Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
         Editor's Introduction: Writing "Race" and the Difference It_Makes
         What importance does "race" have as a meaningful
            category in the study of literature and the shaping of critical
            theory? If we attempt to answer this question by examining the
            history of Western literature and its criticism, our initial
            response would probably be "nothing" or, at the very
            least, "nothing explicitly." Indeed, until the past
            decade or so, even the most subtle and sensitive literary critics
            would most likely have argued that, except for aberrant moments in
            the history of criticism, race has not been brought to bear upon
            the study of literature in any apparent way. Since T. S. Eliot,
            after all, the canonical texts of the Western literary tradition
            have been defined as a more or less closed set of works that
            somehow speak to, or respond to, "the human condition"
            and to each other in formal patterns of repetition and revision.
            And while most critics acknowledge that judgment is not absolute
            and indeed reflects historically conditioned presuppositions,
            certain canonical works (the argument runs) do seem to transcend
            value judgments of the moment, speaking irresistibly to the human
            condition. The question of the place of texts written by the Other
            (be that odd metaphorical negation of the European defined as
            African, Arabic, Chinese, Latin American, Yiddish, or female
            authors) in the proper study of "literature,"
            "Western literature," or "comparative
            literature" has, until recently, remained an unasked
            question, suspended or silenced by a discourse in which the
            canonical and the noncanonical stand as the ultimate opposition. In
            much of the thinking about the proper study of literature in this
            century, race has been an invisible quantity, a persistent yet
            implicit presence.
            This was not always the case, we know. By mid-nineteenth century,
            "national spirit" and "historical period"
            had become widely accepted categories within theories of the nature
            and function of literature which argued that the principal value in
            a great work of literary art resided in the extent to which these
            categories were reflected in that work of art Montesquieu's
            De l'esprit des lois considered a culture's formal
            social institution as the repository of its "guiding
            spirit," while Giambattista Vico's principi di una
            scienza nuova read literature against a complex pattern of
            historical cycles. Friedrich and August von Schlegel managed rather
            deftly to bring "both national spirit and historical
            period" to bear upon the interpretation of literature, as W.
            Jackson Bate has shown. But it was Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine who made
            the implicit explicit by postulating "race, moment, and
            milieu" as positivistic criteria through which any work could
            be read and which, by definition, any work reflected. Taine's
            History of English Literature was the great foundation upon which
            subsequent nineteenth-century notions of "national
            literatures" would be constructed.
             
            Henry Louis Gates, Jr.is professor of English, comparative
            literature, and African studies at Cornell University. He has
            edited several books and has written Figures in Blood and The
            Signifying Monkey.
Anthony Appiah
         The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion_of_Race
         Contemporary biologists are not agreed on the question of whether
            there are any human races, despite the widespread scientific
            consensus on the underlying genetics. For most purposes, however,
            we can reasonably treat this issue as terminological. What most
            people in most cultures ordinarily believe about the significance
            of "racial" difference is quite remote, I think, from
            what the biologists are agreed on. Every reputable biologist will
            agree that human genetic variability between the populations of
            Africa or Europe or Asia is not much greater than that within those
            populations; though how much greater depends, in part, on the
            measure of genetic variability the biologist chooses. If biologists
            want to make interracial difference seem relatively large, they can
            say that "the proportion of genic variation attributable to
            racial differences is … 9   11%."1 If they want to make
            it seem small, they can say that, for two people who are both
            Caucasoid, the chances of difference in genetic constitution at one
            site on a given chromosome are currently estimated at about 14.3
            percent, while for any two people taken at random from the human
            population, they are estimated at about 14.8 percent. (I will
            discuss why this is considered a measure of genetic difference in
            section 2.) The statistical facts about the distribution of variant
            characteristics in human populations and subpopulations are the
            same, whichever way the matter is expressed. Apart from the visible
            morphological characteristics of skin, hair, and bone, by which we
            are inclined to assign people to the broadest racial
            categories black, white, yellow there are few genetic
            characteristics to be found in the population of England that are
            not found in similar proportions in Zaire or in China; and few too
            (though more) which are found in Zaire but not in similar
            proportions in China or in England. All this, I repeat, is part of
            the consensus (see, "GR," pp. 1-59). A more familiar
            part of the consensus is that the differences between peoples in
            language, moral affections, aesthetic attitudes, or political
            ideology those differences which most deeply affect us in our
            dealings with each other are not biologically determined to
            any significant degree.
            […]
            In this essay, I want to discuss the way in which W. E. B. Du
            Bois who called his life story the "autobiography of a
            race concept" came gradually, though never completely,
            to assimilate the unbiological nature of races. I have made these
            few prefatory remarks partly because it is my experience that the
            biological evidence about race is not sufficiently known and
            appreciated but also because they are important in discussing Du
            Bois. Throughout his life, Du Bois was concerned not just with the
            meaning of race but with the truth about it. We are more inclined
            at present, however, not to express our understanding of the
            intellectual development of people and cultures as a movement
            toward the truth; I shall sketch some of the reasons for this at
            the end of the essay. I will begin, therefore, by saying what I
            think the rough truth is about race, because, against the stream, I
            am disposed to argue that this struggle toward the truth is exactly
            what we find in the life of Du Bois, who can claim, in my view, to
            have thought longer, more engagedly, and more publicly about race
            than any other social theorist of our century.
             
