Phillip Brian Harper

Framing the margins : the social logic of postmodern culture

This dramatic rereading of postmodernism seeks to broaden current theoretical conceptions of the movement as both a social-philosophical condition and a literary and cultural phenomenon. Phil Harper contends that the fragmentation considered to be characteristic of the postmodern age can in fact be traced to the status of marginalized groups in the United States since long before the contemporary era. This status is reflected in the work of American writers from the thirties through the fifties whom Harper addresses in this study, including Nathanael West, Anais Nin, Djuna Barnes, Ralph Ellison, and Gwendolyn Brooks. Treating groups that are disadvantaged or disempowered whether by circumstance of gender, race, or sexual orientation, the writers profiled here occupy the cusp between the modern and the postmodern; between the recognizably modernist aesthetic of alienation and the fragmented, disordered sensibility of postmodernism. Proceeding through close readings of these literary texts in relation to various mass-cultural productions, Harper examines the social placement of the texts in the scope of literary history while analysing more minutely the interior effects of marginalization implied by the fictional characters enacting these narratives. In particular, he demonstrates how these works represent the experience of social marginality as highly fractured and fracturing, and indicates how such experience is implicated in the phenomenon of postmodernist fragmentation. Harper thus accomplishes the vital task of recentering cultural focus on issues and groups that are decentered by very definition, and thereby specifies the sociopolitical significance of postmodernism in a way that has not yet been done.

The Evidence of Felt Intuition: Minority Experience, Everyday Life, and Critical Speculative Knowledge

I don’t travel much, but as my acquaintances all know, I like to make much of my travels. Lately in particular, I’ve tried to mine my relatively meager experience along these lines for possible critical insight into the meanings of identity, citizenship, and U.S. nationality.1 These efforts represent an undertaking that is only just beginning; and yet, in some ways, it has been going on for a long time. For instance, I remember a journey I took during the 1985 – 86 academic year (needless to say, that’s the way I measure time—in academic years), a journey from Madison, Wisconsin, where I had gone to visit my boyfriend, Thom Freedman, back to Ithaca, New York, where I was finishing my graduate coursework. Actually, to be precise, the leg of the journey that concerns me here took me only from Madison to Syracuse, as it entailed travel by rail, and Ithaca then had—and, as far as I know, still has—no train station; I would in Syracuse either be picked up by a car-owning friend from Ithaca or transfer to a bus in order to finish my route, depending on the availability of friends with cars.

Abstractionist Aesthetics: Artistic Form and Social Critique in African American Culture

IONIST AESTHETICS Artistic Form and Social Critique in African American Culture PHILLIP BRIAN HARPER

Take Me Home: Location, Identity, Transnational Exchange

A funny thing happened across from Byzantium, the moderately upscale, vaguely nouvelle cuisinerie located on Toronto’s Church Street corridor, at which I enjoyed a leisurely dinner with my friend and colleague, Ricardo Ortíz, during the Modern Language Association convention in December 1997. Earlier that same day I had delivered a paper in which I pondered the sociocultural significances of my exchange with a panhandler on a Manhattan sidewalk in the fall of 1996, shoehorning the presentation amid a welter of interviews with candidates for a faculty position in my home department.1 Thus finished with the stereotypically hectic official portion of my MLA experience, I was ready and eager for the debauch of sophistication that the “Byzantium” rubric would lead one to expect. Having exited the establishment at about 11:00 with my desires in this vein reasonably well satisfied (the food was delicious though the service was poor, the drinks rather meager but the company divine), I left my dinner partner at the nearest street corner and traversed the road to use the ATM in the bank opposite the restaurant—situated squarely “in the gay section” of town, as Ricardo had so helpfully informed our cab driver when asked to provide directions to the place. Immediately after stepping onto the curb, I was peremptorily beckoned by a man standing just before the entrance to the bank, whose cash machine, I could see from the sign in its window, did not accept the card I was carrying. Evidently in his mid-to-late thirties and thus similar to me in age, the man appeared simultaneously unlike me in a number of key respects— white and pale-skinned with a reddish-brown beard, hair hanging straight to just above his shoulders. With his lean, average-sized frame draped in a somewhat worn overcoat, he presented overall a vaguely rough aspect to which I responded with intense ambivalence, powerfully attracted to the masculinity it figured while wary of the desperateness I feared it might signal. Momentarily stymied in negotiating this quandary, I finally motioned for him to