It's the last number before the ritual bow and encore, and Waters is giving each of the members of his band the chance to solo; as each musician finishes his turn, Waters names him to the audience, inviting them to show their appreciation. But there's one player whose turn in the spotlight is oddly marked by what, with twenty years' hindsight and accretion of critical vocabulary, I can only call difference: profoundly melanin-impaired (the only one so marked in the band), he weaves for a moment like a blond ghost as he coaxes the tentative notes from his guitar--until his solo is cut short by Waters, who jokes about having forgotten his name, and plunges with fury into the final verse.

This snub is apparently part of the routine, since the guitarist laughs carelessly at it; but the effect on the all-white audience is palpable. They [we] stare at that guitarist, his whiteness suddenly naked in plain sight, suddenly something no longer to be taken for granted, like the Caucasian-colored Band-Aids of an innocent, ignorant white childhood. He is, in a remarkable reversal of the usual ground/figure racist semiotic, suddenly the liminal one: though the sounds produced by his motion and sweat are part and parcel of the commodity ("the blues") presented for our consumption, his contribution to that production remains unacknowledged; he exists in this moment physically but not politically. Unnamed and unfranchised, at once visible and "invisible" (to borrow from Ralph Ellison), he's not on the roll of those present--in fact, he's paradoxically presented to us as conspicuously absent in that crucial sense.

I recount this episode because the audience's reaction to it (fleshed out in heated conversations afterward) is symptomatic of the ground-figure politic of difference that governs current academic discourse, especially with regard to African-American cultural and critical production. The white audience construed Waters' snub in viscerally personal terms (he was above all "being rude"); but running beneath this visceral reaction was an intensifying cultural and political subtext. Our response was grounded in a refusal to understand the gesture as an instance of signifying, of indirect critical commentary that had its meaning in the "already-givens" of America's historical racism--a racism in which the very performance at hand was complexly complicit. Like the Lion of the Signifying Monkey tales, they [we] were upset because we took the gesture literally when it was intended metaphorically.

As the Lion-Monkey encounters suggest, the habit of taking things literally is a luxury of the powerful, a result of the consonance of one's privileged position with the world inscribed within one's own language. I don't think it was a habit of those in the audience to metaphorize or to deconstruct the signs with which they were presented, especially in a setting as profane as a bar. Falsely secure in the confidence that the meaning of signs is confined to the circuit between code and referent, unconscious of the world as historically created and of themselves as historical subjects, they [we] represented, I would argue, the invisible "ground" internalized by the Western academy and by the dominant national personality.

My thesis, then (certainly not an original one), is that any pedagogical framework for the study of African-American cultural production must include the objective of unmasking the assumptions that constitute the normative paradigm of knowledge--of making what I call "critical whiteness" visible. It has been my own limited experience that this paradigm, if left unexamined and unarticulated, creates for many readers intellectual and emotional interference in their attempts to understand and appreciate black texts--both literary and theoretical.

My interest here is in observing the very particularity of the critical standards and procedures which, in their guise of the "universal," have cast alternative modes as culturally exceptional or marginal. Such a recognition is crucial when the site of study for black texts is the Western academy; with its Classical and Neoclassical pedigree the academy is, like that blues bar in East Lansing, a "rhetorical situation" (using Molefi Asante's phrase) in which the "ground" is already determined. As I believe was the case with Muddy Waters' unnaming of his second guitarist, this Western rhetorical ground has a powerful capacity to naturalize opposing figures as commodities, and to reject or misunderstand authentic gestures that suggest the presence of an opposing (or let us say separate and indigenous) rhetorical ground or center.

Every year at my institution all instructors in the Freshman English Program teach one literary text in common. In recent years this so-called "Common Text" has been the leading edge of our Department's efforts in the area of what, for want of a more precise term, one could call "diversity" or "multiculturalism"; Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison, Rudolfo Anaya, and Bharati Mukherjee are authors whose texts we have used in recent years.

A curious thing happens in our Department as the time for teaching the Common Text approaches: there is a flurry of requests for handouts, background materials, and other instructional supports. The assumption seems to be that without historical and cultural contextualization these texts cannot be read by or discussed with students. This may or may not be so; after all, texts as well as readers and teachers are grounded in their own historical and cultural subjectivities, and one of the tasks of Freshman English is to help students build bridges of understanding between their own experiences and values and those one finds reflected in a variety of literary texts.