            1. Masatoshi Nei and Arun K. Roychoudhury, "Genetic
            Relationship and Evolution of Human Races," Evolutionary
            Biology 14 (1983): 11; all further references to this work,
            abbreviated "GR," will be included in the text.
             
            Anthony Appiah is associate professor of philosophy, African
            studies, and Afro-American studies at Yale. He is the author of
            Assertion and Conditionals (1985) and For Truth in Semantics
            (forthcoming). In addition, he is at work on African Reflections:
            Essays in the Philosophy of Culture.
             
Edward W. Said
         An Ideology of Difference
         The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 seems to have broken, for
            the first time, the immunity from sustained criticism previously
            enjoyed by Israel and its American supporters. For a variety of
            reasons, Israel's status in European and American public life
            and discourse has always been special, just as the position of Jews
            in the West has always been special, sometimes for its tragedy and
            horrendous suffering, at other times for its uniquely impressive
            intellectual and aesthetic triumphs. On behalf of Israel, anomalous
            norms, exceptional arguments, eccentric claims were (and still are)
            made, all of them forcibly conveying the notion that Israel does
            not entirely belong to the world of normal politics. Nevertheless,
            Israel and with it, Zionism had gained this unusual
            status politically, not miraculously: it merged with a variety of
            currents in the West whose power and attractiveness for supporters
            of Israel effaced anything as concrete as, for example, an Israeli
            policy of rigid separation between Jew and non-Jew, or a military
            rule over hundreds of thousands of Arabs that was as repressive as
            any tyranny in Latin America or Eastern Europe. There are any
            number of credible accounts of this, from daily fare in the Israeli
            press to studies by Amnesty International, to reports by various
            U.N. bodies, Western journalists, church groups, and, not least,
            dissenting supporters of Israel. In other words, even though Israel
            was a Jewish state established by force on territory already
            inhabited by a native population largely of Muslim Arabs, in a part
            of the world overwhelmingly Muslim and Arab, it appeared to most of
            Israel's supporters in the West (from which Zionism
            increasingly drew its greatest help) that the Palestinian Arabs who
            paid a large part of the price for Israel's establishment
            were neither relevant nor necessarily even real. What changed in
            1982 was that the distance between Arab and Jew was for the first
            time perceived more or less universally as not so great and,
            indeed, that any consideration of Israel, and any perception of
            Israel at all, would have to include some consideration of the
            Palestinian Arabs, their travail, their claims, their humanity.
            Changes of this sort seem to occur dramatically, although it is
            more accurate to comprehend them as complex, cumulative, often
            contradictory processes occurring over a long period of time. Above
            all else, however, no such process can be viewed neutrally, since
            for better or for worse there are many interests at work in it and,
            therefore, many interests also at work whenever it is interpreted
            or reported. Moreover, while it is worthwhile and even possible to
            reduce and curtail the gross pressure of those interests for the
            purpose of analysis or reflection, it is useless to deny that any
            such analysis is inevitably grounded in, or inevitably affiliated
            to, a particular historical moment and a specific political
            situation.
             
