c hristA b uschendorf Reading Shakespeare Matters: Symbolic Struggles over Literary Taste among Black Intellectuals “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not.” W. E. B. Du Bois’s well-known statement from his famous collection of essays The Souls of Black Folk (1903) conveys a double message. At a time when under Jim Crow laws and the frequent rule of lynch law the black population was under attack, and when Du Bois’s rival, the dominant black leader and educator Booker T. Washington, supported by white elites, argued against higher education and university training for blacks, the assertion that Shakespeare would not mind the company of an African American or, in other words, that the most highly renowned author of the English language was appropriate reading for blacks was meant to provoke a white audience eager to “keep the Negro in his place.” At the same time, Du Bois assured his fellow black citizens that they were entitled to any of the intellectual treasures of the Western canon, be it Shakespeare or the giants of ancient philosophy: “I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension” (52). In contrast to Booker T. Washington’s educational concept of skilled trade, Du Bois favored the full range of academic training at the highest institutional level. As a sociologist, Du Bois was well aware of the fact that in order to fight racism one had to struggle against the common stereotypical images that denied blacks intelligence and creativity. To him, the significance of claiming canonical writers of the Western tradition, thereby incorporating consecrated cultural capital, lay in crossing the very color-line that deeply divided American social space into “two worlds within and without the Veil” (1). And thus it was with a strong sense of self-assurance that Du Bois stated: “So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil” (52). Of course, African Americans have tried to resist the symbolic violence exerted by whites as long as they have been displaced, enslaved or disrespected in America. We may think of the battles of various individuals, for example, the learned poet Phillis Wheatley, who was famously forced to prove her erudition before a committee of astounded white male Boston citizens; we may also recall numerous collective counter-efforts to develop literacy and learning in black communities such as establishing black literary societies in the early nineteenth century (Belt-Beyan). In the following, I will limit my investigation to tracing changes of literary taste by looking at African American 186 c hristA b uschendorf writers’ appropriations of Shakespeare in the twentieth century. 1 I will relate these changes to both the socialization of the authors and to institutional transformations that played a role in canon formations and debates. This approach is based on the insight - inspired by Pierre Bourdieu’s relational concept of the field of cultural production - that the “issue of ‘difference’ is not abstracted from social relations; it is a product of them,” and that “[w]e need to return the social to the literary when we explore how authors establish intertextual relationships with their predecessors as part of the strategy of revisionist striving for canonicity” (Rushdy 10). With Richard Wright and Maya Angelou I have chosen two authors who struggled with severe obstacles on their way to becoming outstanding black intellectuals against the odds, as both grew up in Jim Crow South. Gloria Naylor’s adaptations of Shakespearean female characters in Mama Day (1988) and John Edgar Wideman’s staging of The Tempest by black schoolchildren in his novel Philadelphia Fire (1990) represent a younger generation’s artistic freedom in negotiating the white canon. Finally, I will briefly discuss the satire Japanese by Spring (1993) by Ishmael Reed, which reflects upon the decisive institutional changes that occurred with the integration of African American history in school curricula in the late sixties and the establishment of Black Studies programs at renowned universities in the early seventies. These five writers appropriate Shakespeare in very different ways that will highlight some of the specific difficulties African American intellectuals encounter in accumulating cultural capital and cultivating a literary taste that answers to their political needs and demands. As to Du Bois, though, I would like to add that ten years after the publication of The Souls of Black Folk, he created a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk based on African and African American traditions and exclusively performed by literally hundreds of black actors, singers, and dancers. Du Bois “wrote and staged an historic pageant of the history of the Negro race, calling it ‘The Star of Ethiopia’” (Du Bois, Dusk 136). As he writes in his first autobiography Dusk of Dawn (1940), he “believed that the pageant, with masses of costumed colored folk and a dramatic theme carried out chiefly by movement, dancing and music, could be made effective” (136). Although the concept of the pageant may not convince us aesthetically, it was programmatically important and certainly impressive as to sheer numbers. It was performed for the first time in New York in 1913 with a cast of three hundred and fifty before an audience of thirty thousand. To Du Bois, art at its best was political (Du Bois, Criteria), and at the time, the pageant was a popular genre of political struggle (Colbert). When in 1913 Du Bois commented on his grand project in The Crisis, he casually alluded to Hamlet’s statement “The play’s the thing” 1 For a much broader historical