Outcry of the etcetera culture: Race, culture, and black subjectivity

Gilmer C Cook, Purdue University

Abstract

My dissertation, Outcry of the Etcetera Culture: Race, Culture, and Black Subjectivity, provides a historical mapping of black subjectivity theory’s structure as a dialectical discourse. I use the tripartite thesis-antithesis-synthesis structure of Hegelian dialectic to posit that diasporic theories of black subjectivity—beginning with slave narratives and ending with my theory of “the etcetera”—have evolved through a process of synthetic negotiation wherein emerging concepts of black identity position themselves as compromising syntheses between the competing theses of preceding black subjectivity ideologies. The purpose of this endeavor is threefold: First, the goal of scholarship such as this should always be to educate. The dialectic offers a pedagogical tool for presenting the array of theories surrounding black identity as an organized unit; Second, a heretofore unarticulated accounting of how black subjectivity theories can be methodologically traced as points along a discursive trajectory is useful as a measure for considering the field as a unit and anticipating its course; And last, but not least, presenting the field of black subjectivity theory in this manner provides the framework through which I can position my theory of the etcetera as a dialectical synthesis between post-colonial theory’s essentialist vs. anti-essentialist debate. As is common in Black Studies, my dissertation begins with the assumption that race—as we understand it in the contemporary Western world—is a social construct instituted and disseminated by European imperialists during the Atlantic slave trade. The ingenuity of Europeans in spreading this race myth, along with the sheer scale of the slave trade, resulted in the West’s perception of African diversity and culture forever being limited to the scope of race ideology. The incorporation of these ideologies into global social and economic practice has resulted in race’s effects becoming so deeply woven into the fabric of Western culture that it holds equal position with culture as an ontological or natural category. The reduction of African descendants’ varied and complex cultures throughout the diaspora to a race monolith results in what I refer to as the etceteraing of black culture. In English, when making a statement like, “bartender, my usual: cranberry juice, ice, etcetera,” we are accessing a symbolic order where either previous experience or cultural normative dictate that the etcetera, though clearly signifying a substance with its own identity and complexity, need not be specified beyond its proximity to the named symbol/s. Therefore, the etcetera’s function as a symbol is dictated almost completely by the named symbol/s. In this sense, the etcetera is a trace, or presence of absence, that signals our engagement with the unsubstantiated phantom of a presumably nameable entity. My dissertation uses examinations of modern African Diasporic fiction and hip-hop to demonstrate that in the Western world black subjectivity and culture is positioned as etcetera in that its various unique elements are obscured by and confined within the symbolic ordering of the race monolith.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Patton, Purdue University.

Subject Area

African American Studies|Modern literature|Black studies|Ethnic studies

COinS