            Edward Said,Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at
            Columbia University, is the author of, among other works, The
            Question of Palestine (1979), The World, the Text, and the Critic
            (1983), and After the Last Sky(forthcoming). He will give the 1985
            T. S. Eliot Lectures, on Culture and Imperialism,at the University
            of Kent later this year. His previous contributions to Critical
            Inquiry include "Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and
            Community" (September 1982) and "On Professionalism:
            Response to Stanley Fish" (December 1983).
Abdul R. JanMohamed
         The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of_Racial
            Difference in Colonialist Literature
         Despite all its merits, the vast majority of critical attention
            devoted to colonialist literature restricts itself by severely
            bracketing the political context of culture and history. This
            typical facet of humanistic closure requires the critic
            systematically to avoid an analysis of the domination,
            manipulation, exploitation, and disfranchisement that are
            inevitably involved in the construction of any cultural artifact or
            relationship. I can best illustrate such closures in the field of
            colonialist discourse with two brief examples. In her book The
            Colonial Encounter, which contrasts the colonial representations of
            three European and three non-European writers, M. M. Mahood skirts
            the political issue quite explicitly by arguing that she chose
            those authors precisely because they are "innocent of
            emotional exploitation of the colonial scene" and are
            "distanced" from the politics of domination.`1
            We find a more interesting example of this closure in Homi
            Bhabha's criticism. While otherwise provocative and
            illuminating, his work rests on two assumptions the unity of
            the "colonial subject" and the
            "ambivalence" of colonial discourse that are
            inadequately problematized and, I feel, finally unwarranted and
            unacceptable. In rejecting Edward Said's "suggestion
            that colonial power and discourse is possessed entirely by the
            colonizer," Bhabha asserts, without providing any
            explanation, the unity of the "colonial subject (both
            colonizer and colonized)."2 I do not wish to rule out, a
            priori, the possibility that at some rarefied theoretical level the
            varied material and discursive antagonisms between conquerors and
            natives can be reduced to the workings of a single
            "subject"; but such a unity, let alone its value, must
            be demonstrated, not assumed. Though he cites Frantz Fanon, Bhabha
            completely ignored Fanon's definition of the conqueror/native
            relation as a "Manichean" struggle a definition
            that is not a fanciful metaphoric caricature but an accurate
            representation of a profound conflict.3
             
            1. M. M. Mahood, The Colonial Encounter: A Reading of Six Novels
            (Totowa, N.J., 1977), pp. 170, 171; and see p. 3. As many other
            studies demonstrate, the emotional innocence and the distance of
            the six writers whom Mahood has chosen Joseph Conrad, E. M.
            Forster, Graham Greene, Chinua Achebe, R. K. Narayan, and V. S.
            Naipaul are, at best, highly debatable.
            2. Homi K. Bhabha, "The Other Question The Stereotype
            and Colonial Discourse," Screen 24 (Nov.-Dec. 1983): 25, 19.
            3. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance
            Farrington (New York, 1968), p. 41.
             
