Let us examine Whitman’s “Drum-Taps” (1865). The poems in the chain offer an unnerving, singular portrayal of war. The war in question is not one of mythical proportions; quite the contrary, the poet tends to the reality surrounding the events of America’s Civil War (1861-1865). Whitman treats this war as a tangible ‘civic ritual’, that is, a political space where concerns about national identity and cultural aspirations are confronted with all-too-palpable anxieties regarding gender and sexuality, which in turn, proves challenging to the nineteenth-century paradigmatic way of thinking about foundational/relevant cultural values and beliefs. His project, therefore, appears to be a dialectal one. Amidst the portrayal of America and its lands as the ultimate battlefield, the poet evokes themes of individualism, self-actualization, and the acquisition of power, while presenting the contingent impact of the soldiers’ communal identities on their war-time ability to transpire these themes. With the poems unfolding, Whitman’s direct account of America’s Civil War continues to interrogate the notion that war/wartime violence validates itself as a necessary civic act (albeit one of devastating results), a needed dispensation ‘to rescue’ the American soul from encroaching destruction. Soldiers on both ends of the North-South divide are seen to be sacrificing their lives ‘to save’ America for posterity. While performing out their civic duties, even though their immediate beliefs/concerns may come across as conflicting, oppositional, the soldiers are granted a unique right to form lasting bonds of friendship, often culminating in expressions of valiant same-sex affection.
As a result, the ‘civic ritual’ of wartime violence in Whitman’s “Drum-Taps” ascertains a cathartic actualization for the American self (as in the soldiers’ self-actualization). It severs the social constraints otherwise placed on the relationship existing between ‘the nation’ and ‘the citizen as a subject’ within the overtly visible terrain of policed sexuality and desire confounded in the reality of American life. In that respect, Whitman’s depiction of American citizenship in the long poem as well as in other corners of Leaves of Grass, captivates an act of (if not historical recovery, which is the case with hooks) poetic inscription; the poet ‘claims the power of silences’ by using the immediacy of wartime violence to ‘speak of’ shared practices and symbols that are denied to the (re)presentations of national identities. Thus, “Drum-Taps” constitutes a dynamic site of poetic inquiry into the nature/nurture of American citizenship, gender and social power. Writing of the debilitating effects that war exerts on the American land, Whitman calls upon the power of the actuality of wartime experiences, and how they prove to challenge the dominant culture’s patriarchal stagnancy by exposing the staged fallacy of its discourses and their claim on the American self.
Following a similar vein, cultural theorist bell hooks examines the hitherto historical recording of African American women’s struggle to claim the right of citizenship and all the confounding restrictions that go with it. Ain’t I a Woman, her historically-specific analysis of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American social relations, (re)presents not only an act of agency, but also of translation from private experience to public narrative. As a cultural theorist and a black feminist, hooks scrutinizes the effects normative (re)presentations (such as white is good, black is bad, black women are culturally inferior, white women are true women, etc.) have had on American individuals’ lifestyles. According to hooks, their enactment as dangerous abstractions (whose influence needs to be accounted for if a social group the individual belongs to, for example, black women, is to effectively manage the irreconcilable tensions that surface as a result of its interactions with other social groups) threatens to recognize the reality of people’s day-to-day existence and their experience of oppression along multiple, intersecting, and competing axes:
In America, white racist ideology has always allowed white women to assume that the word woman is synonymous with white woman, for women of other races are always perceived as Others, as de-humanized beings who do not fall under the heading woman. White feminists who claimed to be politically astute showed themselves to be unconscious of the way their use of language suggested they did not recognize the existence of black women. They impressed upon the American public their sense that the word “woman” meant white woman by drawing endless analogies between “women” and “blacks”.
