Audience, Agency and Identity in Black Popular Culture

Shawan M. Worsley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135235635
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Audience, Agency and Identity in Black Popular Culture analyses black cultural representations that appropriate anti-black stereotypes. Using examples from literature, media, and art, Worsley examines how these cultural products do not rework anti-black stereotypes into seemingly positive images. Rather, they present anti-black stereotypes in their original forms and encourage audiences not to ignore, but to explore them. Shifting critical commentary from a need to censor these questionable images, Worsley offers a complex consideration of the value of and problems with these alternative anti-racist strategies in light of stereotypes' persistence. This book furthers our understanding of the historical circumstances that are influencing contemporary representations of black subjects that are purposefully derogatory and documents the consequences of these images.

1 Race, Racism and Black Popular Culture

“subjective objectification” is at the heart of most of my work. i am fascinated by creating myself simultaneously as subject and object. i find it empowering to examine my objectified positions in the structure of our society, then reconfigure myself as the subject of art, recreating myself as art-object, and thus re-objectifying myself on my own terms (subjectively).”

Damali Ayo

Alice Randall, Kara Walker, and the publishers of The Source: Magazine of Hip-Hop Music, Culture and Politics are representative of a wave of late 20^th century artists who insistently create black cultural products that incorporate degrading images and narratives of black identity. These artists hold no allegiance to traditional artistic strategies of black uplift, whose historic goal has been to rework anti-black stereotypes into more positive images. Rather, these artists assert that the continued currency of racist black stereotypes is due, in part, to the failure of these strategies. In response, these black cultural producers present anti-black stereotypes in their original forms and encourage audiences not to ignore, but to explore them. People have responded to these well-known cultural producers with extraordinary acclaim and widespread censure. In this book, I explore these artists’ decision to create controversial black cultural products with racist appropriations, the effects of this work upon audiences, and the cultural implications of this production and consumption upon late 20^th century racial politics.

INTRODUCING THE EXAMPLES

Alice Randall, an African American, is the author of the novel, The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of Margaret Mitchell’s beloved story of the South, Gone With the Wind (1936). When Randall released The Wind Done Gone it garnered large amounts of press coverage and topped best seller lists such as The New York Times for weeks. Randall’s novel revolves around one of Mitchell’s most treasured characters, Mammy, and a character that Mitchell never considered: Cynara. Cynara is the daughter of Mammy and Gerald O’Hara, the white slave master and owner of the plantation. She is thereby the mulatta half-sister of Scarlett O’Hara, Mitchell’s infamous protagonist. Deviating from traditional depictions by African Americans of the enslaved black woman as virtuous and heroic, Randall depicts Cynara as a jezebel. Randall consciously does so as a means to explore the contemporary potency and profitability of this entrenched stereotype of black women.

African American visual artist Kara Walker is most known for her signature work: life-sized silhouette characters that she cuts out of black paper and then pastes on the walls of museums in panoramic fashion. The scenes encapsulate the viewer, whose shadow often falls alongside the silhouettes as the viewer explores the installation. Walker’s exhibits are full of demeaning black character types, such as the coon and the pickaninny, derived from racist ideology of the antebellum slave-holding South. These exaggerated characters exhibit slavery’s worst racist assumptions as they engage in brutal murders, participate in debased public sexual acts, and urinate and defecate at will.

The artworld has applauded Walker’s disturbing representations. She has exhibited at many of the most prestigious museums, including the Whitney Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Moria Art Museum in Tokyo, and the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva. In addition to an impressive list of exhibitions, Walker’s paper cutouts have sold for as much as $329,600. In 1997, only four years after emerging on the art scene, she received the MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant. Today she is a leading contemporary artist and a professor at Columbia University.

The Source is one of the best-selling magazines for rap music and hip-hop culture. Since emerging in 1988, The Source has dominated the print industry with its highly influential album rating system (mics), its creation of the first awards show solely for rap music, its high-profile editors and writers, and its longevity and remarkable sales. Recognized as a highly acclaimed brand name for hip-hop music and culture, The Source has led the industry in relationship to those who cover hip-hop.¹ In 2000, the magazine industry rewarded The Source with a nomination for a National Magazine Award, in the category of General Excellence, for a magazine with a circulation of 400,000 to 1 million. It is difficult to ascertain the company’s exact earnings during this time-period, but it is certain that the magazine was garnering unprecedented revenue in the tens of millions. The Source has outperformed nearly every other hip-hop magazine, and even managed to outsell Vibe, Spin, Rolling Stone and Details on newsstands during the time period of this study, 1989–1999.