            Abdul R. JanMohamed,assistant professor of English at the
            University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Manichean
            Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa. He is a
            founding member and associate editor of Cultural Critique and is
            currently working on a study of Richard Wright.
Bernard Lewis
         The Crows of the Arabs
         Aghribat al-Arab,"crows or ravens of the Arabs," was
            the name given to a group of early Arabic poets who were of African
            or partly African parentage. Of very early origin, the term was
            commonly used by classical Arabic writers on poetics and literary
            history. Its use is well attested in the ninth century and was
            probably current in the eighth century, if not earlier. The term
            was used with some variation. Originally, it apparently designated
            a small group of poets in pre-Islamic Arabia whose fathers were
            free and sometimes noble Arabs and whose mothers were African,
            probably Ethiopian, slaves. As the sons of slave women, they were,
            by Arab customary law, themselves slaves unless and until their
            fathers chose to recognize and liberate them. As the sons of
            African women, their complexions were darker than was normal among
            the Arabs of the peninsula.
            Both themes servitude and blackness occur in some of
            the verses ascribed to these poets and, in a sense, define their
            identity as a group. Professor &lsquo;Abduh Badawī of Khartoum
            begins his book on the black Arab poets the first serious and
            extensive study devoted to the topic with this definition:
            This name [the crows of the Arabs] was applied to those [Arabic]
            poets to whom blackness was transmitted by their slave mothers, and
            whom at the same time was transmitted by their slave mothers, and
            whom at the same time their Arab fathers did not recognize, or
            recognized only under constraint from them.1&shy;
             
            Bernard Lewis is Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern
            Studies at Princeton University and has been a long-term Member of
            the Institute for Advanced Study. His most recent books are The
            Muslim Discovery of Europeand the Jews of Islam.
Israel Burshatin
         The Moor in the Text: Metaphor, Emblem, and_Silence
         The image of the Moor in Spanish literature reveals a paradox at
            the heart of Christian and Castilian hegemony in the period between
            the conquest of Nasrid Granada in 1492 and the expulsion of the
            Moriscos by Philip III in 1609.&shy;&shy; Depictions fall between
            two extremes. On the "vilifying" side, Moors are
            hateful dogs, miserly, treacherous, lazy andoverreaching. On the
            "idealizing" side, the men are noble, loyal, heroic,
            courtly they even mirror the virtues that Christian knights
            aspire to while the women are endowed with singular beauty
            and discretion.
            Anti-Muslim diatribes are fairly common and predictable: they are
            flat and repetitive in their assertion of Old Christian superiority
            over every aspect of the lives of Muslims or crypto-Muslims. Any
            sign of cultural otherness is ridiculed; the conquering caste,
            insecure about its own lofty (and, more often than not, chimerical)
            standards of limpieza de sangre ("purity of blood"),
            laughs away whatever trace of old Hispano-Arab splendor might
            remain in the Morisco. Or, conversely, the uneasy master recasts
            wretched Moriscos as ominous brethren of the Ottoman Turk.
            The truly vexed problem, however, consists in determining the
            meaning of idealized Moors in historiography, ballads, drama, and
            the novel. Roughly speaking, modern criticism divides into two
            camps in attempting to explain this curious phenomenon of literary
            infatuation with a cultural and religious minority subjected to
            growing popular hostility, Inquisitional hounding, and economic
            exploitation. I will call one camp "aestheticist" and
            the other "social."
             
