Critic speak is tough, but we've got you covered.
Quote :"The Race for Theory"
For I feel that the new emphasis on literary critical theory is as hegemonic as the world which it attacks. I see the language it creates as one which mystifies rather than clarifies our condition, making it possible for a few people who know that particular language to control the critical scene—that language surfaced, interestingly enough, just when the literature of peoples of color, of black women, of Latin Americans, of Africans began to move to "the centre."
"The Race for Theory" makes a powerful intervention into the academic fads of the late-20th century, arguing that when "theory" is thought of as the height of sophistication, other forms of critical thought get pushed to the margins.
As someone who built her career studying the works of African-American women writers like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker—and who struggled to have her work be taken seriously in universities—Christian isn't buying the deconstructive and poststructuralist delight in "difference."
Sure, it became all the rage once hotshots like Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes started tossing that sorta word around, but really, it's no coincidence that theorists started talking about "difference" and "the absence of center" at the exact same time that marginalized peoples finally started to get some traction in the "central" institutions of the Western world. That just goes to show that theory can be just as oppressive as the social norms it's trying to break down.