The Social Imperative

Race, Close Reading, and Contemporary Literary Criticism

Paula L. Moya

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780804797030
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In the context of the ongoing crisis in literary criticism, The Social Imperative reminds us that while literature will never by itself change the world, it remains a powerful tool and important actor in the ongoing struggle to imagine better ways to be human and free. Figuring the relationship between reader and text as a type of friendship, the book elaborates the social-psychological concept of schema to show that our multiple social contexts affect what we perceive and how we feel when we read. Championing and modeling a kind of close reading that attends to how literature reflects, promotes, and contests pervasive sociocultural ideas about race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, Paula M. L. Moya demonstrates the power of works of literature by writers such as Junot Diaz, Toni Morrison, and Helena Maria Viramontes to alter perceptions and reshape cultural imaginaries. Insofar as literary fiction is a unique form of engagement with weighty social problems, it matters not only which specific works of literature we read and teach, but also how we read them, and with whom. This is what constitutes the social imperative of literature.

1

RACISM IS NOT INTELLECTUAL

The Dialogic Potential of Multicultural Literature

Racism is not intellectual.

I can not reason these scars away.

Lorna Dee Cervantes

There is no Frigate like a Book

To take us Lands away

Emily Dickinson

In a searingly powerful poem that serves as the fulcrum of her award-winning first book of poetry, Emplumada, the Chicana poet Lorna Dee Cervantes responds to a young, white male acquaintance who has charged her with being altogether too concerned with the existence of racial discord. Over the course of “Poem for the Young White Man Who Asked Me How I, an Intelligent, Well-Read Person Could Believe in the War Between Races,” Cervantes attempts to explain to her interlocutor why she has been unable to transcend the emotional predispositions and what Raymond Williams has called “structures of feeling” that have mediated her race-conscious perspective on their shared social world (Marxism 129–34). Hers is a perspective, she contends, that has its roots in the emotionally toxic fallout of her everyday experiences of racism: the schoolyard experiences that have left her with an “‘excuse me’ tongue, and [the] / nagging preoccupation with the feeling of not being good enough”; the “slaps on the face” that her daily experiences of racism bring to her; the powerful enmity she feels from the “real enemy” outside her door who “hates [her].” In response to the young man’s implied argument that any perspective that participates in the logic of race-consciousness is the result of error-prone beliefs which can and should be eradicated through education, Cervantes insists that the accusation he has leveled at her cannot be adequately answered within the terms he has set forth: “Racism,” she tells him, “is not intellectual. / I can not reason these scars away” (36).

If racism is not intellectual—if a committed anti-racist cannot fight it with facts, then how can we fight it? How might we go about the process of changing people’s emotional horizons?—which is clearly a part of what needs to happen if the problem of racism is to be ameliorated. In this chapter, I explore two possible avenues: interracial friendships and multicultural literature.¹ Insofar as emotions are key to the doing of race, a sustained examination of how emotions about race figure into human motivation must be central to any attempt to move beyond the ideologies and socioeconomic arrangements that sustain racial inequality. Moreover, as a medium of communication that involves the active use of imagination—on the part of the reader as well as the author—literature is one of the key sites in which the social order can be imaginatively examined and reshaped. Both friendships and works of literature have the potential to move people emotionally by activating structures of identification and empathy toward others not like themselves. Books, novels, stories, and poems are important venues within which authors and readers alike can imagine alternative ways of being in this world—or even alternative social worlds.

Racism Is Not Intellectual

Cervantes’s assertion that racism is both imbued with emotion and resistant to pure reason has found resonance over the past decades in the work of philosophers and psychologists alike. For example, in a paper he gave at the 2001 “Passions of the Color Line” conference, Michael Stocker argues against the philosophical view that emotions involve or arise from beliefs alone. Such an account, he explains, “undergirds the hopeful view that racism or at least the emotions of racism could be eliminated by changing the beliefs giving rise to those emotions.”² Stocker makes his argument by drawing on the work of Sartre to trace out the intractability of feelings of loathing and contempt among anti-Semites who are confronted with evidence that logically contradicts the rationalizations they construct to justify their feelings. He then demonstrates the futility of trying to change beliefs without attending to the emotions they are inextricably bound up with:

It would not be enough that anti-Semites come to see that a particular act by a particular Jew is an everyday, ordinary act, or is even a fine act. That thought must be integrated into, and seen to conflict with, their anti-Semitism. And further, this conflict must matter to them. It cannot be seen just as a puzzling anomaly, of the sort that besets many, if not most, theories and generalizations. Nor can it be defended against in ways that stop it from mattering to them or moving them. They must be—and this means that almost certainly they must make themselves be—emotionally available and open to that thought and (what I see as) its obvious implications. (“Some Issues” 13–14, emphasis added)

Stocker’s point bears repeating: if the anti-Semite is not, at a profound level, emotionally moved or bothered by the contradiction between what she observes and what she “knows,” she need not make adjustments to her way of thinking. Even if she acknowledges that the act she has observed is a “fine act,” she can interpret it as an anomaly—as the proverbial exception to the general rule. In this way she can incorporate the act into her consciousness without having her anti-Semitic beliefs challenged in the least. Her emotional involvement is thus a prerequisite to overcoming her logically unfounded views about Jews.

The philosophers Eduardo Mendieta and William Wilkerson also reject the rigid distinction between thought and emotion. In his contribution to the “Passions of the Color Line” conference, Mendieta prefaces his analysis of exoticization as a technology of the racist self with an argument against the view that sees a bifurcation between mind and body. He observes that “the parceling between emotions and ideas, or between emotive responses and cognition, is but a manifestation of a [by now discredited] technology of the self, which dictates that we have to attribute to our biological natures an element of unpredictability and animalistic connotation, and to our cognitive and mental capacities a calculative, predictive nature.”³ Such a technology of the self, Mendieta reminds us, has arisen as a result of a historically contingent (specifically Cartesian) regime of subjection that fails to account for the way in which emotions are both cognitive and evaluative. Contra this view, Mendieta sees emotions as epistemically valuable. Emotions, he explains, “place us in particular relationships to the world, which is made up of things as well as other selves.” Insofar as emotions help us to make sense of others and ourselves, they serve as crucial hermeneutic devices—they “interpret the world for us.”

Similarly, in a compelling essay about the experience of coming out as gay or lesbian, William Wilkerson presents some phenomenological considerations about experience that suggest thought and emotion are necessarily bound up with one another (256–67). Drawing on the work of philosophers in both the analytic and continental traditions, Wilkerson argues that emotions are more than simply decorations or distractions to our thoughts:

[O]ur moods and emotional states are not merely an extra feeling laid over our ordinary thoughts and behaviors; they are part of a horizon that actually changes and molds our thoughts and behaviors, even as our behaviors and experience reinforce our emotions. If I am angry, my anger is not just a reaction to frustrating happenings or disappointed expectations. Rather, my anger has both a reactive and an anticipatory element. . . . When I am writing while angry and my pencil breaks, I may lash out in frustration, even though in a different mood I may simply get up and sharpen it and begin again. The experience is altered by the antecedent context of being angry, and being angry is not just an inner feeling but also a whole style of being in the world. (259–60)

Although Wilkerson chooses anger as the illustrative emotion in his example, his argument holds for all sorts of emotional states. Indeed, Wilkerson suggests that emotional states—as much as “taken-for-granted cultural meanings” and sedimented “habits of action and thought”—inevitably guide the initial direction that any interpretation may take by directing the interpreter’s attention to some elements of the hermeneutic situation while obscuring others (260).

One of Wilkerson’s aims in his essay is to defend the realist contention that attending to one’s own and others’ emotions is necessary for unlocking the epistemic potential of cultural identities. Elsewhere, I have argued that while emotions are always experienced subjectively, the meanings they embody transcend the individuals who are doing the experiencing (see Moya, “Symphony”; Moya, “Introduction”; Moya, Learning, esp. 49–57).⁴ Insofar as people learn from others around them what are considered to be appropriate emotional reactions to specific social situations, emotions are at least partially conditioned by the particular social and historical contexts into which they emerge. In other words, emotions are mediated by the shared ideologies through which individuals construct their social identities. As such, emotions necessarily refer outward—beyond individuals—to historically- and culturally-specific sorts of social relations and economic arrangements.