            Israel Burshatin,assistant professor of Spanish at Haverford
            College, is currently preparing a critical edition of Pedro del
            Corral's Crónica sarracina.
Mary Louise Pratt
         Scratches on the Face of the Country; or,_What_Mr._barrow_Saw_in
            the Land of the Bushmen
         If the discourse of manners and customs aspires to a stable fixing
            of subjects and systems of differences, however, its project is not
            and never can be complete. This is true if only for the seemingly
            trivial reason that manners-and-customs descriptions seldom occur
            on their own as discrete texts. They usually appear embedded in or
            appended to a superordinate genre, whether a narrative, as in
            travel books and much ethnography, or an assemblage, as in
            anthologies and magazines.6 In the case of travel writing, which is
            the main focus of this essay, manners-and-customs description is
            always in play with other sorts of representation that also bespeak
            difference and position subjects in their own ways. Sometimes these
            other positioning complement the ideological project of normalizing
            description, and sometime they do not.
            In what follows, I propose to examine this interplay of discourses
            in some nineteenth-century travel writing chiefly about Africa.
            While Barrow's work is not prominent on anybody's
            mental bookshelves these days, readers will recognize such names as
            David Livingstone, John Speke, James Grant, Richard Burton, Mungo
            Park, or Paul Du Chaillu. During the co-called opening up of
            central and southern Africa to European capitalism in the first
            half of the nineteenth century, such explorer-writers were the
            principal producers of Africa for European
            imaginations producers, that is, of ideology in connection
            with the European expansionist project there. What I hope to
            underscore in these writings is not their tendency towards single,
            fixed subject positions or single, fixed systems of difference.
            Rather, I wish to emphasize the multiplicity of ways of codifying
            the Other, the variety of (seemingly) fixed positions and the
            variety of (seemingly) given sets of differences that they posit.
            European penetration and appropriation is semanticized in numerous
            ways that can be quite distinct, even mutually contradictory. In
            the course of examining discursive polyphony in these travel
            writings, I hope to stress the need to consider ideology not only
            in terms of reductive simplification but also in terms of the
            proliferation of meanings.
             
            6. Ethnographies would seem to be a counterexample to this claim,
            but in fact one can fairly easily show that ethnographic writing is
            inextricably tied to personal narrative. Indeed this tie is a
            symptom of a serious contradiction between ethnographic methods and
            ethnographic discourse. See my "Fieldwork in Common
            Places," in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of
            Ethnography,ed. James Clifford and George Marcus (forthcoming,
            1986).
             
            Mary Louise Pratt is an associate professor in the Department of
            Spanish and Portuguese and the Program in Comparative Literature at
            Stanford University. She is author of Toward a Speech-Act Theory of
            Literary Discourse and is a member of the editorial boards of
            Poetics, Signs Tabloid, and Cultural Anthropology.
Homi K. Bhabha
         Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and_Authority
            under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817
         How can the question of authority, the power and presence of the
            English, be posed in the interstices of a double inscription? I
            have no wish to replace an idealist myth the metaphoric
            English book with a historicist one the colonialist
            project of English civility. Such a reductive reading would deny
            what is obvious, that the representation of colonial authority
            depends less on a universal symbol of English identity than on its
            productivity as a sign of difference. Yet in my use of
            "English"  there is a "transparency"  of
            reference that registers a certain obvious presence: the Bible
            translated into Hindi, propagated by Dutch or native catechists, is
            still the English book; a Polish émigré, deeply influenced by
            Gustave Flaubert, writing about Africa, produces an English
            classic. What is there about such a process of visibility and
            recognition that never fails to be an authoritative acknowledgement
            without ceasing to be a "spacing between desire and
            fulfillment, between perpetuation and its recollection … [a] medium
            [which] has nothing to do with a center" (D,p. 212)?
            This question demands a departure from Derrida's objectives
            in "The Double Session"; a turning away from the
            vicissitudes of interpretation in the mimetic act of reading to the
            question of the effects of power, the inscription of strategies of
            individuation and domination in those "dividing
            practices" which construct the colonial space a
            departure from Derrida which is also a return to those moments in
            his essay when he acknowledges the problematic of
            "presence" as a certain quality of discursive
            transparency which he describes as "the production of mere
            reality-effects" or "the effect of content" or as
            the problematic relation between the "medium of writing and
            the determination of each textual unit." In the rich ruses
            and rebukes with which he shows up the "false appearance of
            the present," Derrida fails to decipher the specific and
            determinate system of address (not referent) that is signified by
            the "effect of content" (see D, pp. 173-85). It is
            precisely such a strategy of address the immediate presenceof
            the English that engages the questions of authority that I
            want to raise. When the ocular metaphors of presence refer to the
            process by which content is fixed as an "effect of the
            present," we encounter not plenitude but the structured gaze
            of power whose objective is authority, whose "subjects"
            are historical.
             
