A few months back I thought about the development of rhetoric in African American culture and the ways it adapts to and navigates black negation. I've been working on a larger essay, but these are the beginning notes. More attention should be devoted to the relationship between African American literature and industry's engagement with such rhetoric. The absence of black publishing infrastructure, combined with editorial and publishing decisions being made by people who lack familiarity with the nuance of African American culture, must to some degree limit the capacity of African American literature's ability to document the consciousness of those who walk through life as black and manage the territories of black negation. As always here at Free Black Space our discussion of such matters is towards a more prosperous black economic in the publishing industry.
1) A rhetoric of survival, at the least describes a measure of balance between the need to publish and distribute literature outside of the circles that African Americans operate in and how this is done in relationship with different audiences. In other words, if one is enslaved, it is hard to imagine literature distribution. Even if one is free, it is hard to imagine literature distribution during those enslaved years. One could argue that the trade in slave literature is much like the trade in slavery itself. The black mind produces the work and for every black mind there are at least a few white folks making money. A rhetoric of survival is a discourse that is conscious of this limited capacity to actually produce and distribute literature outside of the act of authorship.
2) A rhetoric of survival is a yin approach to the market economy of blackness. Whites have always made money out of and off of the black image; and though our mind is immediately drawn to the the most prominent and common common negative elements, people who bring a refined black image to market positive or negative are well compensated. Dare we ask what neighborhoods do the people who make the money live in, where do they send their children to school, what books do they read about black folks, to what degree do they understand the range of our culture? If there is an expertise they offer to the black author, it is the expertise of knowing how to navigate the image of the black in the minds of whites. Thank God for hip-hop, jazz, and blues, which are good solid examples of what blacks can do outside the boundaries of a good education. I am fond of saying, if a black student thought up hip-hop at Harvard, it would be kicked out of the classroom. Black people affirmed hip-hop into existence. Hip-Hop came from a Free Black Space. One of the questions for literature producers is how is black literature produced and manufactured in a Free Black Space, and subsequently how does that literature make it to market?
3) The Canon dreams of the West while obviously essential can easily be seen as a form of self worship. The marginalization of the humanities in universities in favor of business, science, and technology, is all about the original marginalization of cultures that accompanied the conquest of the world. In America in particular, some of the humanities' wars are about the "other" infiltration of departments where people could get glossy eyed about the good ole days of great Western civilization. A rhetoric of survival is in part brought into existence by the simple fact (I hate that phrase-but here yeah it works) that most African Americans are taught by whites. Especially when we get to college educations-especially masters and doctorates. Those taught by whites exercise a certain privilege in the world of the Academy. The point is too important to overlook. Indeed, at this stage of my life, I am starting to dream of a world where when whites study with me we eradicate their racism. Part of education and most likely the parts that continue to perpetuate racism, exist outside the classroom. We eat food, we talk. We go to meet people. We visit houses. It is not simply that most blacks are taught by whites, but many of the whites they are taught by lack some of the skills that are the core of the humanities and our limited in their engagements with blacks who are not their social inferior. To be black is to be authorized to teach almost no one anything, except the ideas about your culture that are already accepted. Among other things, a rhetoric of survival is a response to being educated by whites, who sometimes even hate you. In such cases, one must respect the superior position of the uneducated while understanding one is not inferior. However, and this is the question of rhetoric, one manages the power relationship with a rhetoric that enables you to to get done what you need to get done. Easily this practical adjustment is the exercise of yin cultivation, but the West hs a limited understanding of this concept. In other words, many people cultivate yin power under the guise that it is not power, but merely survival with limited tactical options.
4) The rhetoric of survival asks the question: How can a group of people who often find themselves unable to speak freely with police officers, teachers, bosses, co-workers, and colleagues craft a literature that can speak to people freely and express the full weight of their consciousness. The ideas of craft suggests that the great writer and their practice transcends such matters, but the true transcendence for African American culture would be a vibrant publishing apparatus existing not only of authors but institutions with editors, and internships, and profit making in sync with the capitalist country we live in. The money in these past few years off of African American literature will be enough to entrench the non-diverse industry for at least another two decades.
5) If we move from the last statement to this one, we can imagine how a rhetoric of survival is part and parcel of African American literature. Our slave status, which may be just a tad more than minority-more like symbolic binary minority, has demanded we learn a rhetoric of survival in order to manage our challenging circumstances. I would liken the process to Taiji, which based on animal movements, and designed for maximum efficiency, uses the body, which everyone has. One can easily imagine that it is not knowledge because of this, because the knowledge itself does not require one acquire something else to do it. If Western science objectifies the external world, Taiji forms a connection with the internal one. The process and practice serve as riddle. for even within there are relationships to be formed and mysterious domains to be "conquered" that were it not within the context of your own mind/body relationship seem expansionist. Much of learning is like this, and so it is with the black. People do not understand the profound nature of what blacks have learned under slavery and navigating America, because it is so common place, and much of the true knowledge is hidden by the rhetoric of survival. In other words, black folks make a habit of hiding knowledge from whites to avoid the misuses of power racism and white supremacy enable. (It should be noted all people hide their knowledge. All people from varying backgrounds with different skill sets choose what they let others know about what they know. Specifications for the black are not special in function, but special in terms of what they yield as it fits in with the dynamics and particulars of being black.)
