Lewis R. Gordon - Not Only the Masters Tools: African American Studies in Theory and Practice

NOT ONLY THE MASTERS TOOLS

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Not Only the Masters Tools: African-American Studies in
Theory and Practice
edited by Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon

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NOT ONLY THE
MASTERS TOOLS

African-American Studies
in Theory and Practice

EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

LEWIS R. GORDON AND
JANE ANNA GORDON

First published 2006 by Paradigm Publishers

Published 2016 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Copyright 2006 by Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Not only the masters tools : African-American studies in theory and practice /
edited with an introduction by Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-59451-146-2 (hc)ISBN 1-59451-147-0 (pbk)
1. African AmericansStudy and teaching. 2. African Americans
Intellectual life. 3. African American philosophy. I. Gordon, Lewis R. (Lewis
Ricardo), 1962 II. Gordon, Jane Anna, 1976

E184.7.N68 2006
973.04960730071dc22
2005030856

Designed and Typeset by Straight Creek Bookmakers.

ISBN 13: 978-1-59451-146-2 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978-1-59451-147-9 (pbk)

Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon

The masters tools will never dismantle the masters house. So went Audre Lordes credo in Sister Outsider, which has stood as a guiding principle of subaltern studies. It has meant avoiding the trappings of Eurocentric scholarship and the disciplinary edicts encompassed by it.

The guiding principle of this collection of essays, with no disrespect to Lordes important contributions intended, is that dismantling the masters house is a misguided project. Even if it were true that his house cannot be dismantled by his tools, slaves have historically done something more provocative with such tools than attempt to dismantle the Big House. There are those who used those tools, developed additional ones, and built houses of their own on more or less generous soil. It is our view that the proper response is to follow their lead, transcending rather than dismantling Western ideas through building our own houses of thought. When enough houses are built, the hegemony of the masters housein fact, mastery itselfwill cease to maintain its imperial status. Shelter neednt be the rooms offered by such domination.

The area of research that became known as Black Studies, then African-American Studies and then Africana Studies, has faced questions of how its subject matter should be approached. The dominant approach is to treat Black Studies as an area of research in which training in other disciplines is applied to the study of black people. Whether as Black Studies, African-American Studies, or Africana Studies, a peculiar feature of this area of research is its clear interdisciplinary ethos. To be in Black Studies means, always, to have more than one disciplinary identity and to face the accompanying concern of which disciplines are best suited for engagement with the African diaspora. In some programs and departments, for instance, the view was that the purpose of this area of research was to respond to the lacuna of historical and social scientifi c research on black folk. The result was a preference for social scientifi cally oriented disciplines and research studies such as those found in history, anthropology, economics, sociology, and political science departments. Moreover, the founding of Black Studies programs in the late 1960soften through mechanisms of student protest, most of which was linked to the Black Power movementcame with the prevalent demand for knowledge that would affect national policy. Such demand was ironic since the fi rst Black Studies program, at San Francisco State University, was founded by a group of artists, including Leroi Jones/ Amiri Barka and Sonia Sanchez, from the Black Arts Movement. A moments look into the tenets of that movement clarifi es why they decided to found programs for the academic study of black folk: Indeed, the basic argument of the Black Arts Movement was that art affects the symbols by which people appear in the worldand how people appear has great political consequence. Black Power demanded that control of the means of image production be seized, and the artist intellectuals of the Black Arts Movement attempted to do just that.

Black Studies/African-American Studies/Africana Studies was born with the express purpose of decolonizing the minds of people, especially black people. Although much knowledge can be produced by writing histories and social scientifi c studies, no amount of information could get very far in the absence of minds unable to see or understand it. Important as empirical work has been and continues to be, without interpretation, even at the level of the methods used for organizing the research and gathering data, such work would be meaningless. The power of interpretation is such, however, that it, too, is embedded in a special type of interpretation or hermeneutic without which it, as well, would be meaningless. And that interpretation we call theory.

Without a theoretical framework, the kind of hermeneutic that brings meaning to interpretations, most interpretations would function no better than simple hypotheses in long strings of ideas with the lukewarm designation of maybe. Theoretical frameworks, however, also tend to be embedded in experiences germane to societies and their theorists whose creative work stimulated their birth. What this means is that the theories on which interpretations depend become that on which even our empirical work relies, and such dependency has political consequences. Should Black Studies abrogate responsibility for the theoretical frameworks that inform its production of knowledge, then the very decolonization project sought would be undermined. We call this consequence