The problem, as I see it, is another version of what Henry Louis Gates, Jr. characterizes as the "anthropological fallacy" ("Criticism" 5): the tendency to emphasize the "ethnographic" dimensions of the text so that it seems distinctly or uniquely implicated in the culture from which it arises. Why, for instance, should one assume that chronologies of Chippewa history, or outlines of the Chippewa belief system are necessary to an understanding of Tracks, while a reading of The Great Gatsby can safely proceed without, say, a consideration of Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class or of the twisted American connection between Providential Christianity and the Gospel of Wealth?

This is not to say that such issues do not come up in class discussion of The Great Gatsby; but my sense is that generally texts such as Tracks or Beloved are subjected to pedagogies that mark them "anthropologically" in a way that those by writers such as Fitzgerald and even Faulkner are not--as if the works of these other authors are not situated in particular cultural subjectivities. Whether or not intentionally, the "difficulty" of texts such as Morrison's or Erdrich's is all too often ascribed to ethnological or anthropological causes, while the "difficulty" of a Faulkner or a John Barth or even a Henry James is explained on formal or technical grounds, in a manner which masks the anthropological or ethnological horizons of their texts. Why is this so?

It may be because James's and Barth's work (Faulkner, as a Southern exotic, occupies an ambiguous position here) is seen as coextensive with the Western project of knowledge generally; if, as Gates has suggested, critical approaches tend to arise from or seek out the texts that fit them, then the very categories which literary history assigns to these texts--realism, modernism, postmodernism--indicate the "generic" or culturally nonspecific horizon they are taken to occupy. Within this horizon understanding is a more or less positivist enterprise; interpretive validity is accessible through the seemingly culture-neutral skills of close reading, analysis, and (when necessary) the application of a critical instrumentality.

The rules governing intellectual activity throughout the university--the use of evidence and disciplinary procedures to produce "knowledge" or to approach some asymptote of "truth"--appear to operate effectively within the safe zone of culturally "neutral" texts; but beyond the horizon of this safe zone lurks the troublesome galaxy of literary expression which we have tagged in recent years as "multicultural"--texts which challenge the culture-neutral pretenses of our disciplinary procedures, and which therefore must be "tamed" by other disciplines (e.g., anthropology, sociology, history) before they can be presented to our students.

The implicit pedagogical recourse to a "culturally secular" center or safe zone is perhaps the surest symptom of what I've described as "critical whiteness"; and what I've been at pains to show here (perhaps unfairly with respect to my colleagues) is that this attitude is not simply the xenophobia of our students, weaned on the Reaganite epistemology and master narrative of a Wonder-Bread America that never was; it is a pedagogical posture that is implicit in the way the Western academy operates with regard to the production, maintenance, and transmission of disciplinary knowledge.

In this context cultural interests, like political interests, make discussion uncomfortable, since they threaten to expose the subjective frame within which the culturally secular--and the Western academy itself--is determined. I can't help but think of a debate at our institution this past year, in which a member of our History Department charged that A Different Mirror, Ron Takaki's self-described "multicultural history" of America, "distorts the truth for ideological purposes," while claiming transparency and objectivity for his own principle that an American historian should "teach what we have in common." To which I can only quote the punch line from an old joke I once heard told by Vine DeLoria, Jr., in which Tonto turns in exasperation to the Lone Ranger and says, "What do you mean, we, Keemosabi?"

In some ways the Lone Ranger is an appropriate figure to cite in our consideration of "critical whiteness." This is especially so given what I sense is the underlying cultural paradigm which for many in the academy tends to erase the horizon of culture and substitute in its place a delusional "universality" against which various Othernesses--including literary and critical blackness--are pejoratively defined as eccentric.

I'll illustrate this by a pair of stories, both of them from a recent graduate seminar in the African-American novel. Early in the semester we were discussing William Wells Brown's Clotel, a novel which details the tragic indignities visited upon Thomas Jefferson's African-American offspring within the rubrics of the peculiar institution. Now the idea that Jefferson had children with his slave Sally Hemings is not an invention of Brown, but an established part of African-American oral history; it was from such a body of collectively held "knowledge" that Brown--himself an escaped slave scarcely a generation distant from Jefferson and Hemings--braided his tale.

