tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-595859379914711075.post1234171427384483535..comments2024-03-19T18:51:58.496-05:00Comments on Cultural Front: George Packer compliments LeRoi Jones (but derides Amiri Baraka)H. Rambsyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16862209871277442972noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-595859379914711075.post-10277211010849996942016-04-14T00:40:19.841-05:002016-04-14T00:40:19.841-05:00Your comments on George Packer's essay remind ...Your comments on George Packer's essay remind me that American critical commentaries are becoming somewhat violent if not vile, approaching the barbarity of many comments on social media and tempting me to go "postal" to avoid stress. Simon Gikandi's January 2016 <i> PMLA </i> editor's column "Looking Back on the Black Aesthetic" is a good example of post-whatever discourse that combines accidental and deliberate misunderstanding of historical processes. Under the influence of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Gikandi engages Addison Gayle's <i>The Black Aesthetic </i> (1971)first rather than the preparatory essays in <i> Home:Social Essays </i> (1966) and the groundbreaking work collected in <i> Black Fire </i> (1968). Gikandi is interested in "comparing the literary projects at the University of Nairobi in 1968 and those at various centers of black thinking in the United States" as "one way of recognizing the location of the black aesthetic at the intersection of local and global cultural networks" (11). But I hit the ceiling when a few pages later I read ---"The aesthetic was attractive because of its capacity to phenomenalize blackness -- to imagine it outside the materiality of American life and to affirm the subjective experience of the black subject in itself" (15). However philosophically precise this choice of wording might be, it is regrettable. My friends and I never imagined our lives "outside" the materiality of living, nor did we consider ourselves a "thing" associated with the pronoun "it." I guess Gikandi is more intelligent than Parker, but both of them create blindness where insight should obtain.<br /><br />Jerry W. Ward, Jr. jwardhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00629967356068612552noreply@blogger.com