal to black America to return to a bygone moral era. In a speech before a black religious audience in Memphis, Tennessee, Clinton invoked Martin Luther King Jr.’s memory to chide black America about pockets of immorality in our communities and pathological family structure, ignoring the harmful social impact of many of his policies on the black family. He sounds like a friend, and in many ways he is, but he is also a foe to our best political interests. His political beliefs, in many ways, are emblematic of subversive empathy.

If the impulse to nostalgia is not disciplined, it can be used to fashion moral judgments out of fantasies of the past that downplay our failures and project them more vehemently on someone, or something, else. A huge example is how older blacks nostalgically recall their idyllic lives in comparison to the ills of modern youth, assaulting their relative moral failures while extolling their own virtues.

But to sum it all up, I suppose home conjures for me that Frankie Beverly anthem, “Joy and Pain.” But it remains the quintessential space of possibility, of hope, of unending yearning and unfulfilled expectation.

I guess I’d like to hear you talk about that notion in relation to this generation you belong to, “the betweeners”—very late baby boomers and very early generation x or hip-hop. This also, in the academy, seems to stand right at that modern-postmodern divide. When I hear you talk about your relationship to home, I hear an important question about history and home, time and home. I’m the minister of music at my church, so you know that when I show up with the dread thing going on and I play for the senior choir, there is this odd sense of dissonance and I feel completely at home there even though there are some looking at me as if to say “What’s wrong with that brother?” But there’s this odd sort of thing that goes on because where you are is always where you feel most at home. I imagine that that’s what happens to you when you’re in the pulpit: that it’s the most natural home, but when you walk out into the classroom there is no rupture. But given our notions of race and culture and some of our stereotypes, it seems as if people would expect there to be a rupture, but there isn’t.

No, no. In that sense it’s seamless for me, moving from one rhetorical situation to another, from the pulpit as the axis of convergence of history, spirituality, and morality, to the classroom, where there are other axes of convergence, including inquiry, skepticism, and excavation. The orbits of these rhetorical universes might be seen to be in collision with one another. But skillful black rhetoricians, speakers, teachers, intellectuals, and orators can, by virtue of an enchanted imagination, speak worlds of discourse into existence that cross disciplinary fault lines, that move among genres, and that navigate through discursive minefields, such as the question of what constitutes “real knowledge.” At its base, black culture has always been about migration and mobility. Its members, in one way or another, have been about the business of adapting ourselves to foreign spaces and creating home in the midst of them. We’ve constantly raised the question of Psalm 147, “How can we sing Zion’s songs in a strange land?” To borrow more biblical imagery, the book of Acts contains that famous passage about Paul and his mates being shipwrecked and making it to shore “on broken pieces.” Black people have always been able to take the fragments and shards of our lives, the pieces of our existence broken by oppression, and rework them into a pattern of purposeful existence. That’s not simply about fragmentation as a trope of black existence in the postmodern moment. It’s also about the black modernist quest for a stable identity in the midst of flux and upheaval, often articulated, ironically enough, through a premodern religious worldview.

Thus the premodern black biblical universe accommodates black modernist pursuits in postmodern conditions. “Making it in on broken pieces” has long been a rhetorical staple in the grassroots theodicies—in both the Weberian, sociological
sense and in theological terms—that shape the preaching of figures from C. L. Franklin, Aretha Franklin’s father, to Jesse Jackson. Add to that the fragments of European cultural influences and African cultural retentions that shape black life, and the unavoidability of black folk negotiating between disparate vocabularies, indeed, different worlds, should be dramatically apparent. I think that Levis-Strauss’s notion of bricolage, of taking what’s at hand, what’s left over, so to speak, in the construction of culture to shape one’s survival and identity, is a crucial concept as well in coming to terms with this black gift to move in and through a variety of rhetorics and discourses. In that sense, then, our identities have always been fabricated out of the content of our surroundings. Forced migration and permanent exile will make one into a sophisticated cultural polyglot and sometimes into a cosmopolitan citizen. Home was often a compromise of contexts: wherever we found ourselves, we made that home or at least we transported our home there. Home was not something we could leave and come to again, so home often had to travel with us, across turbulent waters, into hostile countries, and within resistive communities.