perspective on African American reception of Shakespeare, see the volume of essays Weyward Macbeth, ed. by Newstok and Thompson, dealing with the reception of Macbeth from the minstrel show beginnings in the nineteenth century to adaptations on stage and in various media up to the present. Reading Shakespeare Matters 187 (Hamlet act II, scene 2): “The Pageant is the thing. This is what the people want and long for. This is the gown and paraphernalia in which the message of education and reasonable race pride can deck itself” (Du Bois, Star 92). As an effort to display the rich tradition of African and African American cultural history and make blacks proud of their heritage, The Star of Ethiopia anticipated the cultural politics of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, a movement that consciously engaged in creating the image of the New Negro as an American with African roots and at the same time as an intellectual and artist who is just as familiar with the Western canon and aesthetics. But the image of the New Negro was contested both by white patrons some of whom would urge the black writers they supported to come up in subject matter and style to the exoticism and primitivism they expected from them and within the group of black intellectuals who waged fights (some of them over Shakespeare) 2 for adequate cultural representations among themselves. 3 Richard Wright: Native Son as Othello In his youth, Du Bois was shielded from Jim Crow discrimination by growing up in a small town in Massachusetts where he was supported in his insatiable desire for learning both morally by his mother and financially by white townspeople. The latter only disappointed him when they decided that his wish to study at Harvard was too ambitious even for so highly gifted a black student and instead sent him south to Fisk University, a black institution of higher learning, where from their point of view he belonged. The detour Du Bois was forced to take before later entering Harvard University confronted him with “discrimination in ways of which I had never dreamed; […] the public disdain and even insult in race contact on the street continually took my breath; I came in contact for the first time with a sort of violence that I had never realized in New England” (Du Bois, Dusk 15). 2 See, for example, Walkowitz. 3 See Hutchinson’s seminal study on what he calls the “interracial dynamics” of the Harlem Renaissance, in which he criticizes the binary model of white and black literatures and cultures as an inadequate simplification that is difficult to eradicate. Since this kind of dualism along racial lines is indeed still highly relevant in today’s cultural battles (and admittedly underlies the majority of arguments referred to in this article), I would like to give an example of Hutchinson’s corrective view: “Like recent critics, New Negroes tended to accuse their antagonists of being enthralled to white values and predilections. In fact, white critics criticized black writers for being enthralled to white values - usually some other white person’s white values. (The tendency continues today.) This charge of enthrallment to the cultural imperialists could work from a variety of positions. If the black writer emphasized black difference, he might be accused of playing to white stereotypes of the exotic primitive; if she emphasized cultural Americanness or wrote a novel of black bourgeois manners, she might be criticized for failing to see that the ‘Negro experience’ requires a transformation of novelistic form. When white critics adopted these techniques of criticism, they were expressing, of course, their own sense of what black literature should or at least should not be (thus extending their hegemony? )” (21). 188 c hristA b uschendorf Unlike Du Bois, Richard Wright suffered throughout his childhood from growing up under Jim Crow. As Ralph Ellison notes in his essay “Remembering Richard Wright,” “very little attention has been given to the role played by geography in shaping the fate of Afro-Americans” (Ellison 198). While Wright felt the same poignant hunger for books as did Du Bois and Ellison, free access to learning was largely denied to him. In his autobiography Black Boy (1945), Wright emphasizes that he had to fight for literacy in a way reminiscent of the conditions under slavery. Moreover, he stresses that he experienced resistance even from inside his own family. For example, he was forced to read clandestinely, because of his grandmother’s strong religious prejudice against fiction and, more generally, because his family feared that the boy who loved to explore realms of the mind might also transgress the strict social boundaries set for the black population under Jim Crow. 4 James Baldwin very lucidly describes this kind of fear of black parents and its effects on their children in The Fire Next Time: The child “must be ‘good’ not only in order to please his parents […]; behind their authority stands another, nameless and impersonal, infinitely harder to please, and bottomlessly cruel. And this filters into the child’s consciousness through his parents’ tone of voice […]; in the sudden, uncontrollable note of fear heard in his father’s or mother’s voice when he has strayed beyond some particular boundary” (26). It is interesting to note that Bourdieu uses this passage to illustrate the mechanisms of symbolic violence and its long-term consequences. To him, the behavior of black parents is an example of the “practical recognition through which the dominated, often unwittingly, contribute to their own domination by tacitly accepting, in advance, the limits imposed