I read Zora Neale Hurston's essay "What White Publishers Won't Print." In this essay she takes a look at the stereotypes white publishers place on minorities which they use as excuses for not publishing works about different ethnic groups that actually have substance. She argues that white people do not recognize that minorities have feelings like they do because they don't look like them. I feel like this argument is not all sound. It seems a little extreme to say that white people don't think that minorities feel a certain way. I know this essay was written over 50 years ago and that racism was a big deal then and still has its issues today, but I find it hard to believe that statement.

She says that any romance story involving a minority where there is no struggle with race does not appeal to white publishers. It seems that minorities had to fit into a specific mold just to find their place in books. If they didn't fit into the stereotypical role or caused racial tension in the book, then there was no place for them.

Reading this essay after having read Dr. Powers essay about how we are reading less and less and its impact on ethnic literature. It seems like we have worked so hard to get to a point where ethnic minorities are integral part of the literary community, but now since we aren't reading as much ethnic literature is not receiving the exposure it deserves.

The exercise we did in class with the proposal to make Messiah's English curriculum more cultural focused and Christian focused does put a different spin on Ngugi's proposal for an African Literature department. It does seem a little hypocritical for us to not want a more cultural Christian literature department but support the idea of an African studies department in Ngugi's school.
It kind of reminds me of the movie Spanglish. I was watching it the other evening, and the main character Flor (a Mexican immigrant) becomes upset with the family she works for because Deborah (the wife) interferes with her daughter. Flor doesn't approve of they way her bosses liberally give her daughter money for collecting sea glass on the beach and taking her daughter to interviews at prestigious schools. Flor doesn't like these lavish "gifts" because she doesn't want her daughter thinking these things come easily to people.
On the other hand, Flor has intervened in Deborah's daughter's life as well. Deb bought her daughter clothes that were too small saying that she could work off the weight to fit into them. Flor is horrified by this because the daughter isn't overweight; she just isn't the idolized skinny size. Flor alters the clothes without telling anyone and tells the daughter to "Just try on."
This interference seems like a good one from Flor's perspective and the audience's perspective. Compared to Deborah's seemingly poor parenting skills, Flor's kind actions seem justified. But really she is still interfering with another person's child. But we still see Deborah's intereference as worse because her parenting skills seem to harm her children rather than help them.
In a similar way we seem to approach Ngugi's argument. We see it as the Flor to Deborah's European imperalist influence, valuing British and european studies more than indigenous African studies. We see the Christian cultural studies proposal as kind of Deborah's interference. Too much of a good thing. Of course it is not extreme like Deborah's behavior, but our attitudes approaching it seem to be that way.
Is our attitude toward a Cultural Christian studies department justified? or are we just being hypocritical by justifiying Ngugi's argument but not conceding the point for the other argument?

Ngugi's essay "On the Abolition of the English Department" seems to bring up the old question of what is literature? And more specifically what literature should be taught in African schools? When Ngugi wrote this essay English literature was the dominant subject whereas he argues that there should be more than just British writings being studied. They argue that there should be a whole African literature department because it is the roots of the African people studying at the university.
I see this as a justified argument. It makes sense for them to want this kind of depatment because here in the united states we study American Literature as well as other types of literature as well. It makes sense for them to study their own literature especially because of Africa's history of colonization. With European forces influencing African education systems, it makes sense that Ngugi would want to get away from imperalized systems and bring more of the indigenous roots out in the education system.