Under the view I am articulating here, emotions are not merely subjective; they are not circumscribed within one body, nor do they have their origin in an individual psyche. Rather, they literally “embody” larger social meanings and entrenched social arrangements. Recent work in the field of social psychology now provides empirical evidence for this view. Social psychologist Jeanne Tsai and her colleagues have run a number of studies over the past decade showing the cultural causes and behavioral consequences of what is considered to be an “ideal affect,” and the importance of cultural and situational factors for understanding the links between self and emotion (see, e.g., Tsai; Wong and Tsai; Chentsova-Dutton and Tsai). Thus, through attending to the meanings and origins of our often inchoate feelings, we humans can begin to discern the outlines of the social arrangements that sometimes constrain, and sometimes enable, our relational lives (Fanon). It is in this way that emotions have crucial epistemic value.

I have spent the past few pages arguing for the inextricable link between thought, emotion, and motivation primarily because claims about race and racism that are made by people of color are often dismissed by others as based in emotion—and as therefore irrational and epistemically unjustified. In presenting a case for the necessary interconnectedness between what goes on in our hearts and in our minds, I hope to forestall an easy dismissal of the idea that interracial friendships and multicultural literature can contribute to the project of decolonizing epistemologies. Rather than suggesting that the race-conscious perspectives and claims of people of color are not based in emotion, I acknowledge that they often are—even as I insist that such perspectives and claims can be both rational and epistemically justified. Moreover, rather than “clouding the issue” or “derailing the conversation,” emotions surrounding race and racism must be seen as precisely that which the committed anti-racist seeks to understand.

As I use it in this chapter, racism describes a complex of ideas, emotions, and practices having to do with the denigration, hatred, dispossession, and/or exploitation of people who are visually, and often culturally, different from oneself in a way that is understood to be innate, indelible, and unchangeable.⁵ Racism is expressed in multiple registers, including through folk beliefs, laws, court decisions, institutional structures, and everyday interactions. In the subjective realm, those who are exposed to the racism of others experience it as emotional pain, anger, and self-doubt. In the economic realm, victims of racism experience it as a lack of opportunity or the physical dispossession of personal or communal property. In both cases, the harms caused by racism are long lasting and can be handed down over many generations. Children who grow up in racist environments imbibe social attitudes about race along with their mothers’ milk, and children whose parents have been emotionally scarred by their own experiences of social denigration often inherit lifelong preoccupations with, as Cervantes suggests, the “feeling of not being good enough” (36). On a psychological level, it can be difficult for the racist and her victim alike to transcend the attitudes and interactions learned in childhood. In addition, the significant economic advantages gained by the ancestors of many white Americans at a time when the forebears of most racial minorities could be (and often were) legally dispossessed of their lands and labor have not dissipated. Although some people of color have succeeded in substantially improving their economic status, the majority of them confront a systemic economic disadvantage relative to white Americans—a situation that has been, and continues to be, perpetuated across generations both through differential access to educational and employment opportunities and the ongoing effects of institutional and interpersonal racism (Markus and Moya; Desmond and Emirbayer; Omi and Winant). Moreover, racial minorities have had to cope with this disadvantage in a society that measures people’s worth largely in terms of what kind of home they live in, what kind of car they drive, and what sort of school they attend; and that assumes that what people have is what they—in some sort of moral sense—deserve. Given all this, it should not be surprising that the statements about race and racism made by people who are the victims of racism are often thoroughly imbued with expressions of strong emotion—pain, regret, outrage, resentment. Conversely, because many people who participate in racist practices do so unwittingly and unintentionally simply as a result of being part of a society that is organized according to race, it should not be surprising that their reactions to the emotionally-charged claims of their accusers frequently cover the spectrum from denial and defensiveness, through shame, to a self-righteous claiming of racial privilege (Markus and Moya). To the extent that the anti-racist person is interested in understanding the intransigence of something as apparently “irrational” as race, the emotions surrounding race and racism must be seen as precisely that which she seeks to understand. A necessary part of any anti-racist project will thus be a consideration of the strong and varied emotions that are the warp and the woof of the fabric of racial relations in this country.