Apropos of this connection between oral lore and Brown's written record, I invited students to consider Fawn Brodie's study "The Great Jefferson Taboo," which examines the documentary evidence regarding this allegation. Brodie comes to a conclusion that many in the seminar found unsatisfactory: though documentary evidence was largely circumstantial (in part because of destruction of potentially relevant papers by Jefferson's heirs), the gaps in the written record seem sufficiently systematic to allow one to infer the probable truth of the oral one--in effect, following the practice of subatomic researchers who regularly try to adduce unverifiable presences via systematic absences.

My hope was that Brodie's article would help us continue a discussion already begun, one that examined the Western practice of privileging written, as opposed to oral, modes of cultural transmission; in context, it was part of a larger purpose of the course, which was to consider the ways in which what we call "knowledge" in any discipline--whether aesthetic, historical, or even scientific--is, in the Lyotardian sense, a matter of what the rules are, and who makes them. But instead the keynote of our discussion was one of questioning whether Brodie was a "gossip-monger," whether her article was not a "tabloid history" constructed entirely of "unsupported innuendo," with the unseemly odor of (in a by-now familiar phrase) "a political agenda."

For me this echoed a notion mentioned earlier--that is, that standard written history is somehow above politics, and that challenges to its hegemony represent the politicization of an otherwise disinterested search for "truth." Our discussion of the Brodie article revealed not only the logocentrism but the graphocentrism of this position: that is, the privileging of a certain kind of evidence--that of the written "document"--which resists dialogization, and against which other kinds are to be measured for veracity and accuracy.

A second, more serious crisis arose in our discussion of Richard Wright's Native Son. Here a number of readers attempted (unsuccessfully, I think) to impose a particular ideology of interpretation on Wright's text. The difficulty they encountered in doing so is a tribute to the magnitude of Wright's accomplishment in that particular work; but Bigger's refusal to be assimilated into a critical model that did not take into account institutional and historical racism still led many to reject the novel. When pressed to explain their reactions, these readers interpreted the author's intensely naturalistic presentation as an attempt to rationalize, even to "justify," Bigger Thomas's actions. What was lost, it seemed to me, was Wright's indictment of a society that could produce a Bigger, and every time someone tried to return to that aspect of the novel, others replied with indignance that such an approach was tantamount to excusing Bigger from responsibility for his actions.

After some further discussion and reflection, we were able to put our finger on the problem: the habit of interpretation which assigns priority of interest to the distinctive identity of a particular character or characters, and our moral or ethical evaluations of their actions. The notion that this habit of reading could be culture-specific, the fruit of an American ideology of bourgeois spiritual and economic individualism, seemed new to many discussants. But recognizing this as a subjective frame allowed us to look at the novel from another angle, and to see it from a perspective which (I believe) is more "critically indigenous" to Wright's aesthetic and political praxis.

When we returned to the trial sequence in the novel, a new reading emerged: this time the trial seemed a dramatization and critique of the ideology with which some had previously interpreted the text. For the prosecutor, the press, and the public as portrayed in Wright's text, the trial is a dramaturgy of individual guilt; the court, then, reflects a narrative paradigm which many of us habitually or naturally bring to the reading of imaginative literature, one which concentrates on the interests and fates of individual agents.

With this previously veiled ideology now in full view, we saw a new set of questions: What if individual responsibility is not the only kind? Bigger has killed two people; but how many have been "killed" not by individuals but by standing economic practices which force people into overcrowded, underheated, and vermin-infested flats, and then charge them a premium dollar for the privilege? Surely, this is a "crime," too--but it can't be tried in a court of justice because it's "business as usual," a framework within which the court, like Dalton himself, operates. Not surprisingly, the notion of systematic criminality is occluded by the court's exclusive focus on the bourgeois notion of individual moral responsibility.

If we read the courtroom scenes this way, what's on trial for Wright is not Bigger Thomas, but the justice system itself, which uses the trope of personal guilt to conceal its own moral illegitimacy. Rather than trying to exonerate Bigger, Wright is trying to give everyone the opportunity to read the "text" of the trial in another way; in addition to the question of Bigger's crimes and punishment, we might ask whether there are not other "accessories before the fact" that cannot even be brought before the bar of judgment--whether perhaps even this bar of judgment is not an "accessory before the fact."