on them,” which then “often takes the form of bodily emotion (shame, timidity, anxiety, guilt)” (Bourdieu, Meditations 169). According to Bourdieu, symbolic domination is the more powerful because its force is not perceived consciously but is exerted “in the obscurity of the dispositions of habitus” (170). Wright’s autobiography relates several episodes that reflect his family’s anxiety vis-à-vis his explorative energy. Apart from the impediments erected by family members, resistance against Wright’s aspirations is also offered by individual whites as well as by Jim Crow laws that, for example, do not permit him to borrow books from the public library so that he has to resort to the trick of donning the mask of an illiterate black man who takes out books for his white employer. Among the books Wright wants to read are those 4 Due to the logic of his narrative, Wright emphasizes the obstacles he has to overcome rather than the encouragement he received. Yet it is probably crucial to his intellectual development that his mother, who before her marriage had been a teacher (a fact, Wright does not mention in his autobiography), supports his intellectual curiosity and teaches him to read (cf. Black Boy 23 and 24). As Stephan Kuhl, also drawing upon Bourdieu’s concepts, points out, “there was inscribed into the structure of Wright’s family, through his mother’s scholastic profession, a certain degree of cultural capital. [...] This motherly encouragement in the acquisition of cultural, linguistic, literary capital existed within the family structure of Wright’s childhood in tension with the urgencies derived from the family’s great economic poverty, urgencies that tended to impose limits on Wright’s acquisition of this capital” (Kuhl 7-8). Reading Shakespeare Matters 189 by H. M. Mencken, whose notorious bon mot of the South as “the Sahara of the Bozart” is indicative of his severe criticism of the parochial mind of the southern States. The fact that Mencken’s criticism is the kind of knowledge southern whites tried to withhold from blacks greatly enhances the anxiety of the librarian who must make sure that the black “boy” who borrows the books will not read them. Wright, as we know, succeeds against the odds. But in doing so, he “recalls the image of the alienated artist-intellectual who is both proud and ashamed of his or her humble origins” (Leypoldt 853); in other words, he developed a cleft habitus, as Bourdieu defined it on the basis of his own experience (Bourdieu, Sketch 100). Wright certainly never forgot his own strenuous struggle for literacy and the stony path toward recognition as a black intellectual. But in terms of his literary models, there is no question that he did not accept artificial divisions in the world of literature. “He was constantly reading the great masters, just as he read the philosophers, the political theorists, the social and literary critics. He did not limit himself in the manner that many Negro writers currently limit themselves. […] He felt this [literature] to be one of the few areas in which Negroes could be as free and as equal as their minds and talents would allow” (Ellison 283). It is not surprising then that Wright should have made use of Shakespeare in his fiction. As Keneth Kinnamon convincingly argued as early as 1969, one of the crucial scenes in Wright’s novel Native Son (1940) draws on Shakespeare’s Othello: “Stated bluntly, Bigger Thomas is Othello to Mary Dalton’s Desdemona.” Kinnamon sees “the closest similarity to the play […] in the death scene, in which the racial-sexual theme reaches its moment of greatest intensity. Like Othello, Bigger kisses ere he kills. The murder in both the play and the novel is effected by smothering the victim in her bed. In each case, too, an older woman, Emilia or Mrs. Dalton, hovers on the periphery of the action” (359). While there is no verbal allusion to Shakespeare’s play and the effect of the parallels may just “induce a certain emotional resonance” (359), as Kinnamon puts it, it is yet significant that in “writing his American tragedy of race and sex, Wright turned to the greatest English work” (359) dealing with a similar constellation and staging the very blatant physical violence for which Wright - in contrast to Shakespeare - has often been criticized. 5 Maya Angelou: “To Be or Not to Be” at Graduation By 1969, when Maya Angelou published the first volume of her autobiography, the civil rights movement had insisted much more militantly than the Harlem Renaissance that Black was beautiful. The title of Angelou’s memoir pays homage to the black literary tradition by quoting Paul Laurence 5 See also Andreas, who interprets Wright’s Shakespeare adaption in the context of the rich history of African American appropriations of Othello, a play which Paul Robeson, the celebrated actor of Othello, had called “a tragedy of racial conflict, a tragedy of honor, rather than jealousy” (qtd. in Andreas 39) and which, according to Andreas, stages the ‘“master trope’ of white racism” (43). 190 c hristA b uschendorf Dunbar’s poem I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. 