SEPARATION ANXIETIES - Lsu - Louisiana State University

or may not be radical, violent, or nationalist. We must therefore remember that nationalists are
by definition separatists, but not all those we might term separatists seem to have nationalist
aspirations. 3 Nevertheless, the example of Black Nationalism clarifies that nationalist and
separatist groups share many of the same goals and methods. Black Nationalists are primarily
concerned with combating racism, and only one work that I study is overtly about constructions
of race. However, all of them explore different kinds of power and the ways in which certain
peoples seize and maintain it over others. Therefore, studying Black Nationalism provides a
basis for analyzing separatist philosophy and action in general.
As a way of approaching this rather large body of work, I will begin with a critic who,
under Friedman’s terms, often remains too much in the realm of binary thinking. Evandro
Camara—author of The Cultural One or the Racial Many: Religion, Culture, and the Interethnic
Experience—writes that
U.S. society has historically upheld a cultural framework based on separatism, a
pattern that may be evidenced, among other things, in the thematic preponderance
of the idea of ethnicity itself, in the public and official discourse of the society. At
root, this separatism is linked to the dualistic cultural relation (derived from the
racially bipolar administration of social life in general) between the core culture—
which is perceived as the exclusive “property” of all those ethnic contingents that
have been fully absorbed into the dominant social race on the basis of their
classification as white—and all other cultural communities that have from the
outset been classified as biologically unassimilable. (58-59)
Camara’s contention that the United States is based on separatism is admittedly tempting to a
critic studying separatist representations; in these terms, separatism would actually be considered
the original dominant paradigm. Other critics, like Friedman, highlight the problems with
depending upon a white/black paradigm to explain all social relations in the country.
Given what I have said about the increasing complexity of American society and art, I
read Camara’s argument as one good point among many, rather than a successful holistic theory.
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