W. Lawrence Hogue. The African American Male, Writing, and Difference: A Polycentric Approach to African American Literature, Criticism, and History.

W. Lawrence Hogue. The African American Male, Writing, and Difference: A Polycentric Approach to African American Literature, Criticism, and History. Albany: SUNY P, 2003.291 pp. $29.95.

In the 11 chapters that comprise The African American Male, Writing, and Difference, W. Lawrence Hogue pursues texts written by African American male writers of the twentieth century who have not only been "neglected," but who have figured in literature and history, particularly within the cultural networks of normative definitions and European and American institutions, as non-agential, passive, romantic objects defined by the values and aesthetics of the white and African American middle-classes. But more importantly, he contends that African American men and masculinity have not only been historically and culturally "misread" and "ignored," but because "there is no social or literary movement to earner critical attention for existential, Voodoo, blues, and urban subaltern literary texts," he turns to resuscitate, include, and reassess alternative ways in which African American men have been positively represented in literature and imbued with agency.

By anchoring his focus on African American men's texts, he explores, disrupts, and deconstructs the "white/black binary of signification that defines whites as normative and superior and that represents blacks as victim, as inferior, as devalued Other, or, since the 1960s, as the Same as whites." Rejecting the binary's restrictive logic, Hogue initiates a critique of "colonization" that enacts simultaneous moves, and thus shows how European conceptions of Otherness developed both at home and abroad. Illustrating how the Other emerged out of multiple regimes of power and knowledge, Hogue shows how those regimes were enmeshed with colonial expansion from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to European exploits in the Americas on and after 1492. He reveals how the white/black binary was enforced through biology, sociology, and politics and via the idiom of racism, and underscores how it was propelled by Europe's drama with its own internal "non-European Other," and other hierarchies of light/dark, self/Other, civilized/primitive, colonizer/colonized, and Christian/pagan common to various cultures around the globe rather than as the strict practice of "the Europeans."

Tracing the analysis of the white/black binary and these other forms of domination to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, both in their individual and structural terms and within their circuitous trajectory, Hogue links them to the rise of modernity and situates them in the colonial order and (il)logic of race relations in the United States during and after Reconstruction, World War II, the era of segregation and its myth of racial difference, and the Civil Rights era of the 1950s and 60s and within the cultural activity and literary criticism of the 70s and 80s. He then critiques the limits of the Civil Rights sociopolitical ideology of racial uplift and its wide-ranging effects, along with its subjugation of African America's rich aesthetics. He expresses serious concerns for this narrative's denial of class and difference within African American society and its polyvocal and hybrid history--the assimilationist Civil Rights rhetoric that renders the black as the same as the middle class Christian white American norm, leaving the white/black framework in place, unscathed, and leaving firm the notion of a naturalized devalued Other.

Borrowing the concept of "polycentrism" from Walter Laqueur and Samir Amin, and employing poststructuralism, postmodernism, postcolonial theory, and feminism, Hogue deconstructs the white/black binary and its naturalizing logic, and astutely shows how the dyad has been kept in place--through different, though similar mechanisms across cultures and within their own idioms. He looks closely at how the binary has repressed the diverse character of "communities" and other expressive forms within African America. This colonization, he argues, took shape on a number of registers: by the structure of the white/black binary within literature and criticism, aesthetics, and economic apparati that denied and ignored many black experiences. These experiences--which are lived and expressed differently by different subjects-generated manifold communities, methods, lifestyles, cosmologies, aesthetics, and cultural imaginaries and must be given their weight in history and criticism. This acknowledgement is productive, Hogue contends, because it reworks how we understand culture, power, and race relations, but more generally how we can reinterpret literature, and more specifically how we can regard African American aesthetic production beyond repression, dependence, and the narrative of victim.

Using Foucault's insights from The Archaeology of Knowledge, Hogue affirms a sense of history that is "dispersed, decentered, and polycentric" and applies this notion to his own project of radical deconstruction, giving rise more amply and radically, to other ways of asking questions. These innovations encourage differences that can thrive without the terms of "a hierarchical system that privileges a center with a subordinated periphery." By means of this critical deconstruction with its implied reconstruction--as deconstruction not only disrupts, but simultaneously permits new forms of seeing that make possible visions beyond hierarchies and outside the bounds of "repression and violence" and within the conditions of their own "logic and validity"--Hogue can offer an analysis of black radical individualism, existentialism, postmodernism, and what he calls "urban survivalism." These phenomena are integral to black existence and are equal to but different from dominant practices, and cannot be properly called into question and positively explored within the white/black binary or in the Civil Rights narrative that "posits a quest for social equality" in the terms of middle-class interests, aesthetics, and its sanitizing forms of cultural value. Through the radical dispersion of power, the re-imagination of subordinated texts, institutions, traditions and discourses, as well as the empowering of the marginalized, Hogue achieves this positive critique through his close readings of "different racial minorities" and "different belief systems and definitions of life" in James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, William Melvin Kelly's A Different Drummer, Charles Wright's The Messenger, Clarence Major's Dirty Bird Blues, Nathan Heard's Howard Street, James Earl Hardy's B-Boy Blues, and Don Belton's Almost Midnight. These readings are intelligent, original, and reflective of Hogue's fierce command of various theories and literatures.