6 But the time frame of the narrative is the decade of the 1930s, when Angelou grew up in the South. The most important moral influence of Angelou’s youth was her grandmother, who courageously defied the hatred, abuse, and racism the family encountered in their daily lives from people of the white part of town. But while the grandmother is an admirably upright individual and a shrewd business woman steering her grocery store in Stamps, Arkansas, through the crisis of the Great Depression, Mrs. Henderson cannot offer her grandchild any intellectual guidance. When after a traumatic experience of having been raped by her mother’s boy friend, Maya returns to Stamps, she no longer communicates by speech except with her brother. Her grandmother decides to ask her friend, Mrs. Flowers, for help. Mrs. Flowers is a highly respected lady of the town’s black bourgeoisie who like Du Bois reads the classics as an enrichment of her life to which she feels entitled. She induces Maya to speak again by reading to her the beginning of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, a text Maya had read before but had never heard spoken. Mrs. Flowers appropriates Dickens to the African American cultural practices of singing and preaching: “She was nearly singing. I wanted to look at the pages. Were they the same I had read? Or were there notes, music, lined on the pages, as in a hymn book? Her sounds began cascading gently. I knew from listening to a thousand preachers that she was nearing the end of her reading” (97). In this crucial episode, reading is turned into an oral practice and thus contributes to the process of healing the psychological wounds of the past. In yet another pivotal episode, Maya’s graduation ceremony, Angelou juxtaposes white and black literature. Angelou describes at length the anticipatory joy and excitement in the days before graduation. To Maya, her diploma signifies the visible reward for past intellectual endeavors as well as a token of promise for a better life built on incorporated cultural capital. However, she and her class mates are beaten down by crude symbolic violence exerted by the white guest speaker who in his commencement address limits the male students’ professional expectations to becoming great athletes while ignoring the female graduates altogether. Maya understands that the white man had devalued her learning and her diploma: “The accomplishment was nothing. […] [L]earning and spelling decasyllabic words, memorizing the whole of The Rape of Lucrece - it was for nothing. We were maids and farmers, handymen and washerwomen, and anything higher that we aspired to was farcical and presumptuous” (175-176). The hero of the ceremony becomes Maya’s classmate Henry Reed giving his valedictory address, for which he had chosen the famous first line from Hamlet’s monologue “To Be or Not to Be” whose meaning he appropriated to the lives of his black fellow students. At first, Maya is desperate: “Hadn’t he heard the whitefolks? We couldn’t be, so the question was a waste of time. […] I feared to look at him. Hadn’t he 6 Cf. the first and last line of Dunbar’s poem “Sympathy,” Collected Poems 102. Angelou’s uncritical reference to Dunbar was controversial, because in the words of Ralph Ellison “he used styles of dialect humor transfused into literature from the white stereotype of the Negro minstrel tradition” (Ellison 280). Reading Shakespeare Matters 191 got the message? There was no ‘nobler in the mind’ for Negroes because the world didn’t think we had minds, and they let us know it” (177). Maya translates the alternative “to be or not to be” into the black experience: “To be a man, a doer, a builder, a leader, or to be a tool, an unfunny joke, a crusher of funky toadstools. I marvelled that Henry could go through with the speech as if we had a choice” (178). Yet, Henry saves the situation. When he is finished he turns to his classmates and prompts them to join him in intoning: “Lift ev’ry voice and sing / Till earth and heaven ring / Ring with the harmonies of Liberty […] It was the poem written by James Weldon Johnson. It was the music composed by J. Rosamond Johnson. It was the Negro national anthem” (178). The distressing situation causes Maya to hear the message “really for the first time” (179): “We have come over a way that with tears / has been watered, / we have come, treading our path through / the blood of the slaughtered.” The students are not ashamed of the tears they shed, and Maya’s rendering of the graduation ceremony ends on a note of regained pride. “We were on top again. As always, again. We survived. […] I was no longer simply a member of the proud graduating class of 1940; I was a proud member of the wonderful, beautiful Negro race” (178-79). While Angelou pays homage to Shakespeare and other white canonical writers throughout this first volume of her autobiography, it is only black poets who are able to evoke feelings of pride and self-respect. This distinction between intellectual and emotive encouragement marks the autobiography’s position within African American literary history. It belongs to a phase of transition in which the relation between white and black literature shifts towards an emphasis on the Black tradition. In the heated canon debates of the 1960s and early 1970s, Angelou belongs to the moderate voices. However, even one of the most fervent representatives of the Black Aesthetic Movement, Amiri Baraka, then Leroi Jones, used the strategy of rewriting Shakespeare in his two revisions of Othello, Dutchman and the companion piece in the original 1964 edition, The Slave. Not surprisingly, “Dutchman may well represent the ultimate African American revision of Othello” (Andreas 50), since Baraka’s deconstruction radically reverses the Shakespearean constellation: “Lula - the white woman - has become the aggressor in a war openly declared and waged between the races, and Clay is her black victim” (ibid.). Gloria Naylor: Miranda’s Island In the next generation, Gloria Naylor is the most prominent African American writer who integrates both strands, the black cultural tradition as well as the Western canon, especially Shakespeare, in her novels. Yet unlike Angelou she rarely juxtaposes representatives of the two traditions in her texts. 