            Homi K. Bhabhais lecturer in English literature and literary theory
            at the University of Sussex. He is working at present on Power and
            Spectacle: Colonial Discourse and the English Novel and is
            commissioning and editing a collection of essays entitled Nation
            and Narration: Post-structuralism and the Culture of National
            Identity. He is also writing the introduction to the new English
            edition of Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks.
Patrick Brantlinger
         Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth_of_the_Dark
            Continent
         Paradoxically, abolitionism contained the seeds of empire. If we
            accept the general outline of Eric Williams' thesis in
            Capitalism and Slavery that abolition was not purely altruistic but
            was as economically conditioned as Britain's later empire
            building in Africa, the contradiction between the ideologies of
            antislavery and imperialism seems more apparent than real. Although
            the idealism that motivated the great abolitionists such as William
            Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson is unquestionable, Williams argues
            that Britain could afford to legislate against the slave trade only
            after that trade had helped to provide the surplus capital
            necessary for industrial "take-off." Britain had lost
            much of its slave-owning territory as a result of the American
            Revolution; as the leading industrial power in the world, Britain
            found in abolition a way to work against the interests of its
            rivals who were still heavily involved in colonial slavery and a
            plantation economy.3
            The British abolitionist program entailed deeper and deeper
            involvement in Africa the creation of Sierra Leone as a haven
            for freed slaves was just a start but British abolitionists
            before the 1840s were neither jingoists nor deliberate
            expansionists. Humanitarianism applied to Africa, however, did
            point insistently toward imperialism.4 By mid-century, the success
            of the antislavery movement, the impact of the great Victorian
            explorers, and the merger of racist and evolutionary doctrines in
            the social sciences had combined to give the British public a
            widely shared view of Africa that demanded imperialization on
            moral, religious, and scientific grounds. It is this view that I
            have called the myth of the Dark Continent; by mythology I mean a
            form of modern, secularized, "depoliticized speech" (to
            adopt Roland Barthes' phrase) discourse which treats
            its subject as universally accepted. Scientifically established,
            and therefore no longer open to criticism by a political or
            theoretical opposition. In The Idea of Race in Science: Great
            Britain, 1800-1960,Nancy Stepan writes:
            A fundamental question about the history of racism in the first
            half of the nineteenth century is why it was that, just as the
            battle against slavery was being won by abolitionists, the war
            against racism was being lost. The Negro was legally freed by the
            Emancipation Act of 1833, but in the British mind he was still
            mentally, morally and physically a slave.5
            It is this "fundamental question" which a genealogy of
            the myth of the Dark Continent can help to answer.
             
            Patrick Brantlinger,professor of English at Indiana University, is
            the editor of Victorian Studies. He has written The Spirit of
            Reform: British Literature and Politics, 1832-1867 (1977) and Bread
            and Circuses: Theories of Mass Culture and Social Decay (1983).
Sander L. Gilman
         Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of_Female
            Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature
         This essay is an attempt to plumb the conventions (and thus the
            ideologies) which exist at a specific historical moment in both the
            aesthetic and scientific spheres. I will assume the existence of a
            web of conventions within the world of the
            aesthetic conventions which have elsewhere been admirably
            illustrated but will depart from the norm by examining the
            synchronic existence of another series of conventions, those of
            medicine. I do not mean in any way to accord special status to
            medical conventions. Indeed, the world is full of overlapping and
            intertwined systems of conventions, of which the medical and the
            aesthetic are but two. Medicine offers an especially interesting
            source of conventions since we do tend to give medical conventions
            special "scientific" status as opposed to the
            "subjective" status of the aesthetic conventions. But
            medical icons are no more "real" than
            "aesthetic" ones. Like aesthetic icons, medical icons
            may iconographic in that they represent these realities in a manner
            determined by the historical position of the observers, their
            relationship to their own time, and to the history of the
            conventions which they employ. Medicine uses its categories to
            structure an image of the diversity of mankind; it is as much at
            the mercy of the needs of any age to comprehend this infinite
            diversity as any other system which organizes our perception of the
            world. The power of medicine, at least in the nineteenth century,
            lies in the rise of the status of science. He conventions of
            medicine infiltrate other seemingly closed iconographic systems
            precisely because of this status. In examining the conventions of
            medicine employed in other areas, we must not forget this power.
            One excellent example of the conventions of human diversity
            captured in the iconography of the nineteenth century is the
            linkage of two seemingly unrelated female images the icon of
            the Hottentot female and the icon of the prostitute. In the course
            of the nineteenth century, the female Hottentot comes to represent
            the black female in nuce, and the prostitute to represent the
            sexualized woman. Both of these categories represent the creation
            of classes which correspondingly represent very specific qualities.
            While the number of terms describing the various categories of the
            prostitute expanded substantially during the nineteenth century,
            all were used to label the sexualized woman. Likewise, while many
            groups of African blacks were known to Europeans in the nineteenth
            century, the Hottentot remained representative of the essence of
            the black, especially the black female. Both concepts fulfilled an
            iconographic function in the perception and the representation of
            the world. How these two concepts were associated provides a case
            study for the investigation of patterns of conventions, without any
            limitation on the "value" of one pattern over another.
             
