Sterling A. Brown and the Afro-Modern Moment

Abstract When Robert Penn Warren wrote his highly ironic line “Nigger, your breed ain’t metaphysical” (321), he compressed into five deceptively economic feet nearly a half-millennium of white hegemonic philosophy, both its rhetorical strategies and underlying presuppositions. Buzzard, “the carrier of the ostracizing power of white discourse, the trope which declares the otherness of the black” (Nielsen 117), does not simply assert black inferiority but reconstructs and reaffirms the mutually exclusive mythic realms “white” and “black” must inhabit in order to sustain five hundred years of radical inequity. As ametaphysical, “the black” (or, better yet, blackness) must exist beyond the aesthetic, beyond the redemptive possibilities central to the humanistic tradition of arts and letters. As “fictive signifier of the nonwhite” (Nielsen 10), blackness serves as a repository of reifying antitheses: anti-intellectual, illiterate, subhuman, and ahistorical. All in all, Warren constructs a blackness thoroughly banished to the margins of the human community, a blackness of radical absence proclaiming the final and ultimate abstraction of damning eternal sameness. Indeed Warren (and by extension what I will call hegemonic or conventional modernism) achieves much of his coherence through the assertion of objectified blackness, through a tropic vocabulary of necessarily reductive poses impervious to change over time (see Nielsen, North).