Through these penetrating interpretations positioned within American/African American literature and life, Hogue allows these other subaltern and working class identities to speak in their own variety. By working against the dominant cultural narrative of a so called non-humanistic, non-middle class, non-Protestant work ethic, and non-Freudian moral codes within mainstream criticism, Hogue embraces the voices of anthropologists, cultural critics, historians, philosophers and sociologists like Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Theodore W. Allen, Robert Bartlett, Robert Blauner, Peter Burke, Ellis Cose, Oliver Cox, W. E. B. Du Bois, Michel de Certeau, Enrique Dussel, Ralph Ellison, Johannes Fabian, Kevin K. Gaines, Grace Elizabeth Hale, John Hale, Kim F. Hall, Winthrop Jordan, William Loren Katz, Peter Mason, Gunner Myrdal, Walter Mignolo, Anthony Pagden, Orlando Patterson, Renato Rosaldo, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, and Emmanuel Wallerstein. In doing so, he offers trenchant interpretations of black cultural expressions and theories, and alternate forms of masculinity beyond the heterosexual/patriarchal matrix. He astutely manages to show how texts like Johnson's and Kelly's were read and included in criticism and history, but also how their commodification and reception limited our understanding of their heterogeneity and difference. This limitation drives his close appraisal of another African America--one where texts like Wright's, Major's, Heard's, Hardy's, and Belton's were ignored, and whose disregard muffled the sustaining life forms they produced, especially because of the racial uplift project and the sole focus on racism. For Hogue, to be characterized as a victim of racial oppression is to be defined negatively by "someone else's discourse," a discourse that is governed by the interests "of a single paradigmatic perspective in which white, middle-class America is seen as the unique source of meaning, as the US center of gravity, and as the ontological 'reality' for the rest of the country."

Hogue's close readings are attentive to various registers, making them a pleasure to read. His amazing attention to detail is both inviting and seductive. He includes not only radical critique but creatively engages texts and issues. Overall, Hogue's wide-ranging analysis and its polyvalent character, like the broad range of texts and issues embraced, occasion new forms of cultural agency that deconstruct binary logic, that dislodge sedimentary forms of interpretation, and that dialogue with other scholars to reveal modes for understanding the richness of African American men's texts and their varying forms of signification.

Hogue's multifaceted analyses not only uncover exclusions, but render visible the function of ideology and class interests to exclude working class and subaltern forms of life for other more recognizable, mainstream interests and canons, as well as to thwart other valuable but different concepts of social reality. To achieve this effect, he works through ideas put forth by Raymond Williams, John Guillory, Tony Bennett, and Barbara Herrnstein Smith. Hogue affirms that one can only "change/transform a culture by changing the hegemonic cultural narrative." These changes, in the final analysis, encompass both majority cultural narratives and dominant paradigms as well as, if not more importantly, power relations not predicated on models of domination. Hogue's deft moves through disciplines and borders allow him "to envision/construct a reading of America/African American life in which relations have many dynamic cultural, historical, critical, and literary locations, many possible vantage points, rather than a center/norm and peripheries."

Although Hogue is well aware that terms like "black" and "African American," no less than "European" and "colonizer," are problematic, interestingly, he chooses "The African American Male" rather than "the Black Male" as his book's title, in spite of his class critique and even though, as Lewis R. Gordon argues in Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (1995), there are not that many "African Americans" who live in working class spaces and ghettos. The title seems appropriate, however, because his focus is on the American/African American scene. But like Gordon (whose book builds on Fanon's insight of "the lived experience of the black"), Hogue affirms that the reality of people who experience life "as black subalterns" and as "racial Others" confirms the common devaluation that "blacks" share. This lived experience of blackness, Hogue persuasively argues, is lived divergently by blacks, but it offers "differential modes of existence and consciousness" (to invoke Chela Sandoval), and pronounces alternative ways of being "black" and living freely.

Miguel A. Segovia

Brown University