The Source creates a highly ambivalent representation of a Hip-Hop Nation during the ten-year period I investigated. The model citizen of this Hip-Hop Nation appears to be a black, uneducated male, who resides in the ghettos of the United States, regularly engages in violent acts, demeans himself and women, and holds materialistic gain as his highest priority. This male is sexist, homophobic, and ethnocentric.

Although of vastly different genres, Randall, Walker, and The Source hold in common the fact that they each strategically employ pre-existing, typically racist narratives of black identity in order to dislodge them from their positions of dominance. Randall’s characters first appear to be typical antebellum stereotypes, yet once she inserts unexpected information regarding their inner lives, these characters prove complex and largely unfamiliar. Walker, alternatively, physically recreates racist images and then magnifies their inconsistencies in the hope of disrupting their power. The editors at The Source, exercising an even different strategy, appropriate seemingly negative narratives and then rework them in what they believe to be empowering ways. In their own way, each of these cultural producers creates works that embody and revise stereotypical and demeaning imagery. Their goal is to present a counter-narrative that empowers contemporary black people. These artists believe that their work is a necessary response to the racial circumstances of this historical moment and to the ways in which race is continually ascribed and disavowed.

I address two central concerns regarding these black cultural products with racist appropriations. First, considering the vast influence of historical black artistic traditions of racial uplift and the pressure to conform to these ideals, I explore the key factors that inspired these artists to appropriate racist images and thereby transgress these particular black artistic expectations. I perform textual analyses upon Randall’s The Wind Done Gone, Walker’s silhouettes, and select columns in The Source to probe the social, cultural, political, and economic factors that have led these artists to engage in such a controversial cultural strategy. I consider the forces, both within and outside of black communities, that simultaneously inspired and constrained these black cultural producers, who chose not to counter negative images with positive ones. In addition, I evaluate the controversies and criticism in response to their work to detail the complex racial politics of the late 20^th century, that manifested culturally in the creation and reception of these black cultural products.

Second, I explore the intriguing ramifications of these decisions upon audiences who were exposed to such controversial work. I consider critics’ concerns that these types of cultural messages are indeed harmful to people. Through audience reception studies, I reconsider critics’ assumptions of the power of cultural messages. I question if messages embodied within cultural products can manipulate one’s identity and subjectivity so furtively that the person remains unaware of the influence. Rather than viewing culture as an all-powerful force upon a person’s identity and behavior, I illustrate a multi-directional process at play, in which people actively accept, revise, and redefine particular aspects of cultural narratives. Through innovative studies of audience response, I reveal a complex process of reception, in which cultural consumers critically negotiate various ideological messages embodied within culture. This process is an important aspect of cultural consumption that shifts the ways in which we should evaluate black cultural products that contain racist appropriations.

RACIAL POLITICS AND BLACK POPULAR CULTURE

In his useful characterization of the contemporary racial milieu, Keith Byerman articulates how a dialectic of racism and racelessness informs the cultural works of African Americans. Contemporary black cultural producers battle to maintain the significance of race to American life, at the same time that they must critique representations and conditions that are thought to have little or no impact on black lives.² These cultural producers speak to many issues, including social desires to “be beyond race;” the backlash against affirmative action; the increasing globalization of the economy, which has led to a marked decrease in low-skilled jobs that have historically fed the black middle class; the gentrification of largely black inner-city areas with little affordable alternative housing; an increase in federal prisons, in which blacks are incredibly overrepresented; and harsher laws such as the 3 Strike Rule designed to keep blacks in the prison system.

These cultural producers also consider how such bleak circumstances could exist simultaneously with the contemporary heightened visibility of black millionaires. The glorification of these exceptions ironically obscures the social realities of the millions of black poor. Black cultural producers witness the mainstreaming of hip-hop culture and rap music, which makes it appear that society has accepted the black communities from which hip-hop culture and rap music emerged. Yet the music industry, in which blacks hold little power, performs violence upon black people through its relentless production of oversexualized, criminalized, hyper-materialistic black representations. Today’s society can embrace multiculturalism at the same time that it finds a rationale for racist practices, such as racial profiling, in the name of patriotism and national security. Black people still believe in the “American Dream,” despite the fact that there are fewer blacks in many colleges and universities now than in the 1970s. Black cultural producers who incorporate stereotypes into their art both reflect and respond to these seemingly schizophrenic aspects of the late 20^th century.

