Skip Gates, Canons, and the Function of Criticism
In my first conversation with Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr. thirty years ago, he surprised me. Not yet used to the mix of erudition and earthy humor characterizing his affable style, I wasn’t expecting him to say—regarding an infamous gun battle in 1969 between Ron Karenga’s US organization and the Black Panthers—"What kind of shit is that?”
I was interviewing Gates in 1994 for a deep dive cover story in the Village Voice on Black Studies in the academy. Back then, I summarized the conflicting visions in the field as Multiculturalism vs. Afrocentricity; Gates at Harvard represented the former, Molefi Asante of Temple University the latter. The essay is titled, “Who’s Winning the Black Studies War?”
Gates recently reflected on that essay and the Culture Wars of the 1990s to today on the show I co-host, Straight Ahead: The Omni-American Podcast. The episode is a fun, richly informative exploration of Black American culture and a journey into Gates’ intellectual development and commitments as a cultural critic and documentarian. Watch the entire episode here or click the photo above or directly below.
Greg Thomas, Skip Gates, and Aryeh Tepper
The Voice essay chronicled debates and varying perspectives among Afro-American thinkers, writers, and scholars. Several years later my essay, “The Canonization of Jazz and Afro-American Literature,” also mentioned on the podcast, focused on the wider social and intellectual culture war concerning institutional validation of two artistic forms originated and innovated by American black folk, with Gates’ work on the Norton Anthology of Afro-American Literature compared and contrasted with, for jazz, the work of Wynton Marsalis, Stanley Crouch, and Albert Murray forging the way for a jazz program and department at one of America’s crowning cultural institutions, Lincoln Center.
Canonization is the process by which a person, a work (or oeuvre), or a form is assessed by institutional elites and experts as of high value, value so high that the person, the work, or the form will be remembered and studied over long periods of time. Canons are yardsticks of value used especially in academia.
Greg Thomas, “The Canonization of Jazz and Afro-American Literature”
Thoughts on Canons and Cultural Criticism in 2007
In 2007, a fellow Afro-American writer, Daniel Garrett, reached out for a long-form interview prompted by his reading of the canonization essay. Here’s a short excerpt from that interview, originally published on the Compulsive Reader site, centering on the pros and cons of canons and the role and function of artistic and cultural criticism.
Daniel, Compulsive Reader: In your essay on canonization, published by Callaloo (2002), in which you discuss jazz and literature, you state:
The dangers of canon-making are clear. First, trying to be too many things to too many people, thus not being enough to anyone. Second, the determination of who’s in and out of a canon, and which works are in or out, occurring too often by a few institutional elites, who may use narrow, self-serving criteria for selection. Third, the possibility of an overshadowing of the work of the truly great (always few) because of a bias toward inclusion, resulting in minor figures outnumbering the major. The last point carries a certain irony, because canons, when looked at by those who are left out, are associated with exclusion.
Knowing that, why do you think canons remain important, necessary, useful?
Greg: Although canonization has its dangers, canons are yet useful to delineate the masters and masterworks of an art form. Canons are usually determined by scholars who produce and edit anthologies used in colleges and universities. I think they serve a useful critical function because they provide academics and professors a measure, a yardstick to share widely agreed-upon standards of an art form with students. In the same way that journalism is the first run of history, critical assessments of artworks are the first run of canonization.
Daniel, Compulsive Reader: I have thought of criticism often as an articulation that involves appreciation, celebration, exploration, and evaluation, which I see as positives, but very often many people speak of criticism as rejection and repudiation, as primarily negative. What do you think of as “the critical impulse”?
Greg: The critical impulse doesn’t have to be viewed as negative. By my reckoning, the main function of a critic, within the artistic realm at least, is to serve as a go-between for art and artists with the public. A critic should know the values, standards, and basic-to-advanced practices of an art form to best evaluate an artist's work for the public. I also think that a critic should consider the intentions of the artist in the creation of a particular work of art. This is tantamount to what you call “the spirit of a work.” That way, a critic can better assess those intentions, that spirit, within the context of an art form’s traditions. If critics don’t know, understand, and appreciate a tradition, how can they assess whether a work of art fits within or even goes beyond that tradition?
Daniel, Compulsive Reader: What does an ideal piece of critical commentary have to contain?