That’s not to deny the reality of fixed points of domestic reference in time and space, and in body and memory. But the reality is that black people had to have multiple notions of home, and often multiple homes, which is why there’s a thin line between coerced migration and homelessness. You’ve got to remember that home is a noun, verb, adjective, and adverb, and it is both a means and an end. So the lack of a sense of rupture grows from the seamless interweaving of multiple meanings articulated through a variety of rhetorical situations, whether it’s preaching, teaching, writing, and so on. In my case, I can’t deny that at some points all the communities I’m involved in may experience tension and conflict because I don’t feel a radical rupture in moving from one vocabulary to another. But as Gerald Graff argues, we’ve got to teach the conflicts, and by extension we’ve got to illustrate the tensions. For me, that means we’ve got to mix rhetorical styles in edifying fashion. So when I get up in the classroom, for instance, and I really get going, talking about Foucault and Derrida, perhaps, and about Judith Butler, and about Stuart Hall and his distinction between preferred meanings versus negotiated meanings and oppositional meanings, my intellectual excitement translates to my verbal style and energizes my peculiar semantic trace. And my Baptist roots begin to nourish my oratorical engagement, and before I know it, I’m preaching postmodernism.

So here you have a professor with a staccato rhythm and a tuneful cadence who’s invested in the articulation of postmodern conceptualizations of identity and power. I’m baptizing my lecture in the rhetorical waters of my religious tradition. There is no rupture, no discontinuity, nothing but seamless negotiations between diverse styles of intellectual and rhetorical engagement. There may be problems for interlocutors who believe that an etiquette of articulation should prevail, one that polices style and dictates proprietary usage. But I ain’t with that, so there’s no problem for me. The irony is that even in this so-called postmodernist moment, which ostensibly celebrates pastiche, fragmentation, collage, difference, irreverent fusions, and the like, black style remains problematic. When black identity marks
postmodernity with its embodied articulation, there’s a rupture going on in the midst of the rupturing context itself. It involves the problem that has confronted us in premodernity, modernity, and postmodernity: race, and more specifically, the issue of blackness and its unwieldy complement of transgressing expressions.

Yes. There seems always to be this move to delegitimize, to make it . . .

Literally illegal.

I remember my first semester as an undergraduate at Princeton. So, to my mind, this white guy says to me, How are you ever going to go home again? Aren’t you afraid that these people won’t understand?

Yes, would have to unbirth you . . .

There’s some rupture. I’ve thought about this black Ivy League tradition that we seem to silence. Although we celebrate these people, we silence the fact that they were educated in and present at these institutions at the same time as the Eliots, Stevenses, Santayanas, and Jameses. Inhabiting the same physical space.

That’s exactly right. And that’s why postmodernity is so crucial, at least in theory: it helps us uncover and claim the useful legacies of modernism that were submerged in its racial silences. Of course, it could be that postmodernism is really modernism in drag. As you said, when you think of modernism, you think of Eliot and Stevens. And as you noted, you think of Santayana and James too, and we could add Royce, just to keep the Harvard modernists in line. And we could add Joyce, Pound, Frost, Crane, and a host of others. Gender got a strong foothold in the modernist canon in a way that race was never quite able to do, with figures like Marianne Moore, Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, and Djuna Barnes. But at the same time, W.E.B. Du Bois is right in the middle of modernism, along with Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy West, Richard Wright, Chester Himes, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and many, many more. They were all thinking, writing, imagining, and populating black universes, even as many of them insisted that it was impossible to limn the American experience without viewing the nation through the eyes of blacks who were more American than African, as Ellison contended, or as they emphasized the universal moral impulse that echoes through black demands for dignity and humanity, as Baldwin argued.