I am now spending hours going through mountains of file
folders, papers, and offprints in an effort to subdue my life to some sort of
order. I am simply astonished to
discover episodes in my professional life that I had completely forgotten. For example, it appears that in 2004, I
undertook, using my USSAS mailing list, to raise money for an NAACP voter
registration campaign. Really? Who knew?
Along the way, I came across one delicious item that I need
to share with you, if only to illustrate just how wonderful my colleagues were
in the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University
of Massachusetts Amherst. Here are the
title and sub-title of a paper delivered at a 1990 panel discussion in
Atlanta, Georgia. The author is my
colleague Michael Thelwell.
“Cap’n Dey Done Stole De Canon, Best We Bring Up Our
Howitzer”
Or, not necessarily more precisely, but in the fashion of
the day:
“The problematique of de-situating the re-marginalization of
Afro-centric tropistic significations, intertextually, against the ambience of
a phallo- and Euro-centric, post-Derridian canonical discourse, mediated by a
post-Freudian, pre-coital detumescence and seminal exhaustion, other-ality, and
the influential anxieties of race and gender.”
5 comments:
The subtitle, clearly intended to be amusing, is indeed amusing.
p.s. One could deconstruct it, but I think that would be, for lack of a better word, overkill.
Well clearly your colleague is a wit, but what was the paper really all about?
It is a brilliantly funny attack on standard Yale style literary criticism and the manifold ways in which it misunderstands, distorts, demeans, or unintentionally savages the Black experience and literature, complete with an over the top burlesque of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
I took the "influential anxieties of race and gender" to be a -- perhaps slightly strained? -- dig at Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence, simply b.c of the juxtaposition of "influential" and "anxieties." My (rather ignorant) impression though is that Bloom has never been preoccupied w race/gender. Perhaps that's the point? Whatever. It's still funny.
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