ABSTRACT
Critics of Afro-American literature have been profoundly interested of late in these questions on race; in fact, the deconstruction of "race" and its implications for reading literature by or about Afro-American subjects has emerged as one of the most controversial questions in the field of Afro-American Studies today. In an attempt to map out the various shifting positions of a complex and politically volatile debate, this chapter will range widely over four principal texts: Black Literature and Literary Theory (1984), "Race," Writing, and Difference (1986) (both volumes under the editorship of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.), Houston A. Baker, Jr.'s Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (1984), and the exchange in New Literary History between Gates, Baker, and Joyce A. Joyce on "The Black Canon: Reconstructing Black American Literary Criticism" (Winter 1987).1 Primary attention will be devoted to the recent work of Anthony Appiah, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Houston A. Baker, Jr., three scholars at the center of the current debates on "race." I will begin, however, not with an African philosopher nor with an Afro-American literary critic but with a French Antillean psychiatrist, Frantz Fanon; Fanon's study of the Antillean subject under colonialism-a study part philosophy, part sociology, part literary criticism, part politics, and part psychoanalysis-offers a useful way of tracing the many arbitrary significations of "race."
