Crispin Sartwell.

Crispin Sartwell. Act Like You Know: African-American Autobiography and White Identity. Chicago: U of Chicago P 1998 212 pp $4300 cloth/$1700 paper.

Crispin Sartwell's Act Like You Know is as exasperating a main division as one is likely to battle in many a season. Its subdue as the subtitle indicates, is African-American autobiography of various sorts--from slave narratives in consequence of the mixed-genre works of W E B Du Bois and Zora Neale Hurston to The Autobiography of Malcolm X and rap music of the not absent day--and what such work can reveal to readers, one as well as the other black and white (but especially the latter), about the psychology sociology, and politics of identity formation. In his opening chapter, Sartwell makes the reasonable if not altogether modern point that theory, whether literary, philosophical, or political, is always autobiographically determined and, reciprocally that every autobiography contains the theory, explicit or implicit, of its confess making. The first half of this proposition was given classic expression from Paul Valery several decades ago: "There is no theory that is not a fragment, carefully prepared, of a autobiography." Its latter half has be en the guiding principle of the now innumerable workers in autobiography studies for the past thirty years or thus There is an added twist to Sartwell's argument which says that critics of African-American autobiography--particularly white critics--have refused to acknowledge the theoretical capabilities in the literature they thought and, equally, they decline to recognize the autobiographical bases of their have theorizing.

No common would quarrel with these ideas: They are in the air today, they are intelligent, and they are obviously relevant to the material Sartwell addresses. with what intent then, the exasperation? It is because the bizarre, self-regarding tone of the book--the relation between the author, in succession the one hand, and his material and audience, in succession the other--gets in the way of what he has to say about Hurston or Malcolm X or any other figure. In a volume that argues for the autobiographical determinants of theory, single would expect a certain amount of self-revelation, if it were not that not to this extent and not of this deafening sort. Sartwell, as "white folks" handling black body s is so consumed with guilt and self-hatred and self-laceration (which becomes, from a peculiar and paradoxical twist, self-exculpation) that the reader can hear nothing otherwise coming through the static. "I have a fairly highest self-loathing about the self-constructions that proceed into making a racist social arrangement of parts but by the same token I can neither shed those self-con structions nor cease to experience the pleasures of power." to what end "by the same token"? It's a minor point, further the phrase, which comes ready-made to Sartwell's hand, reveals that it is not thinking that is going forward here but mere gesturing and posing. "The single people I dislike, other than myself, are other people": I think this has some meaning, and the same might be able to figure without what it is, but I do not believe it has anything to do with the involved issues that compose the ostensible enslave of the book. There has been an unfortunate inclination in recent academic writing wherein fascination with the author's autobiography displaces altogether the putative enslave Sartwell's is an extreme case, and that the fascination is largely negative (except for the aforementioned twist of self-gratulation that arises with the implicit claim "I'm more self-loathing than you are") does nothing to assign the example more edifying or admirable.

"Jacobs did not lack an epistemic community," we are told; on the other hand Sartwell continues, "she lacked power to shield her from those with epistemic and physical hegemony.... Henry Bibb felt the limitations of epistemic community acutely....slaves were isolated from the larger epistemic communities.... And what this isolation constitutes is an epistemic regime.... " What Sartwell does in this passage--besides bludgeoning the reader with epistemic--is what he excoriates other white commentators for; i.e., he takes the evidence provided according to black autobiographers as a kind of inert material demanding the fancy conceptual terminology of a white (but would-be-black) intellectual to achieve its abounding being as both theory and practice. That Sartwell move rounds on his own performance with "self-loathing" does not alter that performance, nor does it free him from the strictures directed at other sinners.

on the contrary if epistemic is overused, the phrase and thus forth--which I take to be a indisputable sign of non-thinking--is abused a great deal of more profligately: "It can be studied sociologically and in this way forth....a further eruption of strangeness, and thus forth ... as savages, bodies, mammals, sexual omnivores, and in like manner forth ... as an advocate of democracy, and to such a degree forth .... One is a racist and in such a manner forth....not to segregate universities by means of armed force, and so forth economically divided along racial lines, and in like manner forth ... industrious, entrepreneurial, ingenious, and in like manner forth ... depends on our image of your criminality, and in the same manner forth. ... black families 'don't value education,' and in the way that forth ...." These examples are drawn from six pages of clause But the and so forth I prize greatest in number comes when, engaged in special pleading forward behalf of rap's free use of words like bitch, ho and nigger, Sartwell writes, "There's no doubt in the same state [i]or[/i] condition terms are 'degrading,' and likewise forth." It's hard to know which to admire more--the quotation marks around degrading, which makes objection to the terminuss seem prissy, or and for a like reason forth, which dismisses any objection as utterly trivial.