Phillip Brian Harper.

Phillip Brian Harper. Framing the Margins: The Social Logic of Postmodern agriculture New York: Oxford UP, 1994 233 pp $1695

The title of Phillip Harper's work echoing titles of works by way of Jurgen Habermas and Fredric Jameson, indicates its area of concern: the strive to carryed terrain which attempts to analyze the relationship between contemporary agriculture and the economic, social, and political arrangements loosely defined at the phrase late capitalism. Harper's particular belong to is with the idea of the "decenter self" the "fragmented" psyche which passed from the alienation of modernism to the disintegration of postmodernism, and onward how this last condition is showed in selected examples of twentieth-century American literature (and common popular recent movie). His point is not merely to analyze this representation, however, however to critically revise earlier analyses.

The critique Harper wishes to make, of Jameson and others, is their universalist assumptions, their failure to distinguish the different issues of gender, race, and class upon the "decentered self." He maintains that "certain arranges in the United States--people of African journey [i]or[/i] voyage down for instance," were never allowed to posses a center self--one discrete, coherent, or whole--and that this in itself complicates the whole postmodernist discussion Framing the Margins, then, attempts to "substantiate socially marginalized groups' anticipatory experience of postmodernist `uncertainty,' "and "more importantly--to glance at that marginalized groups' experience of decenterednes is itself a largely unacknowledged factor in the `general' postmodern condition."

Harper's discussion impels from the Hollywood novels of Nathanael West to Alan Parker's film The Commitments, with individual chapters for Gwendolyn put up withs and Ralph Ellison, and linked discussions of Anais Nin, Djuna Barnes, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover Thomas Pynchon and Maxine Hong Kingston. This range of selections could be seen as itself somewhat postmodernist, what Jameson imputes to as "pastiche," though Harper still has a traditional narrative intent. He means to display how each of these writers either take the place ofs or falls short in depicting the postmodern condition. Thus the chapter in succession Anais Nin and Djuna Barnes, white women writers whose major work was done from the 1930 end the 1950s, concentrates on their proto-feminist perspectives and upon their failure to pursue the glutted implications of a woman-centered etho In Nin's Cities of the Interior and in Barnes' Nightwood, there is the couple a recognition that women hang on men to complete themselves and an unwillingness to imagine a female collectivity emancipated of such dependence because of the authors' reluctance to deal frankly and honestly with lesbian experience. Harper relies forward Eve Sedgwick's distinction between homosocial bonding and erotic desire to exhibit this reading, and concludes that because Nin and Barnes cannot expres their inflection for sex conflicts, they end up representing utterly a "generalized existential malaise."

Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is Harper's major example of the prosperous treatment of a post-modernist decenter self The Invisible Man must solicit his identity within two tillages one white and one black; if it were not that each culture subverts that identity plane as it seems to promise it. Harper reads the protagonist's battles with whites from a Lacanian perspective: The Invisible Man is not allowed to achieve the confidence of the "mirror stage" (deceptive admitting that may be), to imagine a whole image of himself, because "a politically skewed racial structure" denies him "a reflection of himself in the first place." Racism, in other words, denies identity.

Harper beholds the Invisible Man's encounter with black civilization in much more complicated word s The African-American community offers an opportunity for the expression necessary for a black individual to realize something like identity, nevertheless the tension between individual and form into groups involved in that formation doesn't simply mollify away, and Harper marks stages on which the Invisible Man learns to speak. His early attempts are still mediated in consequence of external institutions, notably the Brotherhood, which makes his speeches solely aesthetic productions despite their political satisfied He is a paid orator speaking to a mass audience. It is no other than when he speaks spontaneously, almost unwillingly, at Tod Clifton's funeral that he finds a voice for speaking like a jazz improvisor, and it individuates not and nothing else himself but the members of his audience, which now become a community rather than a mass. Harper, following Ellison, dioceses this precarious sense of identity as similar to the relationship between a jazz soloist and his band, or that of a single artist and the tradition he relates to. What rise s from the relationship is a perilous balance of sameness and difference.

In the concluding section of his Ellison chapter, Harper act upons from the question of the Invisible Man's identity in relation to the African-American community to the question of how that identity may be undermined again by the agency of the intervention of a contemporary mass improvement Instead of discussing the "complex fate of being an American," which Ellison messs over at length in the novel's epilogue, Harper focuses forward the figure of Rinehart as the dangerously unstable representation of black agriculture within a capitalist system. His appearance in the novel as a series of disconnected signs illustrates the ease with which African-American cultural forms might be stolen or exploited on a consumer society. The difference in focus between the conclusion of Invisible Man and Harper's concluding remarks no doubt indicates the changed nature of racial relations within the United States between 1952 and 1994