All this is a long way around to identifying what I see as the twin pillars of "critical whiteness": a focus on the entrepreneurial self as a transcendent intellectual agent; and a trust in reason and its various disciplinary apparatuses to move that self toward some culturally neutral asymptote of truth. Both of these are the fruit of the regime of knowledge of which the Western academy is, inescapably, an extension. Interestingly, Bigger was on trial in our classroom as well; and what our discussion brought home to me was how much the covert ideology of the classroom was, in its own way, an "accessory before the fact" which concealed its own complicity in the production of of interpretive verdicts on Wright's novel and protagonist. Both classroom and courtroom articulate an institutional "frame" which determines what narratives are available and excludes those which, in Edward Said's valuable phrase, "molest the authority" of the frame by threatening to reveal it as constructed and particular rather than natural and universal.

This is why we should be cautious about claiming as genuine progress the recent inroads made in "the canon" by literature of marginalized groups. As my own anecdotes here suggest, what is needed is not just multiculturalism in our selection of literary texts, but culturally multiple critical frameworks as well; I'm no longer sure what of value can be gained by continuing to reproduce readings of black texts from a perspective of critical whiteness. In fact, we should be examining closely the reasons why certain black texts, and not others, have achieved such currency outside of the indigenous critical contexts which might more properly elucidate them. As Henry Louis Gates has observed, there is always the question of what such texts are being made to "represent," and for whom (see his discussion in Loose Canons 179).

Gates' concern is with what happens when white theory operates on black texts without regard for how the interaction might deform the shape of those texts. Interpretive procedures, and the forms of "knowledge" they produce, are not value- or culture-neutral, and we must constantly ask the question of whether such operations serve or colonize the texts upon which we're focusing. Hazel Carby for instance has noted how white feminist theory "has frequently used and abused [writings of black women] to produce an essential black female subject for its own consumption" (11). She is uneasy with such theory's selective use of the "black female subject" as "cultural and political icons by the white middle class," and has argued that in fact such iconography--which is really a form of tokenism--creates "theories of 'difference' [which] as they inform academic practices, become totally compatible with . . . the rigid frameworks of segregation and ghettoization at work throughout our society" (11, 12).

Her proposed solution to this ill bears sufficiently on my reflections here to quote it at length:

Theoretically, we should be arguing that everyone in this social order has been constructed in our political imagination as a racialized subject. In this sense, it is important to think about the invention of the category of whiteness as well as of blackness and, consequently, to make visible what is rendered invisible when viewed as the normative state of existence: specifically the white point in space from which we tend to identify difference. (12)

I've tried to articulate what constitutes that "white point in space," especially in its function as an intellectual point of reference for the academic treatment of literature and literary theory; Carby perhaps best sums up my conclusions in her observation that the dominant critical paradigms tend to produce a reading of difference which is useful in "the construction of identities rather than relations of power and domination, and [which], in practice, concentrates on the effect of this difference on a (white) norm" (Carby 12).

It's precisely this model of identity or experience abstracted from power matrices of race, class, gender, and culture that black literary theory is designed in part to correct. In aesthetic terms, this means the end of New Critical notions of the text as a transcendent object; it also means the end of a particular model of reading, in which native intelligence, attentiveness, and basic goodwill are sufficient to produce an appropriate understanding of that text. Rejecting this universalist model as "Integrationist Poetics," critics like Houston Baker and their precedents in the Black Aesthetic movement call instead for a culturally particularistic approach, for recognition of "a sui generis tradition of Afro-American art and a unique 'standard of criticism' suitable for its elucidation" (Baker 74).

A fundamental basis of this "standard"--and one which I think more than anything else molests critical whiteness--is its political commitment and referencing with respect to the interests of its larger cultural community (one could, of course, observe the same of a panoply of postcolonialist critical theories, including those of Fanon, Said, and Bhabha). Critical whiteness tends to regard as unseemly intellectual and political advocacy which focuses on anything narrower than the vaguely felt ideal of a liberal society; in its emphasis on unitary truths and interests (no matter how liberally or loosely defined) it tends to reduce intellectual conflicts (particularly those of literary interpretation) to a question of recalcitrant personalities who insist on playing by eccentrically partisan rules.