7 There 7 To be precise, when Naylor does juxtapose white and black writers, it does not seem to have any deeper significance. For example, Cocoa, an educated young woman in Mama Day, thinks during a meeting with her future husband George that she “hadn’t read any fiction more recent than Ernest Hemingway and Ralph Ellison, remembering with 192 c hristA b uschendorf is no weighing up of their respective relevance for Black education or Black identity. Instead she uses intertextual references to Shakespeare’s plays to directly characterize and shape her (mainly female) protagonists, in a way that always reverts the dramatist. Naylor’s rewriting of The Tempest in her novel Mama Day is the best example of her innovative approach. The protagonist’s double name, Miranda and Mama Day, is programmatic. Naylor turns the docile daughter of the great sovereign and magician Prospero into a matriarchal ruler of the Southern island of Willow Springs. As Peter Erickson argued in his seminal article, Mama Day’s magical powers differ significantly from Prospero’s. For example, she accepts the limits of her magic vis-à-vis the mighty forces of nature and therefore tries to cooperate with rather than dominate over nature. 8 In contrast to Prospero who is master over the dispossessed and enslaved Caliban, she traces her lineage back to “African-born” (5) Sapphira, a slave and “a true conjure woman” (3) who is said to have killed her master, the father of her seven sons. There are several more allusions to Shakespeare in Mama Day. There is, for example, the motif of the destructive storm as yet another reference to The Tempest; and there is Ophelia alias Cocoa - the granddaughter of Miranda’s sister Ophelia who committed suicide by drowning - who loves King Lear and presents a copy of this play to the man she loves. But although Naylor renders homage to Shakespeare by providing a strong presence and recognition of the acknowledged master of the Western canon, she at the same time insists on difference and critique. The strength of the women she creates is based on their deviation from Shakespearian female characters whose names they bear. But rather than turning them into invincible heroines, Naylor exposes their vulnerability in their struggle against male domination, and it is for this reason that her black Miranda and her black Ophelia are the more convincing human beings. John Edgar Wideman: Caliban in West Philly An important effect of the battles African Americans intellectuals fought in the era of the civil rights movement on behalf of their own cultural tradition is the institutionalization of Black Studies at prominent American Universities, for example, at the University of Pennsylvania in 1974. Such institutions changed not only academia, the book market and the literary field in the United States, not to speak of the sub-field of African American literature, but it also modified the canon debates - and the kind of reading appropriated or discussed by African American authors. a sinking heart the worn copy of King Lear I could have been spending my evening with” (60). Here, reading canonical writers, be they white or black, is preferable to a boring conversation. 8 See also Gary Storhoff’s Jungian interpretation of Mama Day. Reading Shakespeare Matters 193 The novelist John Edgar Wideman was among the first students in the African American Studies program at the University of Pennsylvania. 9 In his novel Philadelphia Fire, Wideman creates an African American intellectual as narrator, a thinly disguised persona of himself, who in turn creates a persona called Cudjoe after the famous Jamaican Maroon leader: “Why this Cudjoe, then? This airy other floating into the shape of my story. Why am I him when I tell certain parts? Why am I hiding from myself? Is he mirror or black hole? ” (122). The novel focuses on the horrific bombing of the Afrocentric cult Move by Philadelphia police in 1985. However, I will focus on another event that according to the narrator is essential to the narrative: “Black kids doing Shakespeare” (134). “This is the central event. I assure you. I repeat. Whatever my assurance is worth. Being the fabulator. This is the central event, this production of The Tempest staged by Cadjoe in the late 1960s, outdoors, in a park in West Philly. […] The Tempest sits dead center, the storm in the eye of the storm, figure within a figure, play within play, it is the bounty and hub of all else written about the fire […]” (132). Ironically, a tempest, which hits Philadelphia on the weekend the play was scheduled, prevents its performance. And yet, the play is a reality: the children learn their lines by heart and rehearse the play, and in the process Cudjoe reflects extensively on the function of this production and anticipates the performance: “That was Shakespeare youall just saw performed. And we did it. Blank verse and fustian, shawns and bombards, the King’s English. Tripping lightly off their tongues. So look upon these heroes. Don’t ever forget them. They wave madly. Want your approval … Our children. And their children after. But never the same again” (132). Cudjoe, the teacher of inner city black children, wants to prove that his students are capable of performing Shakespeare although he himself expresses doubts in the beginning: “Black kids doing Shakespeare. How impossible it seemed. Farfetched. Maybe not even a good idea, even if I could pull it off” (134). Notwithstanding his skepticism, the idea takes hold of Cudjoe: “The play was the