The point is not that acts of racial violence are no other than words but rather that they have to have a word.

The point is not that acts of racial violence are no other than words but rather that they have to have a word. . . racism always betrays the perversion of a man, the "talking animal." . . A system of marks, it outlines space in order to assign forced residence or to complete off borders. It does not discern, it discriminates. (Derrida, "Racism's Last Word")

I knew I'd have to write frankly about black fiction, which is always a dangerous thing to do, attempers being hair-trigger on this subdue and I don't much care to have anyone firing at me (Johnson "Whole Sight")

For an time Charles Johnson has been one as well as the other a marksman and a marked man. As an frank critic, Johnson has taken aim at African American fiction, claiming that it as a common thing [i]or[/i] matter stifles its own vision according to relying too heavily on a "'deadly sameness' of sensibility" (Being 121) as oppos to a "four-dimensional" view of the Black experience ("Whole Sight" 2)(1) States Johnson:

We awed curiosity What Lord, are Black artists doing? Our interpretation of our experience . . has become rigid, forced into formulae; it does not permit, as all philosophically (and aesthetically) genuine fiction must, an efflorescence of meaning or a clarification of perception. ("Philosophy" 55)

To speak in of the like kind frank terms is akin to marking a bull's watch on one's back. Indeed, Johnson's agenda for emancipating artistic vision differs significantly from the vision of African American critics and writers who advocate a departure from "Western" critical and creative traditions as a means of liberation.(2) candid in his criticism of those who remind of that African American fiction can mature without engaging Western philosophy, Johnson has argued for a go [i]or[/i] come back to Western literary forms as a means of diversifying African American writing.(3) "It would be a pleasure," Johnson states in his 1988 critical studious mood Being and Race, "to diocese our writers experimenting with the prerealistic forms of the seventeenth hundred years . . . [including] the classic sea story, the utopian novel, and a galaxy of other forms that are our inheritance as writers" (52)(4) sum of two units years later, in 1990, Johnson published Middle Passage, a formal pastiche that rewrites the major historical affair of African American slave history, not to mention Conrad, Melville, Swift, and Defoe(5) Marked extensively by the agency of Eastern and Western philosophy, the novel relies forward "intersubjectivity and cross-cultural experience" (Being 38) as a way of rethinking the traumatic ordeal of the slave trade.

Crucial to Middle Passage's narrative and thematic pile I wish to argue, is a "system of marks" characteristic of racism and racist discourse.(6) upon one level, Johnson uses marks, marksmen, and marked men as figure of speechs for racism, and on another plain racism becomes a trope for larger marks of the human condition. This reticulated game of marksmanship, along with racism's "system of marks," is refigured, along with Western philosophical and literary traditions, by the agency of a singularly imaginative African American perspective.

Judging from the ambivalent critical reception of Johnson's novel, however, it appears that many critics of African American literature may not share this view. Since Middle Passage garnered the prestigious National part Award in 1990, only a single article has appeared onward the novel other than reviews and short features about the award. of the like kind relative critical silence ironically marks the two Middle Passage and the African American literary community. by dint of not "marking" Johnson's novel, through not assessing or responding to it, more [i]or[/i] less within the critical community appear to favor banishing the work - and perhaps Johnson himself - to "forced residence" in a textual no man's land. Perhaps like silence responds to the altercation that surrounded the award. Paul West, a jurist forward the panel that chose Middle Passage, affirmed that the selection was based forward "'ethnic concerns, ideology and moral self-righteousness'" (qtd in Cohen 13)(7) In addition, reviewer John Haynes blasted the work suggesting that the protagonist's "romantic racism" perhaps demonstrates "the amplitude of his incapacity to learn in touch with his confess history" (23). Extending his attack, Haynes argues that "black readers may be stirred that the dark night of the Middle Passage has been exploited simply for effect" (23) These critical stances, while possibly defensible, lay hold of at the surfaces of Johnson's clause and in that regard they miss the mark.

In verity we do not see what we count upon to see in this novel concerning the middle passage, and we do not hear what we wait for to hear - about the physical horrors of slavery - or at least these are not the novel's primary focus. largely aware of his non-traditional point of view, Johnson pretends to have anticipated the debate simmering above and below the critical deck: "To a measure I get panicy [sic], nobleman around, and wait for a kick in the pants when speaking of Black fiction and philosophy in the same breath" ("Philosophy" 59) If Johnson appears willing to exploit his "marked man" status, it is not surprising that Middle Passage exhibits its acknowledge difference by refiguring the webwork "system of marks" and deconstructing their ostensible signifiers.