The Transformative Potential of Interracial Friendship

In her book What Are Friends For?, feminist philosopher Marilyn Friedman makes a cogent and compelling argument for understanding the institution of friendship as providing important opportunities for moral growth. Building on the work of Carol Gilligan, as well as on the work of Gilligan’s critics, Friedman explores the sort of profound moral growth that can result from a deep and sustained attention to the best interests of a person other than oneself. She takes as her paradigmatic case the relation of friendship, and identifies several features of friendship that make it conducive to fostering moral growth. By friendship, Friedman means “a relationship that is based on approximate equality (in at least some respects) and a mutuality of affection, interest, and benevolence. Friendship in this sense can occur between or among lovers or familial relations as well as between or among people not otherwise affiliated with one another” (189). Although my own interests are directed less toward the potential friendships hold for moral growth than toward the potential that interracial friendships hold for expanding and changing people’s emotional horizons, I find Friedman’s account useful for her insightful explication of the dynamics of a certain type of friendship. Rather than including in my discussion every sort of relationship across cultures to which some people may give the name of “friendship,” I focus on the sorts of relationships that are predicated on a strong degree of voluntarism, mutuality, sharing, and trust—that is, the type of friendship described and identified by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics as a “complete” or “perfect” friendship.⁶ In what follows, I both build on and depart from Friedman’s account to examine the way that interracial friendships can contribute in significant ways to the changing of people’s racial schemas. I start by enumerating several features that are common to complete friendships before returning to a consideration of specifically interracial friendships. I propose that the sharing of experiences about race and racism within interracial friendships that are predicated on a strong degree of voluntarism, mutuality, sharing, and trust can lead not only to emotional growth regarding the illogic and evils of racism, but also to an increase in the two friends’ shared understanding about the way race functions in our society to maintain current relations of power.

There are several features of complete friendship that make it particularly conducive to epistemic and emotional transformation. The first and perhaps most important characteristic is that it is a voluntary association. When a person says that she is friends with someone, she usually means at least these two things: (1) that she has chosen her friend because she feels affection for her, and (2) that her friendship with the friend exists independently of biological or attributed kinship ties. This is not to say that one cannot be friends with a member of one’s family—friendships among family members are both possible and frequent. Nevertheless, when one develops a friendship with a biological child or a sister-in-law, describing that relation as a “friend” implies that there is a crucial sense in which the relationship transcends the kinship tie. Moreover, the voluntary nature of complete friendship ensures that it is inherently self-regulating in the way that other sorts of relationships often are not. In general, economic, familial, and social considerations weigh much more heavily on marital, sibling, and parental relations than they do on friendship. As noted by the feminist philosopher Marilyn Frye, it “is one mark of a voluntary association that the one person can survive displeasing the other, defying the other, dissociating from the other” (73). Indeed, because friendships exist with comparatively less institutional support than marriages and other familial structures, the relationship will survive only as long as both friends attend to it—at least intermittently. Once one person ceases absolutely to participate in the complex negotiations required to keep each attentive to the other, or begins to demand more from the relationship than the other is willing to provide, the friendship will founder or cease to exist. Indeed, the always-present threat of the friendship’s dissolution discourages both coercion and the possibility of taking one’s friend for granted.

A natural consequence of the egalitarian nature of voluntary friendships is that friends who wish to maintain their relationship will be disposed to take an interest in and show respect for each other’s perspectives—even when those perspectives differ from one’s own. Accordingly, friends often come to understand each oth...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Schemas and Racial Literacy
• 1. Racism Is not Intellectual: The Dialogic Potential of Multicultural Literature
• 2. Not One and the Same Thing: The Ethical Relationship of Selves to Others in Toni Morrison’s Sula
• 3. Another Way to Be: Vestigial Schemas in Helena María Viramontes’s “The Moths” and Manuel Muñoz’s “Zigzagger”
• 4. Dismantling the Master’s House: The Search for Decolonial Love in Junot Díaz’s “How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie”
• 5. The Misprision of Mercy: Race and Responsible Reading in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy
• Conclusion: Reading Race
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index