Of course, no reading or reality is non-ideological; nor is it news to anyone that one of the characteristics of a privileged ideology is its ability to make itself appear "natural" and "universal" while casting other ways of seeing as "political" or "ideological"--or, failing that, to convert the claims of the Other into the category of the "anthropological," thereby containing or rejecting the various particular commitments--political, cultural, and otherwise--characteristic of these varieties of criticism. What I'm talking about as "critical whiteness," then, is nothing more or less than the enjoyment by many in the academy of an unconscious epistemological privilege. In this setting critical and theoretical apparatuses tend to be treated as a kind of intellectual technology--tools for producing "meaning" in higher yields by operating on certain texts in a particular way. The implicit assumption--often denied in theory but replete in practice--is that critical texts are (or ought somehow to be) politically naive or culturally secular--explanatory of other texts rather than begging interpretation, explanation themselves.

This view produces a dominance (at least in terms of what Lyotard would call "truth claims") of secondary over primary texts--a situation which Gates colorfully refers to as an "Oedipal slaying at the crossroads" (Figures 49). Just such a slaying--or at least a wounding--occurred in our seminar's discussion of Native Son. Some readers instinctively sought to explain their unsatisfactory experience with the novel by trying to find "something wrong" with Wright's text; with unambiguous faith in (and identification with) their interpretive technologies, it never occurred to them to question instead whether there were not something wrong with their tools, or with the sort of "knowledge" they expected those tools to produce.

An indigenous critical approach to Wright's novel might on the other hand have begun where Asante suggests the Afrocentric method does: with a conscious inventory of one's own constructed subjectivity (see "Interiors" 27ff), especially with respect to language. Such an approach would puncture the reportorial illusion of Wright's steely prose, and reveal the text's fundamental skepticism about "descriptive" language (remember how grotesquely Bigger's own experience is distorted in the parallel newspaper accounts of his crime, capture, and trial), and connect Wright's work to Fanon's notion that for many language is a medium that can only be used with a certain irony or double-voicedness. One could then see more clearly how the meaning of a particular text is determined by its rhetorical (which is to say sociopolitical) context: who's speaking, to whom, in what context or community, and to what purpose.

In any case, what is required is a reversal of critical field: to use the "difficulties" encountered in the reading of Wright's text to interrogate the interpretive procedures brought to bear upon it--to subject our own critical methods to dialogization with the voices within the literary texts those methods are normally used to master. Once such a dialogue is engaged, it becomes possible to unmask critical whiteness: what interests or constituencies are veiled by the emphasis on the entrepreneurial-positivist model that seems second nature to many in the academy? How might we see all interpretive models as historically situated and politically engaged? What is it, for instance, about the postwar politics and culture of France that motivates the critical models advanced by Barthes, Foucault, Lacan, Derrida?

Herein lies the challenge of black literary theory to critical whiteness: it reminds us, as Baker insists, that the "signifieds" of our discourse are not positivist referents but rather meanings that are rhetorically--which is to say ideologically--assigned. By its explicit grounding in a cultural community, black theory also puts the lie to the presumed "authority" of other discourses which seek to legitimate themselves by hiding behind the veils of cultural secularism or value-neutrality by revealing them as "conditioned by discoverable laws of formation" as well as "boundaries of exclusion" (Baker 121).

Which brings me back the blues praxis of Muddy Waters in that East Lansing bar of twenty years ago. His gesture at the end of the concert was one of "critical blackness," both coextension of, and commentary on, the text of the performance, a recognition that the venue at hand was a cultural "contact zone" of which those in the audience had been previously unconscious. If nothing else, it disturbed the untroubled ideological sleep of those for whom commodity interactions mask those of race and power; not unlike those troubling appendices one finds at the end of such narratives as Frederick Douglass's Narrative, Harriet Wilson's Our Nig, or even Ellison's Invisible Man, it was a final reminder not only of the blackness of his text but also of the critical whiteness which he knew to be his listeners’ frame of reference. What the audience reacted to in Waters' theatrical snub of his white sideman was the unexpected reversal of figure and ground, of subject and object in the racial semiotic--the amazement, as bell hooks describes it, "that black people think critically about whiteness." She continues:

Often [whites'] rage erupts because they believe that all ways of looking that highlight difference subvert the liberal belief in a universal subjectivity (we are all just people) that they think will make racism disappear. They have a deep emotional investment in the myth of 'sameness,' even as their actions reflect the primacy of whiteness as a sign informing who they are and how they think. (167)

The white audience's instinctive explanation of Waters' gesture--that he was being "rude," perhaps even engaging in a kind of "reverse discrimination"--was simply a sign of how stubbornly they clung to this "myth of sameness," a myth by which white America expresses its desire to make race "disappear" as an issue in history and preserve the Franklinesque paradigm of the entrepreneurial self. This "rage" (or other expression of discomfort) is always a possible response to texts whose engagement with American racism is fundamental to their form as well as content, since the "rhetorical ground" of such texts threatens to unmask this convenient myth.

