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Blackness and the Adventure of
Western Culture
By George Kent
George Kent's Blackness and the Adventure of
Western Culture is the first book of
literary criticism by a black scholar to be published by
an independent black publishing company. Several of the
essays have previously appeared in the CLA Journal,
while others have never been published before. Dr. Kent,
a professor at the University of Chicago, has
established substantial renown as a scholar of Richard
Wright.
Blackness and the Adventure of Western Culture
includes stimulating essays on James Baldwin, Langston
Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and William
Faulkner, as well as a primer on the Harlem renaissance.
As a black man and a scholar, Dr. Kent has conjured up
the complex essence of black folk history and applied
and analyzed that history as a creative motif for the
black writer. His critical perspective is that of the
Black aesthetic—viewing
the black writer as only a black critic/a black man can.
—Back Cover
Notes, Third World Press (Chicago, Illinois, 1972)
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Kent's Introduction
(excerpts)
High Ground Humanism
The reader, I hope, will find no
rigid allegiance to traditional high ground
humanism. By high ground humanism, I mean the
established values implicit in white writers (whether
agonized over or promoted), derived from Hebrew, Greek,
and Roman traditions: the assumed triumph of the
individual, the clarity of truth, the existence of
transcendental beauty, the shining virtues of
rationality, the glory of democratic freedom, and the
range of Christian and platonic assumptions that tend to
form stubborn threads in the warp and woof of white
tradition as a systematic and abstract
universalism.
What I'm saying is that the writer is
permitted to step wherever he wills, and, as humble
critic, my job is to hang loose and follow. Which means
that I'll follow him into high humanistic ground, if
that's where he leads, and stand by holding a flashlight
to see what rhythms he can make visible and throbbing.
And I'll stand with him in the cool thickets in the low
grounds of lonesome valleys where things go down dense
and all definitions dissolve as they resolve or hold
themselves together by dint of home made existence-ism
clubs.
Absorbing Folk Traditions
In sum, definitions provided by folk
and cultural tradition, loosely defined, on which the
writer can enforce as much signification as the the
definitions can be made to bear. For the black writer
has by no means massively absorbed his folk and cultural
traditions and forms, as evidenced by the little use to
which the folk sermon and the supernatural and conjure
traditions are put. These traditions offer, of course, a
resource—not
a prison. They are convenient passports to a Blackness
beyond simple sloganeering and rhetorical assertion.
Now there are terms that today are
sterile categories or shifters of the nature of reality
at the very moment they attempt to make coherent
statements: protest, meaning really tract or
special pleading; transcending (the narrow and
parochial concerns of the black experience and thus
arising to the level of Man); universalism,
meaning usually a validation of Western high ground
versions universalism. Today these terms have revealed
themselves as game names.
For example, the term protest
covered Richard Wright for thirty years, concealed his
depths from us, so that we are just now beginning to
find out what his meaning for us is. Transcending
becomes all too quickly reducing the tensions of the
black experience, become faceless. And the problem of
universalism is that its current use misdirects the
writer and the critic, leads to vague abstractions (Man,
the Human Condition), and packs concealed cultural
referents. Any universalism worthy of recognition
derives from its depths of exploration of the density,
complexity, and variety of a people's experience—not
by transcending. . . .
The blues, which at one time
was a form completely addressed to blacks and, when
recognized at all, were seen largely as something
quaint, are now universal. This fact indicates that an
America now exists which is upset over the issue
of deep communication with the self, an issue not easily
escapable in black culture which the blues made a career
of dealing with ages ago.
To Be or Not to Be a Black Writer
Equally foolish, it seems to me, is
the energy wasted upon whether one is to be a black
writer or writer (who happens to be black). the issue
would hardly be worth discussing, if some important
black writers had not, to their hurt, taken it so
seriously as to diminish their creative powers. Now the
simple fact is that whiteness is not simply skin color
in America (or europe0, but a set of mythologies
inherited by white writers with which they naturally
interpret the universe.
Thus a William Styron, a white
liberal and winner of a Pulitzer prize for his Nat
Turner, could not envision a slave (Nat Turner)
revolting from natural feelings, but only when his mind
was unsettled by an indulgent white. When Styron was
ready to show how an untampered-with Black revolts, he
created the mindless and savage rapist and slaughterer
Will. Now i would submit that William Styron is a white
writer.
Imagine a talented Black (who was not
simply putting down a fast hustle) using Styron's
mythology! Or imagine Richard Wright interpreting the
South by some modified version of Faulknerian mythology.
