Critiquing bell hooks Postmodern Blackness: Does Black Literature need the critical apparatus of Black Postmodernism?

By Don Allen, M.A. Ed./MAT

           Looking through the lens of postmodernism as it pertains to color, race, class and more specifically, the African American, it becomes even more problematic to define the modern, postmodern and post-post modernism. Not because we cannot comprehend the  

Don Allen, M.A. Ed./MAT

meanings, but so few black intellectuals have been indoctrinated with postmodernism in a way that would lay bare to a very clear definitions, claims or arguments. In bell hooks’ “Postmodern Debates: Postmodern Blackness,” she is determined to cut relevance into her view of postmodernism at the sake of not stepping out and defining an apparatus of her own that can be used by black authors and society to make meaning for a ‘modern, post or post-post’ in ‘blackness.’ hooks writes, “I was told by another black person that I was wasting my time, that ‘this stuff does not relate in any why to what’s happening with black people.” (128).

          I tend to agree with the other black person on the critique of hooks amazement and have been unsettled by the lack of black literary agents who have not looked to solidify a meaning exclusively to black culture. If hooks and others would look at the examples of modernism to include the post and post-post in black culture there is an extensive prospect to break the mold set by the white-patriarchal construct as it pertains to having exclusivity in the hierarchy of literary devises. To define a change in literary meaning, you first need an example of devise you want to amend. For the simple sake of argument, the black culture could look at the sport of boxing. To look at the modern in boxing, one could argue that Mohammad Ali and Joe Frasier could fit perfectly in a literary definition. 

          From a postmodern definition, boxers like Sugar Ray Leonard, Wilfred Benítez, Thomas Hearns, Roberto Durán, and Marvin Hagler, called the boxers of the decade for the 1980s by Sports Illustrated fit fine. Nevertheless, when looking at post-post modernism in this example, stepping away from boxing’s golden age society has the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), which is the largest mixed martial art promotion company in the world featuring most of the top-ranked fighters in the sport. In addition, the World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. (WWE), which is an American publicly traded, privately controlled Entertainment Company that deals primarily in professional wrestling, with major revenue streams from television and cable. 

          As a Black author, given the examples above, we could argue for a new literary device, or critical apparatus such as Current Relevatism – not to be confused with Cultural relativism, the idea that a person's beliefs, values, and practices should be understood based on that person's own culture, rather than be judged against the criteria of another. The meaning of ‘Current Relevatism,’ is that during our arts, society and literary history (Black America), there were moments in the depths that are timely and relevant in our cannons that lay bare to likening of Marxism, capitalism, modernism, postmodernism and postmodernity that can only be defined by the current state relevant to the black literary cultures purchase. Hence, while hooks understands what could be labeled as modern, she negates the opportunity to insert a new critical apparatus like Current Relevatism to account for the white-patriarchal construct and what it has used to create meaning and identity for black bodies, literature and culture for far too long. “During the sixties, the Black Power Movement was influenced by perspectives that could easily be labeled modernist,” (129). 

If Black literary agents cannot idea, create and distribute new meaning in the areas of literatures critical apparatus to define and review for debate, we have not gotten any further as intellectuals then the common household cat. Black Postmodernism and the definitions, which have never been cleared or applied, are unnecessary? 

Works Cited: Malpas, Simon. "Postmodern Blackness | Bell Hooks." Postmodern Debates. New York: Palgrave, 2001. 128-135. Print.

What is Postmodernism? Capitalism and Schizophrenia

By Don Allen

Really...what did happen?

I have differed musings about this book. From one perspective I admire it’s bring down of Freud and its elucidation of how individuals are made to yearning remorseless administrations. Maybe its to their superbness, alongside that of other postmodern savants, that their musings no more appear earth-shaking, yet I additionally feel that their hypotheses are not exceptionally valuable on a practical level, particularly when wearing such pretentious dialect.

A most critical work in the improvement of genuine hypothesis in the late twentieth century,
Anti-Oedipus is an essential content for social researchers, legendary scholars, women's activists,
savants, and others inspired by the issues of breakthrough Western traditions.

In his prelude, Michel Foucault calls Anti-Oedipus a starting to non-rightist life, alluding to
 political oppression as well as to the autocracy inside us-the longing to be driven. Identify with that
issue, Deleuze and Guattari set forward a political investigation of yearning as it is communicated or
stifled in Western traditions. They find the seeds of society's ailment in contemporary therapy -
especially in the prevailing figure of Oedipus.

Deleuze and Guattari see machines all over. The body, the earth, craving, everything techniques
as a machine. In the same light, they announce, "Everything is production”. Nothing is ever done
delivering. Sustenance, a PC, a spoon, everything is generation as it keeps on creating and is attached
up to different machines that keep on delivering. Regardless, only in light of the fact that nothing is
ever done creating does not imply that nothing is ever delivered. It is critical to note that "Something is
created: the impacts of a machine, not simply allegories". Items exist yet just as makers. Besides,
"creation is quickly utilization and a recording procedure”. The qualification in the middle of creation
and utilization – and the procedure that records those – is caved in by the commonness of generation
in both utilization and recording.

The book is sorted out into four sections. The first is presentation that, accepting that Anti-
Oedipus is a kind of machine, depicts "what it can do and how it functions”. The second is an
investigation of the thought of "wanting generation" which arranges this inside an "inner" study of
Oedipus. This is trailed by a third part, which portrays the "outer" scrutinize of Oedipus and its
relating idea of "social-creation." A fourth section finishes up the book by looking at conceivably
 productive utilizations of schizoanalysis inside territories of hypothetical and political activism, for
example, Marxism, woman's rights and environmentalism. All through, painstakingly points of interest the relations in the middle of Deleuze and Guattari's book and its different hypothetical antecedents, including (among others) Marcuse, Reich, Weber, Adorno, Lukács, Klein, Lévi-Strauss and Lacan. The principal section specifically is concerned to position Anti-Oedipus in a custom of "supernatural."

The second and third parts involve examinations, clarifying - in genuine Kantian style - the three
"blends" of the oblivious, the "paralogisms" of analysis (the illegitimate employments of these three
unions), and the social developments, which generally compare to the recorded advancement of
Oedipus (brutality, oppression, and private enterprise). The focal subjects investigated here
incorporate thoughts of generation and hostile to creation, the "body-without-organs" as a format for
wanting creation, frameworks of (political and phonetic) representation and engraving, and the
generally changing character of the "socius," together with the different ventures of longing (social
and psychic) that constitute it. While these sections are entirely explicatory, the fourth and last section, entitled "Past Critique: Schizoanalysis and all inclusive history," endeavors to orchestrate Deleuze and Guattari's bits of knowledge and apply them to the fields of contemporary political and hypothetical verbal confront.