Whiteness is a contesting site of inquest for hooks; it is a ‘civic ritual’ not too dissimilar to Whitman’s inference of America’s Civil War as one such political space. Hooks approaches whiteness treating it as a tangible social construct, with its rules and regulations, employed by white men and white women in America’s white supremist patriarchal power structure in order to create a political space where racial/gender status is used to grant and/or deny citizens certain (internationally) recognized civil liberties (for instance, access to good public education, professional training, nurturing and affordable health care system, housing opportunities in once uni-racial neighborhoods, stable paying jobs, etc.).
Writing about African American women and their silenced history, hooks works through the social category of gender, since this category characterizes a significant component in/for the presentation of her subjects’ existence as racially marked citizens. Fellow social historian and feminist critic Joan W. Scott has also examined the postmodernist conception of gender, as one of the more recently added categories of social discourse. In “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” Scott outlines the main postulates a historian like herself attributes to the social category of gender. Rejecting the fixed and stagnant quality of the man/woman binary opposition when approaching gender in social terms, Scott defines gender “as a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, and… a primary way of signifying relationships of power.” This unique position which gender assumes as a social category allows hooks to relate to it, through her work, as a means of decoding the meaning of ‘racialized citizenship’ in American society, and at the same time, a way to bring forth a scholarly initiative, which will then help others understand the complex connections existing among various forms of social interaction within the confines of America’s patriarchal order:
If women want a feminist revolution – ours is a world that is crying out for a feminist revolution – then we must assume responsibility for drawing women together in political solidarity. That means we must assume responsibility for eliminating all the forces that divide women. Racism is one such force. Women, all women, are accountable for racism continuing to divide us. Our willingness to assume responsibility for the elimination of racism need not be engendered by feelings of guilt, moral responsibility, victimization, or rage. It can spring from the heartfelt desire for sisterhood and the personal, intellectual realization that racism among women undermines the potential radicalism of feminism. It can spring from our knowledge that racism is an obstacle in our path that must be removed. More obstacles are created if we simply engage in endless debate as to who put it there.
Furthermore, hooks’ work creates a platform for today’s cultural theorists, enabling them to engage and combat the unspoken acceptance and affirmation of culturally determined roles, imposed on people’s individuality by various mechanisms of compliance (governmental decisions, communal practices, tradition and gossip). Accordingly, hooks ‘reclaims the silences’ of American slavery, American patriarchal social structure, American Civil Rights policies, American feminist thought, by recovering the silenced history of a minority group that has struggled to ascertain the basic rights of American citizenship.
Hence, the cultural criticism of bell hooks and the cultural poetics of Walt Whitman encourage us to reevaluate constantly our own definitions of humanity, of a self, of a voice, of a consciousness. Their work propels us to question the tools we employ to (re)present humanity in a segregated world, through the now distinctive categories of race, class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, which stand to mark our furthering apart rather than coming together as one, one great world of plenty. They ask of us to rethink the way(s) we celebrate the differences and/or the universalities of our traits.
Do we allow for a comparative approach, or do we work within a specialized field, and from time to time compare notes with the other teams? Do we generalize based on a number of case studies, or do we allow for an interdisciplinary approach, and if we do, do we give the right of way to the literary or the social sciences? Do we interrogate the categories themselves as they are being defined or reshaped by our findings or do we allow for a fluidity of dialogue between them?
In the wake of ‘the changing times’ of present-day life, when most people turn to mass-produced metaphors, images, archetypes (in other words, commodified cultural indicators), in order to find valediction for their choices, their struggles, their unsheltered existence within a global(izing) mass-culture, Whitman’s nineteenth-century verse and hooks’ twentieth-century black feminist scholarship put forward alternative creative responses to the devastating impacts of nationally-bounded citizenship. They demonstrate the value of unstable, decentered ‘sites of memory’ that engage citizens in a multi-vocal discourse, listening and commenting on each other’s different views and understandings. They demonstrate the value of gendered interpretation of racialized subjects (and vice versa) when confronting age-old arguments of racial superiority, biological determinism, and a hegemonic sexual regime. The ‘(re)claimed silences’ of their respective works demonstrate the unflinching diversity, enlivening complexity, and unquestionable beauty of American engendered identities.
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