6) If blacks operate within such limits, does it not follow that what we call African American literature does also. One would be hard pressed to imagine American literature being the same as it is now, if the writers were white, but all the publishers and the editors were black. Even with the mass education African Americans have received in the West, such a literature would be shaped by some portions of African American consciousness. While African American writers and others in the literary industry may comment on the lack of diversity, rarely have I heard the degree to which the lack of diversity effects the shape of the literature. Those works that are successful, extraordinary as they are, represent an adjustment to the less than ideal conditions. When I think about the poems of Li Bai, I imagine a complete efficiency of the poem towards consciousness. It is common for African American poets to engage in the writing of forms. Of course we do not mean hip-hop, and we do not mean blues, though I have seen quite a few attempts that made me shudder. Hip-Hop would be almost impossible for a student who has no real contact with black folks. In other words, the nuance could easily be off. Macklemore is a good example of an MC who seems to have a legitimate white code, under a hip-hop soundtrack. But I thought about the efficiency of Li Bai towards his own culture and forms. In other words, he did not have to navigate some external influence. No doubt, China in its vast history has had cultural wars and invaders who have challenged the culture, but there's something unique about the black-it is that the word black attached to us is also the symbolic metaphor for negative. Though the history and intellectualism has specific histories and the like, the learning does not clear up the metaphorical connotations that in real time, sync with the feeling of many-including other blacks. This sync is the place where the writer by positioning themselves in relationship to the black learns important secrets about the cognitive code that exists between language and thought. A rhetoric of survival though practical, to some degree avoids the resolution of some of the codes, by choosing to reasonably head towards publishing in the here and now.
Though one searches for remedies, reparations, as unlikely as they maybe, would be better than that. In other words, the black spends a lot of time acting like the mind of the person who treats you bad can be cured by mind, when in fact the relationship between mind and feeling is what caused the problem. You wanna deal with racists, you gotta deal with how they feel. The rhetoric of survival does this by avoiding confrontation with places where language can be contested as mere black philosophy or some form of opposition. By drawing attention to the rhetoric of survival we must ask the question how do white writers and readers feel when they read this literature by black authors, and to what degree does racism as a enduring part of American culture and literature shape the writer, editor, publisher, and larger white audience's response.
7) But the black is image of the perfected radical, which once brought into the fold represents the empire's ability to transcend its own contradictions. Blacks who fit into this role drive towards celebrity status, because their radicalism is sanctioned. Even more importantly, they make money for the empire. Post-integration, they become stamps of diversity and serve to show that the empire has made progress. A rhetoric of survival in this case transcends the actual work on the page and becomes part of the author's discourse in society. When the author, as I heard a famous author recently says, attributes the success of their work to their hard work, discipline, and craft, the context for the comments is the rhetoric of survival. For in these instances, the author no matter the radicalism they express, attributes the success to the heart of the American dream. To clarify slaves worked really hard-the system demanded it, but that hard work did not always translate into recognizable success.
8) A rhetoric of survival would sync the study of literature with the study of the literary industry. The later is extremely important for African Americans and our future. The absence of such study may be in the end related to the absence of literary institutions of power. It seems clear that blacks lack such. Especially if one notes the recent success of black literature, much of it seems to suggest that using a rhetoric of survival we have been able to create literature that bridges the racial gap and fits in well with what the guardians of literature imagine as great. But I dare suggest, had those same books been published by black presses, they would not be so great, or take another hundred years to actualize. A rhetoric of survival is as much success strategy as it is a way of creating literature. But we should be clear, if literature documents a people's consciousness, a rhetoric of survival documents a people's consciousness in relationship to a consciousness that negates them. In these cases the consciousness is an obstacle course that one must navigate to make a living. It may be sufficient for survival, but given some of the dynamics of our enduring condition, the navigation of such dynamics may also limit the power of that literature in relationship to the people who will benefit from the documented consciousness in relationship to their struggle to survive in three dimensions.. A rhetoric of survival is status quo.
9) But we must also remember that all things strive for balance. There is nothing to negate about the rhetoric of survival. Rather it should be used to contextualize the limits of African American literature and clarify how great literature can be produced without African Americans becoming communally great. In other words, a rhetoric survival will clarify the distance between our aspirations and our conditions, and show how the absence of publishing and distribution infrastructure in particular makes it rather easy to see the limit of our "progress."
Tion and
