On the matter of Jeremiah Wright, conservatives remain encased in an adamantine literalism. From the perspective of either deconstructionism or postcolonial theory, Wright’s utterances are neither controversial nor disturbing. Lack of general familiarity with these critical discourses accounts for the deep-lying anti-Wright bias of both the blogosphere and talk-radio. The conservative misdirection here parallels the literalist condemnation of Paul de Man.

Let us invoke Homi Bhabha’s encomium to Franz Fanon (Location of Culture, Chap. 2), including Fanon’s meditations on the liberatory effects of anti-European violence. As with Fanon in Bhabha’s gaze, Wright appears as the purveyor of a transgressive and transitional truth. His voice is most clearly heard in the subversive turn of a familiar term, in the silence of a sudden rupture: (not God bless America but…) God damn America. This line of thought keeps alive the dramatic and enigmatic sense of change. That familiar alignment of colonial subjects — Black/White, Self/Other — is disturbed with one sharp reversal, and the traditional grounds of national identity are dispersed. It is this palpable pressure of division and displacement that pushes Wright’s sermons to the edge of things — the cutting edge that reveals no ultimate radiance but, in his words, an “audacity of hope.”

Through repeated sonic replication (which Wright surely anticipated, having released the sermon on DVD), the phrase is effectively broken up, or opened up, in a moment of Lacanian jouissance, migrating, so to speak, from God damn America into God(d) am(n) America. The evident echoing of late-capitalist discourse-games (Toys “R” Us) turns God Am America into what is simultaneously a discreet invocation of early-American providentialism, an appeal to business interests, and an identificatory excursus on the Illinois subaltern.

Spivak is no less apt on the problem of literalism (Spivak Reader, Chap. 9). The denial of contingency is a particular loss on the matter of Wright. Deconstruction has taught us that taking contingency into account entails the immense labor of forging a style that seems only to bewilder. On Wright, we must question staying within the outlines of rational agency and instead give a hint of postcolonial heterogeneity in opposition to the impoverished conventions of mere reasonableness. That “high” register, where sermonic production is in the same cultural inscription as the implied listener, cannot be employed for the epistemic ruses of the South Chicagoan subject.

In short, from the standpoint of deconstruction and postcolonial theory (and only from that standpoint), Wright’s remarks are undisturbing, and in fact most welcome. Since the most eminent universities in the United States have consistently valorized these discourses it follows that (unless you’ve got a problem with deconstruction or postcolonial theory — and how could you possibly?) Wright is to be commended. To be sure, the aporias of Wright’s populist discourse are more implicit than in deconstruction or postcolonial theory. Yet in substance (insofar as substance can be attributed), Wright’s views and those of scholarly theorists are quite similar. If anything, the theoreticians are more radical. Obama’s ability to act as both the revelatory sign and unifying signifier of the discourses of Harvard or the University of Chicago, on the one hand, and the demagoguery of South Chicago, on the other, ratifies and validates his location in culture.

OK, I’ve been tweaking actual deconstructionist and post-colonial texts, and adding some “original” analysis of my own, to fit the Wright affair. It’s partly in fun, but also remarkably easy to do. The serious point is that these radical theorists, so popular in America’s academy, do in fact approve of figures like Wright, which is why respectable universities have tenured Wright’s spiritual mentors. (Thanks to Lisa for pointing me to Spengler’s important analysis of Wright’s theological sources.) The condescending approval of sophisticated academic radicals toward Wright’s theological mentors seems very much like Obama’s own approval of Wright. The tone of the two worlds might be different, but the substance is not that far apart.

Again, to be serious for a moment, Michel Foucault, another deeply influential postmodernist thinker, made a point of idealizing “local” rebellions against oppressive universal forms of knowledge. By this he meant anything from an individual radical subtly subverting some bureaucracy he was employed in, to the challenge posed by Afrocentrism to traditional Christianity. There is “local” radicalism, then there’s the sophisticated universal academic radical, who encourages and approves of, yet also transcends, the radicalism of place. We might say that Obama has latched onto Wright’s “local” radicalism in the way that his universally radical anthropologist mother latched on to the localized struggles of Indonesian peasants. There may be some condescension and pragmatic political manipulation here, but it’s likely also mixed with the genuine admiration of authentic local radicalisms we find among intellectuals. Obama’s gift is that he knows how to unite both sensibilities.