ISMLL Warren 245: The Race Game

Upon reading this essay and all its research, its quotes, its jargon and its stance on the racial issue in literary theory, all I have say is duh. What I mean by duh is that, to me, it seems obvious what he is speaking of: the idea of what role race plays in literary theory and the emphasis it should and does take. He quotes Du Bois, he quotes men and women of African American descent, but he never really comes out and argues his premise: “I seek to account for and critique the appeal of race to literary critics over the past two decades and to suggest reasons we ought to modify or resist aspects of that appeal” (Warren 245). Instead, he lists, chronologically, how the current version of the debate started with Henry Louis Gates Jr.

What he hints at, but never actually says, is that the current debate over race has to do with extremities. What I mean by this is that at one point the prevailing thought in academia was that race is a fact of biology and since facts are facts, there was no use in arguing about it. But once that view changed and race was seen as a “social construction,” the pendulum swung the other way and academia began to focus solely on the race element (Warren 245). So the pendulum swing never has centered and continues to yo-yo as the realm of academia has given race cart blanche in the realm of study. I think by negating this aspect Warren places the race debacle in a lack of social context: the pendulum swing only occurred after African American scholarship was deemed viable: i.e. the journal Modernism/Modernity first two published volumes were race themed.

Warren also does not account for how his argument fits or is a link to this debacle. As he is arguing for the modification of race in literary criticism, he is playing into the same mess he is critiquing. This irony is surprisingly left out of his argument. His argument uses page after page of evidence to support his call to modify the current state of race in literary criticism yet he fails to see how it plays right back into that same. Does his critique apply to him? Why Doesn’t he account for it? No. And so the debate continues.