            Sander L. Gilman is professor of Humane Studies in the Department
            of German Literature and Near Eastern Studies and professor of
            Psychiatry (History) in the Cornell Medical College, Cornell
            University. He is the author or editor of numerous studies of
            European cultural history with a focus on the history of
            stereotypes. In addition, he has coedited Degeneration (1985) with
            J. E. Chamberlin. His study Jewish Self-Hatred is forthcoming.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
         Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism
         It should not be possible to read nineteenth-century British
            literature without remembering that imperialism, understood as
            England's social mission, was a crucial part of the cultural
            representation of England to the English. The role of literature in
            the production of cultural representation should not be ignored.
            These two obvious "facts" continue to be disregarded in
            the reading of nineteenth-century British literature. This itself
            attests to the continuing success of the imperialist project,
            displaced and dispersed into more modern forms.
            If these "facts" were remembered, not only in the study
            of British literature but in the study of the literature of the
            European colonizing cultures of the great age of imperialism, we
            would produce a narrative, in literary history, of the
            "worlding" of what is now called "the Third
            World." To consider the Third World as distant cultures,
            exploited but with rich intact literary heritages waiting to be
            recovered, interpreted, and curricularized in English translation
            fosters the emergence of "the Third World" as a
            signifier that allows us to forget that "worlding,"
            even as it expands the empire of the literary discipline.1
            […]
            In this essay, I will attempt to examine the operation of the
            "worlding" of what is today "the Third
            World" by what has become a cult text of feminism: Jane
            Eyre.2 I plot the novel's reach and grasp, and locate its
            structural motors. I read Wide Sargasso Sea as Jane Eyre's
            reinscription and Frankenstein as an analysis even a
            deconstruction of a "worlding" such as Jane
            Eyre's.3
             
            Gayatri Chakravorty Spivakis Longstreet Professor of English at
            Emory University. She is the translator of Jacques Derrida's
            De la grammatologie and is presently finishing a book entitled
            Master Discourse, Native Informant. Her previous contributions to
             are " &lsquo;Draupadi' by Mahasveta
            Devi" (Winter 1981) and "The Politics of
            Interpretations" (September 1982).
Hazel V. Carby
         "On the Threshold of Woman's Era": Lynching, Empire,_and_Sexuality
            in Black Feminist Theory
         My purpose in this essay is to describe and define the ways in
            which Afro-American women intellectuals, in the last decade of the
            nineteenth century, theorized about the possibilities and limits of
            patriarchal power through its manipulation of racialized and
            gendered social categories and practices. The essay is especially
            directed toward two academic constituencies: the practitioners of
            Afro-American cultural analysis and of feminist historiography and
            theory. The dialogue with each has its own peculiar form,
            characterized by its own specific history; yet both groups are
            addressed in an assertion of difference, of alterity, and in a
            voice characterized by an anger dangerously self-restrained. For it
            is not in the nature of Caliban to curse; rather, like Caliban, the
            black woman has learned from her behaviour of her master and
            mistress that if accommodation results in a patronizing loosening
            of her bonds, liberation will be more painful.
             
