He reads the blogs and begs to differ.

I shall begin by stating that the use of tense in this novel is absolutely fascinating and I think we should discuss it for a few minutes in class.

I say this because I have the feeling that our entire conversation will be dominated (as I’m sure it should be) by discussions of race. However, I don’t know that this novel fits as comfortably with the arguments of bell hooks as we would like.

First, this narrative seems to be set in (an alternative universe?) in “Big City” America in the late 1960’s early 70’s. The very fact that the society is still segregated greatly simplifies race relations in the book: Whites are intolerant and blacks are not tolerated. It’s made clear that Fulton would have been silenced if not light skinned. (Somebody argued that this was evidence of a complication of race relations. I strongly disagree for the aforementioned reasons.) While I know we are to make every effort to avoid this debate, I don’t think that this text presents a post-modern sense of “blackness” in the way that Hooks champions in her article. If anything, this text is more like Ellison’s Invisible Man, as it uses complex metaphors and surrealistic imagery to present a rather uncomplicated (though astutely critical) version of race relations in the US.

Also, I wish to disagree with a previous argument that was posted on the blog that seems to imply (I may have misunderstood) that Lila Mae and Pompey’s mutual animosity somehow represents hook’s analysis of nominalism. Instead, I would argue that, in many ways, this personifies the “nationalist or assimilationist, black-identified or white-identified” (house v. field) that is the hallmark of the essentialist camp. Furthermore, the simple fact that Lila Mae misjudged Pompey demonstrates this mentality more than it undercuts it. Does this text champion the black intellectual in the way Cornel West would find productive? Do we really learn anything about Fulton besides his race? It would be completely irresponsible of me to suggest that this text is essentialist (and I have no intention of making this argument), but I don’t see it moving Black representation in a new direction. I don’t know that his book is the answer to bell hook’s request.

Either way, I think we should talk about the use of tense in the novel.