We must keep in mind here that we are talking about
stances that deeply affect the interpretation of black
experience. In this context, Faulkner will everywhere be
seen as a white writer. . . . Now, of course, to many
whites, white writer is what is meant by
writer. . . .
Sensibility of the Black Writer
Now some of the adoption of white
mythology is probably conscious for both Chestnut and
other writers. Frantz Fanon calls the condition cultural
imposition, W.E.B. DuBois in "Of Our Spiritual
Strivings," The Souls of Black Folk, speaks of
"double consciousness." The latter can take interesting
and subtle twists, since to escape the area of brute
oppression is to acquire instruments ("education," etc.0
that transform one's psychic structure and enforce a
greater openness to powerful and subtle mythologies that
deny one's existence.
Thus, unless one is very lucky and
unusually skilled in his footwork, one effects the
illusion of escape only and the loss of one's being,
or at best considerable modification. Thus, so knowing a
man as Richard Wright rages against the murderous weight
of the West upon the backs of Blacks, but still flashes
forth the lonely posture of the Western ideal; the
expression of the individual life as revolutionary will,
which also bears the nagging weight of alienation from
many of the rhythms of one's own people.
So in some of the essay I'm concerned
about double-consciousness and about what I call the
sensibility of the black writer. The clean
adjustment is hard come by, and the struggle for it is
what I mean by the title of this book: Blackness and
the Adventure of Western Culture. It ties in with
the business of being a black writer, and acknowledging
it, for there are too many other forces working against
one's being to take on such silly psychic burdens as
denying from the outset one's identity. One becomes Paul
Lawrence Dunbar presenting mainly the idyllic portions
of a tough folk tradition, in conformity with white
mythology; and Countee P. Cullen fretting because, try
as he may, his Negroness keeps informing the best of his
poems.
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Contents
Introduction 9
Patterns of Harlem Renaissance
17
The Soulful Way of Claude McKay
36
Langston Hughes and Afro-American Folk
and Cultural Tradition 53
Richard Wright: Blackness and the
Adventure of Western Culture 76
On the Future of Richard Wright
98
The Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks
104
Baldwin and the Problem of Being
139
Ralph Ellison and Afro-American Folk and
Cultural Traditions 152
Faulkner
and the Heritage of White Racial Consciousness;
Notes on White Nationalism in Literature
164
Before Ideology: Reflections on Ralph
Ellison and the Sensibility of Younger Black Writers
183
Index 201
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George E. Kent (1920–82) was
an African-American professor of literature, with a
specialization in Afro-American literature. Born
in
Columbus, Georgia,
George Kent was the youngest of four children born to
Irby D. Kent, a blacksmith and Louise Austin Kent, a
school teacher. Even as a child he would teach alongside
his mother. He met his wife, Desiré Ash, whilst studying
for his BA at
Savannah State College.
After serving in the 25th Infantry (1942–5), he received
his MA and PhD in English from
Boston University. Dr.
Kent and his wife, Desire, had two children; a son
Edward, now deceased, and a daughter, Sherald. . . .
He later obtained a Masters and Ph.D. from
Boston University, in English Language and
Literature. . . . Over a long teaching career, he
held numerous positions including visiting
professorships with colleges and universities such as
Wesleyan University,
University of Connecticut,
Florida A & M University,
Grambling State College,
and the
University of Chicago.
From the 1940s through the 1960s he held positions from
Professor of English to Professor and Chairman of
Languages and Literature, as well as Dean of
Delaware State College.
He was also Professor and Chairman of English in
the Division of Liberal Arts at
Quinnipiac College.
The
annual George E. Kent Lecture at the
University of Chicago
is named in his honour. His specialism was Afro-American
literature. He completed the first full biography of the
poet
Gwendolyn Brooks just
before his death from cancer in 1982.
He finished his career in education
as a Professor of English, with a specialty in
African-American literature and poetry at the
University of Chicago
from 1970 until his death in 1982. While at the
University, George E. Kent is remembered as a pioneer
for being among the first tenured African-American
professors at the
University of Chicago
and as the first African-American professor of English.
Dr. Kent should also be remembered as an intense scholar
and intellectual dedicated to excellence in his work as
well as in the expectations he had of the many students
he taught and mentored.—Wikipedia
posted 15 August 2006
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.—WashingtonPost |
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By Russell Simmons
Russell Simmons knows firsthand that
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you happy." |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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