But this rage is only one response, one that offers itself when more powerful and subtle strategies of containment have failed. Absent Waters' signifying gesture, there would have been nothing in the performance to disturb the audience's complacency about their own cultural framework, whose design works in significant ways to mystify the historical and ever-present racism to which the music itself is in part a response; as Baker observes, there's always the danger that these blues--whether musical, literary, or critical--will be recuperated and appropriated by the frame of bourgeois commodity exchange they must at once work within and against (see Blues, 62-63).

This is as true of black literary theory as of other culturally indigenous discourse (e.g., the blues); the academy is itself a version of the "tight space" observed by Baker, within which the "privileg[ing] of certain economic terms" obliges the "black subject . . . [to] come to terms with 'commercial deportation' and the 'economics of slavery'" (Blues 39). And when that "privileged term" is the entrepreneurial self, a "white point" from which words and actions are construed the direct expression of individual free agents operating on some neutral "level field" of historical and cultural engagement, black theory--like Waters' blues--is always under the threat of capture and commodification by the univeralist models to which it takes exception.

In fact, the perceived ease with which a particular critical model can be "appropriated" by white theory to "represent" the rich variety of indigenous or vernacular critical approaches has been one of the recurrent points of controversy within the African-American critical community. There is, for instance, Houston Baker, Jr.'s critique of Gates' work, which sees the latter's formalist leanings as making him complicit with the very critical power structure to which both supposedly take exception. But my purpose here is not to adjudicate the argument between Baker and Gates, or between the two of them and other critics such as Norman Harris and Joyce Ann Joyce, who see Baker and Gates as equally co-opted by white critical perspectives; rather, it is to note Baker's implicit observation that what is most "natural" (which is to say most powerfully conventional) in the contact zone of the Western academy--the practice of "academic address" and a value-neutral stance toward knowledge and understanding (see Baker, "Caliban" 383)--is antithetical to African-American literary and critical praxis.

Of course the pedagogy I've tried to suggest as an antidote to this difficulty has other risks; "vernacular" criticism is subject to the same deformations of academic usage as the literary materials from which it is derived. The greatest danger is that of constructing the indigenous or "vernacular" approach as itself an anthropological object or field, and other (supposedly) non-vernacular "theories" as value-neutral super- or metacultural discourses. But the best guard against this is to call into visibility the effaced particularity of the academy's own ideology, whose claims to "universality" mask its own "vernacular" origins in the Western European mercantile and bourgeois experience.

Black literary theory must be positioned in the curriculum in such a way as to break the hermeneutic circle inculcated by the academy's definition of "knowledge"; its mission, at least for majority students, must be to make the institution's ethos of critical whiteness visible, to undermine the "naturalness" of the privileged terms which structure students'--and our--responses to literary texts. This is more than an argument for using black theory to read black texts; rather, it argues that for majority students particularly a basic familiarity with current black critical discourse is a necessary framework or precondition for understanding those texts. The notion of a critically naive reading should now be exposed clearly as one which threatens to do violence to those texts, and impede the reader's full appreciation of the aesthetic which governs them.

WORKS CITED

Asante, Molefi. The Afrocentric Idea. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1987.

------. "Interiors." In Kemet, Afrocentricity and Knowledge. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990. 3-40.

Baker, Houston A., Jr. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory. U of Chicago P, 1984.

Carby, Hazel V. "The Multicultural Wars." Radical History Review Fall 1992: 6-18.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. "Criticism in the Jungle." In Black Literature and Literary Theory. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Methuen, 1984. 1-24.

-----. Figures In Black: Words, Signs, and the "Racial" Self. Oxford UP, 1989.

-----. Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars. Oxford UP, 1992.

hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. U of Minnesota P, 1984.

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