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Gates, Henry Louis Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of AfricanAmerican Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press,
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Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy:
Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. New York: Verso, 1989.
Levine, Lawrence. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American
Folk Thought From Slavery to Freedom. New York: Oxford University
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Mouffe, Chantal. "Hegemony and New Political Subjects: Toward a New
Concept of Democracy,” in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg
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Notes
Important thoughts for this paper came from Mark Crenshaw, Moishe
Postone, Learmond Winters, and Jason Veitzer. Greatest thanks go to
the following readers and advisors: Rafael Sanchez, C ^rge Steinmetz
and Marilyn Ivy.
My idea of discourse is largely taken from Ernesto Laclau and Chantal
Mouffe (1989). For Laclau and Mouffe, elements of the social cannot
be pre-defined or given a specific causal effect, because they do not
exist outside the symbolic. Being part of the symbolic means that
elements of the social "lack an ultimate literality which would reduce
them to necessary moments of an immanent law” (98). The symbolic
realm does not mean simply the realm of ideas or language. Since social
elements are also symbolic elements, there is no separation between the
discursive and the material realm: "every object is constituted as an
object of discourse, insofar as no object is given outside every
discursive condition of emergence” (107). The—partially fixed—
meaning of any object is derived from its place in a discursive
formation; thus social elements have no essence outside of their
definition within a discourse, and all elements of society are equally
discursive.
The ideas of articulation and subject position are also taken from
Laclau and Mouffe. First, the attempt to fix, at most partially, elements
into a discourse Laclau and Mouffe call an articulatory practice and
for them "Every social practice is . . . articulatory”(113).
Second, Laclau and Mouffe claim that a single subject position
normally does not determine an individual's outlook or actions in
society. This is in part because individuals are engaged in more than
one social relation and thus may have more than one subject position—
"not only social relations of production but also the social relations,
among others, of sex, race, nationality, and vicinity" (Mouffe, 1988).