thing” (132). Wideman’s reference to Shakespeare’s Hamlet brings to mind the goal Hamlet pursued with the performance of the play: “The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king” (Hamlet, act II, scene 2). In analogy, The Tempest then provides the opportunity to criticize Prospero and the ideology of colonization he represents. In Wideman’s novel, it is Caliban, who expresses the critique of Prospero in a dialogue between himself and Miranda imagined by Cudjoe. The latter’s African American vernacular connects Shakespeare’s “Abhorrèd slave” Caliban (The Tempest act I, scene 2; qtd. in Wideman 139) with Cudjoe and his students in Philadelphia’s ghetto: “So I ain’t playing the dozens but that lying ass wanna be patriarch Prospero who claims to be your daddy and wants to be mine, he’s capable of anything. Incest, miscegenation, genocide, infanticide, suicide, all the same to him. To him it’s just a matter of staying on top, holding on to what he’s got. Power” (142). 9 See Griffin on the importance of the University of Pennsylvania and its Center for the Study of Black Literature and Culture, especially under the tenure of Houston Baker, for the institutionalization of black literature. 194 c hristA b uschendorf Thus Wideman seems to argue that “a politically progressive reading will consist of exposing the hegemonic values of canonical works” (Guillory 21). Wideman’s narrator wants to make his students understand the historical context in order to be able to question the presuppositions of Shakespeare’s text and moreover, to start questioning the power structures in their own society: “And one of my jobs as model and teacher is to unteach you, help you separate the good from the bad from the ugly” (131). In “unteaching” them, Cadjoe uses references to popular culture (as in this case to the famous 1966 Spaghetti Western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) and states his message in colloquial phrases with which his students are familiar: “Play got to end the way it always does. Prospero still the boss. […] Having the last laugh” (144). To “unteach” his students also means to humanize Caliban: “Unbeast him” (140). Miranda tries to ‘unbeast’ Caliban by her attempt “to bring forth speech from the beast,” when he “would gabble like / A thing most brutish”, but she fails, as she argues, because “thy vile race, / Though thou didst learn, had that in’t which good natures / Could not abide to be with” (The Tempest act 1, scene 2; qtd. in Wideman 139-140). Cudjoe translates Miranda’s allusive words into the following unambiguous chiasmus: “She offered the word, Caliban desired flesh” (140). In the novel, it is not Miranda but Cudjoe who “unbeasts” Caliban by explaining Miranda’s perspective as induced by patriarchy that is much older than Shakespeare, in fact, can be traced back to Genesis. “Are you following me, children? The dangerousness of this [Miranda’s] speech about speech shoved in a woman’s mouth. It’s informed by a theme older than Willy or Willy’s time. […] The Garden where three’s a crowd” (140). Miranda, Cudjoe claims, is a victim of the same power that dominates Caliban, albeit the violence exerted upon her is not physical but symbolic. “She wants to share. But she can’t. She’s a prisoner, too. Hostage of what her father has taught her” (141). To recognize power structures in the past and to transpose them to the present is one of the decisive lessons Cudjoe hopes The Tempest will teach his students. As he explains to them, “It’s your history too in the word. […] Blue. As in melancholia” (130). After all, Caliban is the students’ “number-one great great great greater than god grandfather” (131). But Shakespeare set him free “with one stroke of the pen” (131). “Say free at last. Free at last” (131). Offering the hope of freedom, the play provides yet another prospect, namely to alleviate the effects of the blues. At the end of his appeal to the students to support the theater project, Cudjoe once more skillfully links their history and present to The Tempest: “We been in the storm too long, chillun. We gone crank up the volume, crank up the volume, to a mighty tempest and blow the blues away” (131). 10 Another lesson of playing Shakespeare in Philadelphia Fire rests on the logic of practice. “Doing it. That’s the point” (133). By mastering an alien language in which they express untried states of mind and emotions, the students do not only accumulate linguistic capital, but they enter unfamiliar territory, make new experiences, undergo significant changes and thus will 10 For further connections between Shakespeare and African American music, see Lanier (2005), whose article begins with the section entitled: “Shakespeare Sings the Blues.” Reading Shakespeare Matters 195 be “never the same again” (132). To Wideman, the Shakespearean play within the plot is not primarily about upward educational and thus social mobility. Nor is it merely about the recognition of whites vis-à-vis blacks on the basis of the latter’s familiarity with the icon of the Western canon. Rather, it is about the more important opportunity of the deeper, existential change that may occur when children experience the linguistic and intellectual realm of The Tempest, appropriate it for their own purposes and grow in the process. This is why “the fabulator” emphasizes that the constellation “[t]enand eleven-year-old black kids. Shakespeare” (125) is essential to the narrative. Its explosive force may in the end be stronger than the bombing of Move: “I think it’s a great idea. Real guerrilla theater. Better than a bomb. Black kids in the park doing Shakespeare will blow