            Hazel V. Carby is assistant professor of English at Wesleyan
            University. She is the coauthor of the Empire Strikes Back: Race
            and Racism in Seventies Britain and the author of Uplifting as They
            Write: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist
            (forthcoming, 1986).
Barbara Johnson
         Thresholds of Difference: Structures of Address in Zora_Neale
            Hurston
         In preparing to write this paper, I found myself repeatedly stopped
            by conflicting conceptions of the structure of address into which I
            was inserting myself. It was not clear to me what I, as a white
            deconstructor, was doing talking about Zora Neale Hurston, a black
            novelist and anthropologist, or to whom I was talking. Was I trying
            to convince white establishment scholars who long for a return to
            Renaissance ideals that the study of the Harlem Renaissance is not
            a trivialization of their humanistic pursuits? Was I trying to
            contribute to the attempt to adapt the textual strategies of
            literary theory to the analysis of Afro-American literature? Was I
            trying to rethink my own previous work and the re-referentialize
            the notion of difference so as to move the conceptual operations of
            deconstruction out of the realm of abstract linguistic
            universality? Was I talking to white critics, black critics, or
            myself?
            Well, all of the above. What finally struck me was the fact that
            what I was analyzing in Hurston's writings was precisely,
            again and again, her strategies and structures of problematic
            address. It was as though I were asking her for answers to
            questions I did not even know I was unable to formulate. I had a
            lot to learn, then, from Hurston's way of dealing with
            multiple agendas and heterogeneous implied readers. I will focus
            here on three texts that play interesting variations on questions
            of identity and address: two short essays, "How It Feels to
            Be Colored Me" and "What White Publishers Won't
            Print," and a book-length collection of folktales, songs, and
            hoodoo practices entitles Mules and Men.
             
            Barbara Johnson is professor of French and comparative literature
            at Harvard University. She is the author of Défigurations du
            langage poétique and The Critical Difference,translator of Jacques
            Derrida's Dissemination,and editor of The Pedagogical
            Imperative: Teaching as a Literary Genre. Her previous contribution
            to ,"Rigorous Unreliability," appeared
            in the December 1984 issue.
Jacques Derrida
         Racism's Last Word
         APARTHEID may that remain the name from now on, the unique
            appellation for the ultimate racism in the world, the last of many.
            May it thus remain, but may a day come when it will only be for the
            memory of man.
            A memory in advance: that, perhaps, is the time given for this
            exhibition. At once urgent and untimely, it exposes itself and
            takes a chance with time, it wagers and affirms beyond the wager.
            Without counting on any present moment, it offers only a foresight
            in painting, very close to silence, and the rearview vision of a
            future for which apartheid will be the name of something finally
            abolished. Confined and abandoned then to this silence of memory,
            the name will resonate all by itself. Reduced to the state of a
            term in disuse. The thing it names today will no longer be.
            But hasn't apartheid always been the archival record of the
            unnameable?
            The exhibition, therefore, is not a presentation. Nothing is
            delivered here in the present, nothing that would be
            presentable only, in tomorrow's rearview mirror, the
            late, ultimate racism, the last of many.
             
            Jacques Derrida,professor of philosophy at the Ecole des hauts
            etudes en sciences socials in Paris, is the author of, among other
            works, Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, Margins of
            Philosophy,and Dissemination. His most recent contribution to
            ,"The Linguistic Circle of Geneva,"
            appeared in the Summer 1982 issue. Peggy Kamuf teaches French at
            Miami University, Ohio. She is the author of Fiction of Feminine
            Desire.