Greg: Again, within the artistic frame, critical commentary should evoke the artwork, so a reader feels that he or she is seeing the piece, or a listener hearing the music, etc. It should refer to the artistic tradition and to the past works of an artist too. The critic provides an interpretation based on authority grounded in those elements I mentioned above. Ideally, critics shouldn’t be so presumptuous or arrogant to think that their take is the “be all and end all” of interpretation. Especially since the best authorities are the artists!
I’m not down with placing the critic above the artist, a move that unfortunately became au courant in the academy in the post-civil rights era with the rise of certain writers and scholars (many from France) whose work in critical theory, deconstruction, and post-structuralism was and remains unintelligible to most regular readers. (I like some of Michel Foucault’s work, however, particularly his idea of the “entrepreneur of the self,” which I studied while doing grad work in American studies at NYU.) Many academic critics speak to a very small audience of other scholars. I view the critical function from my perspective as a journalist and think that if we, as “critics,” strive to connect artists and artworks with the public, we should speak and write in a manner that an educated public can understand.
Daniel, Compulsive Reader: In your canonization piece, you say about the essayist and novelist Albert Murray:
Murray has been a native insider to the jazz scene since the late 1930s, when he was a student at the Tuskegee Institute. He was close with his idol, Duke Ellington, who called him ‘the unsquarest person I know.’ He is the author of the as-told-to biography of Count Basie, Good Morning Blues, and Stomping the Blues, a perspicacious poetics on jazz and the blues idiom, as well as ten other books, including three novels and a book of poetry. Stomping the Blues places the music within an indigenous, ritualistic context. To Murray, the blues are not a lamentation based on the sociological status of blacks; to the contrary, Murray posits that the blues represents a confrontational and affirmative attitude toward life. Even though life is a low-down dirty shame (with no ultimate purpose), those with heroic aspirations respond to the inevitability of the blues with nimbleness and elegance on the dance floor of life.
Could you say more about what you think about Albert Murray and what evidence you find to support his interpretation of the blues?
Greg: I respect and love Albert Murray and was honored to recently videotape Henry Louis Gates Jr. presenting Murray with Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois award, with special guests such as Wynton Marsalis and George Wein in attendance.
Go to a blues club some night, even today in 2007. Although what Murray calls “the blues as such” may be a tale of woe, blues music, and musicians (which includes jazz musicians) partake in a life-enhancing ritual that has folks grooving to the universality of the stories, and even engaging in fertility rituals once they leave the club! Jazz, as fine art, is what Murray calls “the fully orchestrated blues statement,” so that confrontational and affirmative attitude is present there in spades too.
The implied diss to sociology in the quote of mine above was intentional, as the insights of Murray (and Ralph Ellison before him) reveal how limiting sociological categories are for capturing and reflecting the full range of black American experience, whether cultural or psychological. And this is a pernicious state of affairs: sociological terms become a basis for public policies and for terminologies used by the media. I know what I’m talking about here: I have years of experience in the media, and I majored in public policy in college. So, this isn’t some petty academic dispute. Lives and lifestyles hang in the balance of how others perceive us and how we perceive ourselves.
In part because of the flawed thinking and reasoning of the Social Sciences, we’ve gone from calling our neighborhoods “ghettos” to describing our collective mental state as supposed “self-hatred” to nowadays some of us buying into the ahistorical twaddle called “post-traumatic slavery disorder”! Give us a break from such nonsense! Variations on victimization will get us nowhere fast, though it might get book contracts for those who posit that drivel for profit and to meet the publication requirements of so-called institutions of higher learning.
How can you be a victim and have such an influence on the world’s styles and culture? How can you be a victim when you have survived enslavement and despite continued social repression maintain your faith, and your groove, and still, you rise?! How can you understand and achieve the heights of life itself as a fine art when you don’t recognize the hero and heroine within? We know life for black folk is tough. What’s new? Is it as hard for us today as it was in slavery, or during Jim Crow? Hell no, though the reality of a 50% unemployment rate for black men in New York City is a frightening social statistic and cause for shame and protest, not to mention what’s happened in New Orleans post-Katrina. Nonetheless, let’s count our blessings anyway, and keep swingin’! We owe it to our ancestors and our future generations to give nothing less than our best.