Manifesto of a Tenured Radical. Cary Nelson
large numbers of secondary or college students should not, therefore, be underestimated. They succeed to a significant degree in representing not only the kind of society we have been but also the sort of society we are now and have the potential to become in the future. There is no escaping those effects; the option of simply collecting texts from the past in a neutral fashion does not exist. Every choice about what to include or exclude not only grants or denies those individual texts wide visibility but also puts each included text in a dialogue with the other texts in the anthology, a dialogue that gives readers a chance to test possible class or intercultural relations and a dialogue that would otherwise not take place. Anthologies figure not only the material facts of history but also the active process of remembering and reconstructing it. They offer a reading of past social relationships and put forward opportunities for new social relations in the future. Far more is at stake, therefore, than just the already significant power to propel a poem, story, or historical document from obscurity to renown, though that is obviously among an anthology’s powers as well, especially when a little-known small press publication thereby suddenly gains a much larger audience. But anthologies do not only have radical effects on texts. They also work to recreate their readers by repositioning them in relation to a remembered past, a lived present, and an imagined future. Anthologies are hardly the only force acting in that capacity, but they are not trivial, and they will, once again, have those effects whether their editors admit it or not.
Editing an anthology of American literature is thus not only an aesthetic but also a social and political project. One must decide which racial, ethnic, and social groups to include, how much space to grant them, and whether to mix them up or group them together. A historical anthology can grant not only past but also present agency to various constituencies and political parties. One has to decide not only how such groups represent their own history but also how they represent other races, ethnicities, and political groups and indeed how they represent the nation’s various acts, ideals, and institutions. No past conversation recreated over such issues can fail to speak to the present. And nothing but the most benighted notion of evaluation would lead us to conclude that all these matters would be settled by judgments of quality or historical importance alone.3 For notions of quality change when different styles and forms of literary expression enter the picture, just as what counts as historically important changes when a focus on diplomatic, military, and dominant political history is broadened to include dissident groups and everyday life. Nor does the recognition that inclusion in anthologies can help to empower gendered, ethnic, racial, and political groups settle the problem of which sorts of texts get in and which stay out. The anthologist has to decide what sort of national history he or she wants us to remember and how the relations between different groups of people have helped shape that history. It is not merely a question of whether black or white or red or yellow perspectives matter, but rather a question about what sort of voices they will have within what is necessarily a very selective frame.
An anthologist working with modern American poems must, for example, decide whether to limit the selection of Langston Hughes’s poems to his more humanistic affirmations of black identity, as most anthologists do, or to include his concise attacks on white racism and on Christian hypocrisy. Does one focus, like most anthologists, on Claude McKay’s most abstract protest poems or include the poems of explicit anguish about racial identity and rage at white America? In anthologizing the contemporary Mesquakie poet Ray Young Bear, do you include only his more affirmative poems focused on Native American culture, like “The Personification of a Name,” or pick more overtly troubled poems like “The Significance of a Water Animal” or “It Is the Fish-Faced Boy Who Struggles,” or even his towering poem of protest and indictment, “In Viewpoint: Poem for 14 Catfish and the Town of Tama, Iowa”? Does one ignore the many powerful poems protesting racism written by white Americans, instead anthologizing poems on less troubling topics? Does one include (or at least cite) some of the racist poems by major and minor white poets to show that poetry exemplified the same struggles typical of the rest of the culture or instead, again like most anthologists, allow readers to believe poets remained focused on more easily idealized subjects?
The dominant pattern for many years for general anthologies of American literature has been to seek minority poems that can be read as affirming the poet’s culture but not mounting major challenges to white readers. One of Ray Young Bear’s most regularly anthologized poems, “Grandmother,” may seem not even to have been written by a Native American when it is taken out of the context of the rest of his work. It is also, to be sure, not just a question of the nature of the poem at issue but of our reading practices, interests, and assumptions and what interpretations they are most likely to produce. But that is something an anthologist can influence. Just how much of African American history seems to be invoked by Hughes’s widely anthologized “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” will depend in part on how much knowledge the reader brings to the poem and how much of that knowledge is put in play and amplified by the other poems in the anthology, especially other poems by Hughes himself. Simply placing “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (“I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human veins”) next to Hughes’s “The Bitter River” (“I’ve drunk of the bitter river . . . Mixed with the blood of the lynched boys”) will increase the likelihood that the earlier poem, with its references to Lincoln and the Mississippi, will carry more complex historical freight. Young Bear’s remarkable “It Is the Fish-Faced Boy Who Struggles,” in which the people come together at the end to observe ceremonies they had long forgotten, will be more marked by the history of white repression if it is read along with “In Viewpoint: Poem for 14 Catfish and the Town of Tama, Iowa.” The latter poem, moreover, is about how the genocidal mentality of the frontier survives today, so its challenge to contemporary readers is especially pointed. The poem opens by asking “in whose world do we go on living?” and proceeds to detail the ways white abuse of the Mesquakie permeates every element of daily life, from the louts who dream of bludgeoning Native Americans on a weekend to the town newspaper that dramatizes every Mesquakie offense and relegates every positive story about the tribe to the back pages.
Once editors find the courage to include more antagonistic texts, as most do not, the issues at stake become more complex and the works available richer and more varied. An anthology that aims to present multicultural history relationally and interactively, indeed, is not limited to literary works that divide easily into affirmative and negative groups. One can, for example, include white poets writing empathically, reflectively, or awkwardly about African American or Native American culture. And an accurately representative record of multicultural literary and historical relations will show that not only minority identities but also the dominant white identities come under scrutiny. One answer to the recurrent question of how to make whiteness visible in our history is simply to reprint the works that seek to do just that. In the 1920s and the 1930s, a period when writers from a variety of cultures regularly took up questions of race, that would include some of the poems I assigned in the course I will describe in chapter 5, such as Aqua Laluah’s “Lullaby,” Anne Spencer’s “White Things,” Claude McKay’s “To the White Fiends,” and Kenneth Patchen’s “Nice Day for a Lynching.”
“I’m looking for a house,” Hughes announces in a 1931 poem, “where white shadows/Will not fall.” “There is no such house,” he answers, “No such house at all.”4 What does it mean, modern poets repeatedly ask, to bear on one’s body the sign of that history—white skin—the figure for a cultural dominance so omnipresent it was, like a white shadow, as though invisible? It is a question relatively few white Americans have felt impelled to ask in the eighties and nineties, though it is a question anthologists may be able to help put in play again, as Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps did in their important 1949 anthology The Poetry of the Negro, which included a section of poems by white poets. In her 1929 poem “Lullaby,” Laluah warns a black child not to wish for whiteness, lest he become “a shade in human draperies,” out of touch with his family and in love with death. Spencer’s 1923 “White Things” had put forward similar notions, suggesting that agents of a valorized whiteness have taken a multicolored world and “blanched [it] with their wand of power.” Lucia Trent’s 1929 poem “A White Woman Speaks” responds by declaring herself “ashamed of being white,” but Kenneth Patchen instead claims