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Race and the Rhetoric of Resistance
Jeffrey B. Ferguson is remembered as an Amherst College professor of mythical charisma and for his long-standing engagement with George Schuyler, culminating in his paradigm changing book The Sage of Sugar Hill . Continuing in the vein of his ever questioning the conventions of “race melodrama” through the lens of which so much American cultural history and storytelling has been filtered, Ferguson’s final work is brought together here in Race and the Rhetoric of Resistance .
144 pages, Hardcover
Published March 12, 2021
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April 6, 2021
I picked this one up to read less as criticism than as a genuine pleasure read – pleasure at least in that I read it with no goal other than to have sufficient familiarity that I can be a small part of a panel discussion at the upcoming MELUS conference.
And, while I acknowledge that it may not be beach reading (though I did, in fact, read much of it at Ocean City, NJ) it is provocative and stimulating reading.
In fact, as I read, I couldn’t help but be struck by the sense that this is criticism in what I think of as the European rhetorical model. It really is essayistic – discovering its meaning as it goes – rather than scientific. That is, while many of our leading American critics seem to write as if they’re conscious of how their own piece of work fits into a larger puzzle of academic thought, Ferguson writes like the Europeans who explore where their individual voice takes them. (Derrida, for instance, rarely seems to me to write as part of a larger structure; he takes a grain of an idea and explores it as Ferguson does here .)
So, I liked this right away for that ambition. Reading it is a chance to glimpse the workings of Ferguson’s mind, and it stands as a tribute to a man who died too young. I understand this book as honoring a life and career cut short, and – grateful as I am to have it – I am saddened by thoughts of what might have been.
This book, then, is more a collection of essays than an extended argument.
The title essay is clearly the star of the show, and I have found myself swimming in its ideas since I read it two or three days ago. As I read it, Ferguson explores the notion that much of African-American identity has been formed – at least rhetorically – as resistance to the dominant white culture.
That foundational observation grows out of a sustained cleverness in his reading. He demonstrates that resistance informs much of the language of African-American identity. To take one example, he posits the rhetoric of religion as one potential alternative. Looking more closely, though, he points out that much of the African-American rhetoric of faith puts belief as a “way station” on the path to the ultimate freedom of heaven. In and of itself, he points out, we don’t see much in the notion that faith itself – independent of how it might represent a way to live in the everyday – can be a solution.
It occurs to me that the observation parallels Irving Berlin’s famous distinction between negative and positive freedom. Here, Ferguson strikes me as noting a rhetoric of ‘negative emancipation,’ a sense of what one might be free from, in contrast to a not-yet-fully articulated vision of what a positive emancipation would look like. (In his final, unfinished essay, he offers a striking reading of Ellison’s Invisible Man where he locates one powerful example of that possibility.)
Keeping in mind that Ferguson wrote most of this book six or even ten years ago, it’s striking to think how much such an argument implicitly troubles our conversation today. On the one hand, the moment of Trump (may it be brief) has reignited the line between Blacks and much of the rest of America. It’s almost quaint to see Ferguson limning some of the ways Obama spoke about race, so the context of his argument is already substantially altered.
Still, what are we to make of a claim that the emphasis on a language of pushing back against the [white] other fundamentally limits Black self-expression? How can African-Americans conceive of a way to name their experience if so much of the language of that expression has to do with rejecting some other?
I certainly don’t have an answer, and I’m glad I’m not called on to find one. But I am excited to feel the conversation that Ferguson seems to be calling for, and I look forward to hearing how other African-American thinkers begin to answer it.
The other essays in the collection do not directly address the same question, but he does begin to revisit some of it – with the same searing cleverness – in the fourth essay, “Of Mr. W.E.B. DuBois and Others.” There, after a careful critique of DuBois (one of the most efficient and engaging I have ever read) he concludes with the observation that DuBois’s greatest oversight is that, as he valued the potential of the “Talented Tenth,” he overlooked the potential of the working (and formerly enslaved) poor. Without denying the useful political agenda behind DuBois’s work, he notes that DuBois couldn’t escape teleology; all African-American experience has to be harnessed for its potential to improve – essentially to resist. He misses the possibility that the experience of the slave, horrific as it is, shows a humanity worthwhile in itself. He praises the “vulnerability” and the capacity to “live on nothing” of the ex-slaves as something worth more thought than DuBois ever gave it.
Upbeat as that might sound, the second essay, “Freedom, Equality, Race,” is a darker, essayistic exploration of what I understand as the foundations of critical race theory. America, he proposes, is imagined so fully through racist conceptions that it’s hard to imagine what it would look like in some other fashion. As I read this, Ferguson’s contribution to the thinking is parallel to his title essay. Just as Blacks have perhaps too often arrived at self-definition through resisting white America, so has white America constructed itself on a principle of retaining dominion over Blacks. It is the same fundamental mistake applied not by the victims but by the victimizers – to enduring and devastating effect.