people’s minds” (143). Wideman’s approach is then didactic and at the same time more radical than the examples discussed above, because in his novel appropriating Shakespeare is not about the accumulation of cultural capital of black intellectuals, but - at least on the level of plot - is meant to benefit black ghetto children who are economically and culturally impoverished. Read with Bourdieu, the teacher Cudjoe by having black kids “do” Shakespeare provides a counter-training which may lead to a change of habitus. Ishmael Reed: Othello on Campus Ishmael Reed’s novel Japanese by Spring (1993) is a satire of university politics and academic struggles over ideologies. The protagonist Benjamin “Chappie” Puttbutt III notoriously jumps on bandwagons. As a member of a family with a long military tradition, he attended the Air Force Academy, but when “he had tried to organize a Black Panther chapter among the few black cadets who were enrolled” (4), he was expelled. “In the 1960s, he was a TA with a huge Afro and addicted to blackness” (14). He wrote his PhD dissertation on a 1920s poet, Nathan Brown; yet he later produced a best-seller under the title of Blacks, America’s Misfortune (14) and “had achieved notoriety for his magazine article in the New York Exegesis, denouncing affirmative action” (6). By 1990, he teaches English and literature at Jack London College, and desperately tries to get tenure. “Though there were a few guys still wearing those nationalist pillbox hats, and ‘Black is Back,’ or ‘Black is the future” sweaters, dreadlocks, the defining ideology of the eighties was feminism. Puttbutt was still a feminist. Memorized every mediocre line by Zora Neale Hurston. Could recite Sylvia Plath from memory. Could toss around terms like phallocentricity. […] But now their power was waning […]. Some of those in the Department of Humanity who were to vote on his tenure were feminists and so he still had to be friends with them in case he needed their vote” (10-11). For the time being, he is a neoconservative, but looking ahead and suspecting that “the Asian thing was going to fly” (49), he enthusiastically takes Japanese lessons on the basis of the textbook Japanese by Spring. His foresight is being rewarded, when Jack London College is taken over by 196 c hristA b uschendorf Japanese, Puttbutt’s Japanese teacher is put in charge of restructuring the humanities departments and reforming their curricula and asks Puttbutt for assistance. Just before this overhaul, Puttbutt had been denied tenure; thus his change of luck gives him a chance for revenge. Reed uses this situation for an extended debate on Shakespeare’s Othello. At first, Puttbutt is surprised when he learns that he had not received tenure because the Miltonians headed by his adversary Professor Crabtree had taken offense at “the article he had written many years ago in which he said that Shakespeare’s Othello was racist. He’d forgotten all about it. It was his master’s thesis. Written when he was in his Black Power period. Nobody discussed racism any more. Racism was something blacks had made up in order to make whites feel guilty, so the line went. Puttbutt had learned the argument well. He used it. Published articles about how blacks couldn’t seem to get it together. The New York Exegesis even considered him for a seat on its editorial board” (94). When under the new presidency Crabtree gets into trouble for poor academic performance in the past and approaches Puttbutt as a supplicant, the latter turns the tables on him and confronts him with his instrumental role in denying him tenure. A heated debate about Othello and racism ensues. Crabtree’s critique of his “thesis that race relations in this country haven’t changed since Shakespeare’s time” as “preposterous,” tempts Puttbutt to defend his paper. He claims that Shakespeare turns Othello into “a primitive” (96), “a noble savage” (98), a statement he confirms by quoting from the play. He also maintains that “Shakespeare believed that the only uncorrupted interracial relationship can be that between a white man and a colored woman” (97). Crabtree accuses him of “projecting” (97) and extends his indictment to black people in general: “You blacks are always complaining about racism. Racism this and racism that. You use racism to explain away your failure. All of this talk about racism on the campus of Jack London. I’ve been teaching here for thirty years and have never found a single instance. Do you hear? A single instance. And now you have to reach back and drag Shakespeare into it. Is there no end to your people’s paranoia? ” While Crabtree is speaking, Puttbutt looks out of the window and watches students of a white fraternity in blackface perform a ritual they call the “Annual Slave Day”: “One large white boy had put on the mammy attire. Head rag. Red and white polka-dot dress. Huge pillow for breasts. The ‘slaves’ were being auctioned off to the older brothers” (97). Racism on campus is a reality that Crabtree will continue to ignore. In Japanese by Spring, Reed parodies the changing race politics and likewise makes fun of the notorious power struggles among humanities departments, many of which are polarized by canon revisions. The contingency of such revisions is expressed in the following passage, when the new president comments on the Western canon from an Asian perspective and ridicules “such dubious claims that Europe is the birthplace of science, religion, technology, and philosophy. I’ve been reading this so-called philosopher, Plato. All about such foolishness as to whether the soul has immortality. What nonsense. Hegel and the rest are