Hughes’s essay begins by describing the attitude of blacks to poetry and artistry. They didn’t want to be defined as “Negro poet[s]” but just as “poet[s]” (Hughes 1313) which Hughes takes to mean they want to be “white poet[s]” (1313). The Negro (to use Hughes’s term) culture defined good literature as white literature because that is what society has taught throughout history. Not only did whites subscribe to their own literary superiority but so did blacks. They would not recognize any blacks as great artists unless they were published by white magazines or recognized as significant artists by whites. “The road for the serious black artist, then, who would produce a racial art is most certainly rocky and the mountain is high. Until recently he received almost no encouragement for his work from either white or colored people” (1313). Colored artists felt like they had no freedom to truly write what they wanted if they were to be recognized in any way. Societal constructions built narrow parameters around what was considered good literature written by blacks.
In a similar way Annette Kolodny identifies “literature as a social institution, embedded not only within its own literary traditions, but also within the particular physical and mental artifacts of the society from which it comes” (Kolodny 2149). That social institution is traditionally a male society where literature uses the language of men. But if women have their own language with which to write, then it may be difficult for men to understand this language since they are used to their own. As Kolodny points out, if men are not able to understand this writing, then they will “dismiss those systems as undecipherable, meaningless, or trivial” (2150). If men do not accept women’s writings in their own language, then they will have to use male language which would still play into those social constructions unless women writers manipulated that language enough to stay true to their feminist ideals. In order to be accepted into literary circles, women must navigate “minefields” because they are not readily welcomed into that society.
Both Hughes and Kolodny recognize the difficulties of establishing new social constructions within the arts and more specifically literature. While Hughes might not have to navigate a minefield, he still has to climb a mountain and struggle to make whites, as well as colored people, realize the value and the good creative artists that are “Negros.” Kolodny struggles to bring acceptance in the literary circles and the literary canon for female authors who write with women’s language. Hughes and Kolodny write against the dominant white male culture that has defined literary history. Not only has this dominance affected white male approaches to literature, but it has also affected the communities that Hughes and Kolodny write about.

I read Barbara Smith's essay "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism" in which at the beginning she cites the history of how Black women's literature has been perceived in literary circles. Many talented black women writers have produced fantastic work depicting life in the slums and relationships between race and environment. But these writers have been criticized for not making their work more accessible to broader subjects like class and environment. The critics making these comments belittled the issues of race that these authors were dealing with.

Smith goes on to say that biggest "mishandling of Black women writers by whites is paralleled more often by their not being handled at all, particularly in feminist theory" (2305). When race and feminism are discussed in literature they are usually separated. The two are rarely discussed together, and this especially applies to lesbian black women.

Smith seems to make her point that in literary criticism a black lesbian woman never exists. She may be written about by black women writers, but critics tend to glaze over them and focus on more talked about issues like mainstream feminism or racism without taking into account the significance of a black woman character and her relationship to other women.

Annette Kolodny seems to be a voice of post modernism as well as feminism. She implies that we approach reading by the way we are taught. We are molded by different social constructions and learn to read with those constructions forming our thoughts. The introduction says that "Literary criticism matters to feminists because they insist that literature embodies social beliefs, conventions, attitudes, ad ideologies that operate powerfully throughtout the whole of society" (2145). If we apply this to Cixous, it makes sense to say that literature has been phallocentric because that has been the culture surrounding literature throughout history.



She talks about women's writing which tries to circumnavigate language culturally instituted by males. Women use their own language in writing and give it new symbollic meaning in order to escape the political and cultural associations with traditionally male language. The problem then becomes men's interpretations of that language (or lack of interpretation). They cannot decipher the language and so they disregard it as meaningless. This in sorts presents a catch-22: in order for women to communicate and for men to appreciate their writing women must use their language, but by using men's language women are still playing into the male literary constructions.



Kolodny tells a story of one of her colleagues who denounced Kate Chopin as an author worth reading. "'If Kate Chopin were really worth reading,' . . . 'she'd have lasted - like Shakespeare.'" (2152). This made me think of Virginia Woolf's "Shakespeare's Sister." Maybe if Shakespeare's sister had actually been educated and possessed the same talent as her brother and had been allowed to write, Kate Chopin would also possess that same lasting quality. (I think today she does because we read The Awakening in my American Lit. class). It's absurd to think that a book so highly acclaimed today was only a few decades ago still looked at as something inferior just because of its womanish language.

When reading Helene Cixous, I can see how she relates to Virginia Woolf. Cixous talks about male writing on pg. 2042 of her essay, and says, "I maintain unequivocally that there is such a thing as marked writing; that, until now, far more extensively and repressively than is ever suspected or admitted, writing has been run by a libidinal and cultural - hence political, typically masculine - economy." I see this in relation to Virginia Woolf's argument that women are depicted literature on in their relationships to males. Since historically men have been the dominant writers, writing has been subjected to their conventions. If men are driven to write by their libido, as Cixous seems to suggest, then it makes sense for women in literature to be connected only to males, especially when the women tend to be primarily lovers of the men.



Cixous observes that literature has a history of being phallocentric and that women are usually repressed by this and feel awkward when they try to write. Women have written in secret and then have felt