Masks: Blackness, Race and the Imagination.

Adam Lively. Masks: Blackness, Race and the Imagination. New York: Oxford UP, 2000. 295 pp. $30.00.

It is not a new argument that there is a fundamental black presence at the heart of modernity, whether that modernity be defined as beginning with the Enlightenment philosophers of the eighteenth century or the primitivist artists of the twentieth, and whether that presence manifests itself as a positive cultural inheritance or a hidden racist discourse. For the past decade, scholars have been exposing to light the racist discourse at the foundations of liberalism and the Africanist cultures present in works of European modernisms. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has traced the signifying relationship African writers established with those eighteenth-century European racialists, while Paul Gilroy has measured the depth of the Black Atlantic, whose waves lapped on both Caribbean and English shores. Christopher Miller and Tzvetan Todorov have explored how a wide range of intellectuals deploy an "Africanist discourse" in French writing, while Toni Morrison has showed us the persistence of what she calls the "Africanist presence" in modern works of American literature. Central to these studies are two interrelated beliefs: first, the materialist belief that the given conditions of a racialized and racist society manifest themselves in the cultural productions of that society and, second, the psychoanalytic belief that these cultural productions manifest this racism or indebtedness in a repressed yet recoverable form.

Adam Lively's Masks is another and welcome addition to this burgeoning and still fruitful field of study. Divided into two parts--the first on the "invention" of race, the second on the manifestations of blackness in modernist texts in the twentieth century--the book asserts just how central the "ongoing cultural and scientific debate as to what... race signifies" has been and continues to be to "modem thought and sensibilities."

In the first part, dealing with the preconditions of modernism, Lively provides engaging and wide-ranging explorations of how race developed as an intellectual system in a Christian context. Looking first at the ways that European thinkers "invented" race, Lively then examines the ways race was transmuted in the shifts from the culture of sentimental abolitionism to the age of empire. What is particularly admirable about this survey is its range. In his first chapter, for example, Lively attends to theological debates (the origins of the association of blackness with Ham), philosophical theories (Leonardo on the "grey" offspring of black and white parents, Swedenborg on how Africans think "interiorly" while Europeans think "exteriorly"), and cultural phenomena (the Moorish origins of the English morris dance, the blackness of the Harlequin figure in commedia dell'arte). This analysis of intellectual debates and cultural events provides a useful supplement to the kind of work that has been ably performed by hi storians like Walter Allen, who have been more focused on the material "invention of race" in the early modern period. The book's attention to European developments also supplements the kinds of analysis of cultural texts that have been more focused on America, as Eric Lott's work, for instance, has been. It should also be noted, however, that the work on the "invention of race" in Lively's book does not (and is not intended to) replace the more thorough histories of race as an intellectual concept (like Thomas Gossett's Race: The History of an Idea in America) or a material set of political practices (like Oliver Cromwell Cox's older but still insufficiently-appreciated Marxist text Caste, Class, and Race).

Throughout the first part, Lively spends some time looking at particular works of fiction to give more concrete examples of the specificities of the intellectual traditions he is delineating. In the first chapter he provides a lengthy reading of Simon Tyssot de Patot's Les Voyages et Aventures de Jacques Masse (1710), in the second of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), and in the fourth of Joseph Conrad's Nigger of the 'Narcissus' (1898) and Heart of Darkness (1902). Mostly, though, in the first section Lively is more heavily concerned with drawing out what he sees as the key shifts from the age of sentiment to the age of empire. The most notable shift is that from the sentimentalist idea of identification ("Am I not a man and a brother?" asks the kneeling slave in Josiah Wedgwood's medallion) to the imperialist idea of disidentification (where the "Negro became irredeemably Other" to the colonizing mind). This is especially marked in the notable shift from the abolitionist representation of ev ery black person as having a white soul to the colonial fictions that suggested that within "every white skin is a heart of darkness." As Lively makes quite clear, the symbolism of blackness plays the fundamental role in these changes and also in the final shift at the turn into the twentieth century, the shift from imperial romance to imperial modernism.

In the second section of Masks, Lively examines more closely some of the notable cultural works of that modernism. The three chapters of the second section are devoted, respectively, to a study of the fictions of passing in the first quarter of the century, the literature presenting the black hero in mid-century, and the association of blackness with apocalpyse in post-World War II American writing. The passing chapter looks at works from Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894) to Jessie Fauset's Plum Bun and Nella Larsen's Passing (both 1929), the heroic chapter at Aime Cesaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (1939) and Jean Genet's Les Negres (1958), and the apocalypse chapter at the writings of Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, John Updike, and Bernard Malamud. The second section is somewhat uneven. There are some abrupt shifts from one idea to the next, and it is often difficult to follow what feel like impressionistic associations between the points Lively is trying to make. In addition, some of the extende d readings--of Updike's Rabbit Redux and Malamud's The Tenants, for instance--give too many plot details and too few profoundly insightful comments of the type Lively elsewhere makes about the meanings of those representations.

In the end, this is a book that does many things, and does them well. Written in a style that is a pleasure to read, Masks gives us an invigorating survey of how race came to mean different things in the intellectual debates of modernity and what representations of race do mean in the cultural texts of modernism. In 1970, Ralph Ellison mused in an essay called "What America Would Be Like Without Blacks" that "whatever else the true American is, he is also somewhat black." Lively's book, like those earlier studies that show how blackness is at the heart of our intellectual heritage, shows us that this is true for the French and the English and all the nations whose modernity began in slavery.

[c] 2002 Ashraf H. A. Rushdy