R A C E A N D I N T E R P R E T A T I O N 105
When we understand Hamlet, we understand a different text from the one that either Shakespeare or his original audience understood. Similarly, what Du Bois understood when he looked at himself after the visiting cards incident was a different ‘‘text’’ from the one with which he began. And as it did for the person on the slave ship, this new understanding helped to orient his future and was revised in light of it. Lives move in hermeneutic circles in which we anticipate our future in terms we take from our past and revise our understanding of our past in light of the future we anticipate for ourselves. Moreover, Du Bois’ story and countless others like it became part of the history of race. In reading each other and ourselves as black, white, Asian, Latino, or Latina, we are part of a historical tradition in which we understand each other in terms of the history of which we are a part and develop the historical tradition of racial interpretations in the ongoing interactions and entanglements in which our racial understanding of one another participates. To be sure, this historical hermeneutic circle raises the same issue for racial identity that it raises for literature. For, if we understand Hamlet in terms of its interpretive history and if this interpretive history is already the afterlife of Hamlet itself, why is that historical hermeneutic circle not a vicious one? Why do we not simply understand Hamlet the way it has always been understood? This question is of obvious importance for our racial understandings. We want to know how we should understand ourselves and others but if we cannot escape a historically ‘‘effected’’ answer to this question, an answer the terms of which are dictated by our history, then what have we achieved by looking at textual understanding? Do our understandings of who or what we are not bring with them the failures, ideologies, and biases of our racially produced world? If so, the move from questions of identity and social construction to an account of understanding will have been of little help. Just as it is difficult to see how we could unravel our constructions as raced individuals to move to non-racialized constructions of identity, we will have to admit that we retain racial meanings as part of a vicious hermeneutic circle.