full of such nonsense also. This ignorant man maintained that the Chinese had no philosophy. What rubbish. No wonder Reading Shakespeare Matters 197 the Americans can’t make a decent automobile. Their intellectuals spend all of their time on the fuzzy and useless Greeks and German idealists. If one were to apply the empirical razor to all of these so-called theories, the entire course of Western philosophy could be covered in one week. Also I am considering dropping the inordinate number of courses devoted to the work of John Milton. My staff has checked his character background. He spent some time in jail, you know. We do not think it appropriate to include courses about an ex-convict in our catalog” (90f.). In the mode of a satire, Reed deconstructs the Western canon as a biased product of Eurocentrism and, more generally, uncovers the global political and economic battles behind canon debates. Finally, Reed lays bare the mechanisms of self-interest underlying the academic power games over the control of cultural capital, which after all can be transformed into economic, social or even symbolic capital. Conclusion These case studies of Shakespeare’s use in twentieth-century African American literature demonstrate what from a sociological perspective is a truism: The acquisition of literary taste in the black writer’s intellectual socialization as well as the subsequent canon debates are part of a necessarily relational process that is always already referring to the white dominant culture. As Bourdieu has shown in Distinction, (literary) taste is never the product of an exclusively individual, subjective choice; it is also dependent on the position the social agent occupies in the field and the types of (cultural) capital he or she has been able to accumulate. In addition, it depends on the power of definition one’s group may exert in the cultural field. Since the field of cultural production is only relatively autonomous, it changes according to forces at play in the field of power. Consequently, with regard to canon formation we may assume, in John Guillory’s words, “a homology between the process of exclusion, by which socially defined minorities are excluded from the exercise of power or from political representation, and the process of selection, by which certain works are designated canonical, others noncanonical” (6). Thus, literary taste as a function of the relation between the dominant white and the dominated black culture changes according to the degree of recognition granted to African Americans or the degree of resistance African Americans mobilize against misrecognition. At the beginning of the 20th century, Du Bois thought it necessary to make the point that African Americans were entitled to and thus should strive for the symbolic capital of a literary taste defined by the white dominant class as legitimate. Richard Wright, born in 1908, and Maya Angelou, born in 1928, represent different generations of writers who yet both suffer from exclusion and discrimination. The poverty of Wright’s family deprives him from regular access to schooling; his mostly self-educated reading guides him toward the white canon that was to shape his intellectual makeup throughout his life. In contrast, Angelou profits from her grandmother’s relatively affluent 198 c hristA b uschendorf situation and social status as well as from regularly attending school. Yet her experience at graduation is a clear manifestation of Bourdieu’s argument that it is above all the institution of the school itself that is responsible for the reproduction of the social order (cf. Guillory 58). In addition, Angelou experiences the political struggles of the civil rights movement that result not only in legal concessions but subsequently lead to the formation of a black literary canon that is reflected in her work. In the 1980s and 1990s, Wideman’s and Naylor’s differentiated, critical appropriations of Shakespeare and Reed’s satirical fictional meta-discourse are an outcome of the institutionalization of Black Studies. The latter has significantly increased the autonomy of the subfield of African American literary production, and it is this enhanced autonomy that has since then led to a greater recognition of black intellectuals, which in turn authorizes them to level the binary conception of the relation between the Western and the African American literary canon. 11 Within the Western canon, Shakespeare represents the epitome of consecrated authors in the English language. His undisputed position allows for a particularly broad variety in coming to terms with this towering canonical figure. When you claim him, there is no doubt about his ultimate legitimacy; 12 when you repudiate him, you can be certain that you disallow the whole Western tradition; and when you acknowledge him by rewriting, his prominence and popularity guarantee that the slightest reference as well as the most radical revision will be recognized - and enjoyed. Works Cited Andreas, James R. “Othello’s African American Progeny.” South Atlantic Review 57.4 (November 1992): 39-57. Print. Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. New York: Vintage, 1984. Print. Belt-Beyan, Phyllis M. The Emergence of African American Literacy Traditions: Family and Community Efforts in the Nineteenth Century. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004. Print. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1984. Print. ---. Pascalian Meditations. Trans. Richard Nice. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2000. Print. ---. Sketch for Self-Analysis. 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