Gates, Jr.

If we substituted everything that referred to race with buzz words that relate to feminism, I think it could still be a really educational article and I think it could work. One glaring, fundamental thing stands in the way of that for me though. Gates writes, “The biological criteria used to determine ‘difference’ in sex simply do not hold when applied to ‘race.’ Yet we carelessly use language in such a way as to will this sense of natural difference into our formulations.”  (5) If we are to close-read, as Gates advises us to, this doesn't bode well for feminism. He defines race as a trope by basically saying it is mystified to make things that don't appear naturally or genetically in a race seem to be natural and genetic. With feminism, the whole point is that it's true we are biologically somewhat different but that doesn't mean there is a "right" answer to gender.

The natural difference should not cue superiority or inferiority respectively. If these "inscribed" differences were actual, physical differences would it then be "okay" to represent them as fixed and finite point from which one set of people draw authority? Why I believe it could work is the idea of having a different literary canon for each different literary tradition. Female literature need not be judged against male canonical literature to be valuable in the same way that I can't judge the Spanish language as "inferior" just because it isn't English. They both have sets of grammatical rules, alphabets, written and spoken versions, etc. which makes each a language regardless of whether we share words, letters, punctuation, etc.

Race is absolutely a terministic screen here. The way Gates describes the history of black literature, he relies upon the fact that whites identified "black voice" in certain ways (i.e. through certain terministic screens). First it was supposed that blacks couldn't write because there was no "European discovered" artifact of written language and it spiraled out from there. There had to be forewords at the beginning of books of poetry that stated the "white authorities" on the subject had deemed the pieces authentic despite their "blackness." All of this basically screams that white European history forces you to see through white European terministic screens about "others."


Works Cited

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. “Writing ‘Race’ and the Difference It Makes.” Critical Inquiry 12.1 (1985): 1-20. JSTOR.      http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343459