The final, unfinished essay here, “Notes on Escape,” suggests (somewhat heartbreakingly) that Ferguson was beginning to push even further with his overarching thought. He contrasts the desire for escape with the push for resistance/revolution, noting that the crucial difference is that escape looks to the past as a place of refuge (as in escaping to something that does, or once, existed) while revolution looks to the not-yet of a new political structure.
There is a lot to think about here. It’s a pleasure to ride the ripples of thought from this first-rater thinker even if he did not have the chance to finish the ambitious project he has started.
And, while I acknowledge that it may not be beach reading (though I did, in fact, read much of it at Ocean City, NJ) it is provocative and stimulating reading.
In fact, as I read, I couldn’t help but be struck by the sense that this is criticism in what I think of as the European rhetorical model. It really is essayistic – discovering its meaning as it goes – rather than scientific. That is, while many of our leading American critics seem to write as if they’re conscious of how their own piece of work fits into a larger puzzle of academic thought, Ferguson writes like the Europeans who explore where their individual voice takes them. (Derrida, for instance, rarely seems to me to write as part of a larger structure; he takes a grain of an idea and explores it as Ferguson does here .)
So, I liked this right away for that ambition. Reading it is a chance to glimpse the workings of Ferguson’s mind, and it stands as a tribute to a man who died too young. I understand this book as honoring a life and career cut short, and – grateful as I am to have it – I am saddened by thoughts of what might have been.
This book, then, is more a collection of essays than an extended argument.
The title essay is clearly the star of the show, and I have found myself swimming in its ideas since I read it two or three days ago. As I read it, Ferguson explores the notion that much of African-American identity has been formed – at least rhetorically – as resistance to the dominant white culture.
That foundational observation grows out of a sustained cleverness in his reading. He demonstrates that resistance informs much of the language of African-American identity. To take one example, he posits the rhetoric of religion as one potential alternative. Looking more closely, though, he points out that much of the African-American rhetoric of faith puts belief as a “way station” on the path to the ultimate freedom of heaven. In and of itself, he points out, we don’t see much in the notion that faith itself – independent of how it might represent a way to live in the everyday – can be a solution.
It occurs to me that the observation parallels Irving Berlin’s famous distinction between negative and positive freedom. Here, Ferguson strikes me as noting a rhetoric of ‘negative emancipation,’ a sense of what one might be free from, in contrast to a not-yet-fully articulated vision of what a positive emancipation would look like. (In his final, unfinished essay, he offers a striking reading of Ellison’s Invisible Man where he locates one powerful example of that possibility.)
Keeping in mind that Ferguson wrote most of this book six or even ten years ago, it’s striking to think how much such an argument implicitly troubles our conversation today. On the one hand, the moment of Trump (may it be brief) has reignited the line between Blacks and much of the rest of America. It’s almost quaint to see Ferguson limning some of the ways Obama spoke about race, so the context of his argument is already substantially altered.
Still, what are we to make of a claim that the emphasis on a language of pushing back against the [white] other fundamentally limits Black self-expression? How can African-Americans conceive of a way to name their experience if so much of the language of that expression has to do with rejecting some other?
I certainly don’t have an answer, and I’m glad I’m not called on to find one. But I am excited to feel the conversation that Ferguson seems to be calling for, and I look forward to hearing how other African-American thinkers begin to answer it.
The other essays in the collection do not directly address the same question, but he does begin to revisit some of it – with the same searing cleverness – in the fourth essay, “Of Mr. W.E.B. DuBois and Others.” There, after a careful critique of DuBois (one of the most efficient and engaging I have ever read) he concludes with the observation that DuBois’s greatest oversight is that, as he valued the potential of the “Talented Tenth,” he overlooked the potential of the working (and formerly enslaved) poor. Without denying the useful political agenda behind DuBois’s work, he notes that DuBois couldn’t escape teleology; all African-American experience has to be harnessed for its potential to improve – essentially to resist. He misses the possibility that the experience of the slave, horrific as it is, shows a humanity worthwhile in itself. He praises the “vulnerability” and the capacity to “live on nothing” of the ex-slaves as something worth more thought than DuBois ever gave it.
Upbeat as that might sound, the second essay, “Freedom, Equality, Race,” is a darker, essayistic exploration of what I understand as the foundations of critical race theory. America, he proposes, is imagined so fully through racist conceptions that it’s hard to imagine what it would look like in some other fashion. As I read this, Ferguson’s contribution to the thinking is parallel to his title essay. Just as Blacks have perhaps too often arrived at self-definition through resisting white America, so has white America constructed itself on a principle of retaining dominion over Blacks. It is the same fundamental mistake applied not by the victims but by the victimizers – to enduring and devastating effect.
The final, unfinished essay here, “Notes on Escape,” suggests (somewhat heartbreakingly) that Ferguson was beginning to push even further with his overarching thought. He contrasts the desire for escape with the push for resistance/revolution, noting that the crucial difference is that escape looks to the past as a place of refuge (as in escaping to something that does, or once, existed) while revolution looks to the not-yet of a new political structure.
There is a lot to think about here. It’s a pleasure to ride the ripples of thought from this first-rater thinker even if he did not have the chance to finish the ambitious project he has started.
Displaying 1 of 1 review