At the center of some black cultural producers’ appropriation of racist stereotypes is an acknowledgement of the formidable legacy of slavery, which has caused many of these seemingly incompatible aspects of American society. Slavery is a critical ideological, cultural, and economic influence. Although African Americans today did not live as slaves, they nonetheless continue to experience the trauma of slavery. Indeed, slavery fits the definition of a cultural trauma, which Ron Eyerman, quoting Neil Smelser, defines as “a memory accepted and publicly given credence by a relevant membership group and evoking an event or situation which is (a) laden with negative affect, (b) represented as indelible, and (c) regarded as threatening a society’s existence or violating one or more of its fundamental cultural presuppositions.”³ Consequently, not everyone needs to feel or even experience trauma directly. The group’s consistent reinterpretation and re-presentation of its collective memory of the event is motivated by future generations’ recollection of trauma and the fact that these generations are consistently associated with and identified by it.

While I wholeheartedly assert that slavery was not a totalizing system of dehumanization and that blacks endured to construct vibrant and resistant constructions of blackness and black identity, one cannot ignore the residuals of slavery manifested in entrenched demeaning stereotypes. Stereotypes inherited from slavery raise a fear and loathing of blackness, at the same time that they present belittled and disparaged black subjects. They create restrictive boundaries that limit and narrow the possibilities for black subjectivity, which has an incredibly damaging effect on society’s image and treatment of black people. Stereotypes are the ghosts of slavery that haunt African Americans. Although most people would likely agree that black stereotypes are gross mischaracterizations, mammys, coons, brutes, and jezebels abound in American popular culture.

Black stereotypes are a driving influence of Randall’s novel, Walker’s silhouettes, and The Source magazine. These cultural producers incorporate derogatory images into their work and then make use of a number of strategies to disrupt and undermine these stereotypes. For example, Randall’s protagonist, Cynara, is the willing concubine of a married Confederate soldier. She embodies the devastating assumption that the enslaved black woman is a seductress, whose one goal is to lure the white man into an illicit sexual relationship. Randall, however, takes Cynara through a journey in which Cynara gains knowledge that makes her rethink the benefits of her life as this white man’s mistress. In literary terms, the stereotype of the jezebel must compete for narrative dominance within Cynara’s shifting identity.

Similarly, Walker’s silhouettes depict black characters acting out in violent, obscene, and demeaning ways that appear to validate racist ideologies. These characters seem to justify slavery in the antebellum South and the supposed criminality of these slaves’ descendants, the contemporary black community. Walker, however, magnifies these stereotypical and racist images until they appear at their most absurd and illogical. It becomes increasingly difficult to take these characters’ behaviors as truthful and accurate.

Lastly, The Source also depicts negative notions about blacks by championing an image of a Hip-Hop Nation whose ideal citizen is a violent, ghetto black male, who glorifies in sexual-gratification, criminal activity, and material consumption. However, the magazine also points to the hostile ideological legacy surrounding the black subject, and insists upon a worldview that subverts by valorizing the negative. The magazine takes pride in what society says is bad, and seeks to empower young black males whom society often labels as outcasts.

Consequently, within each of these cultural products, racist narratives lose their power because they cannot maintain their demeaning and defeating characterizations. These cultural producers’ goal is not to buttress stereotypes. Rather, in their use of racist imagery, these cultural producers critically expose faulty assumptions regarding black identity to empower people to resist these stereotypes’ racist appeal.

BLACK CULTURAL TRADITIONS AND RACIST APPROPRIATIONS

In addition to their critique of racist stereotypes, Randall, Walker, and The Source also fight against narrow definitions of black identity created within resistant black cultural traditions. Walker has been explicit in numerous interviews regarding her concern with simplistic representations of black identity. Her artistic persona, The Negress, purposefully “acts out” and resists any easy categorization as a heroic black female. Randall also questions historical black constructions of the freedwoman’s journey from slavery to freedom. Randall concludes The Wind Done Gone with Cynara alone, living on the outskirts of the black community. She is unable to transfer her story to her son, whom she has given up “for the race” in payment for her past racial sins. This ending implies that efforts at black uplift often lead to the policing of individuals who do not conform to particular ideals. They are denied the right to participate fully in the black community. This is hardly a “happy ending.” In addition, The Source rejects the notion that by conforming to particular moral ideals, black people will gain the rights they seek. The Source’s violent, materialistic, ghetto citizen of the Hip-Hop Nation addresses young people’s belief that existing black narratives do not speak to their unique sensibilities as late 20^th century Americans, or to the increasing repression of blacks since the Civil Rights Movement.

Each of these cultural products therefore calls for the creation of alternative narratives of black identity, different from the pre-existing ones largely hailed within black literary, historical, and visual traditions. In their cultural representations, Randall, Walker, and The Source refuse traditional narratives of black uplift. In other words, these artists strategically choose to deviate from historical black cultural endeavors to present a “proper” and “respectable” black subject to counter the debased and stereotyped black figure. They do not maintain that a “good” image can wrestle dominance from a racist representation. They opt to engage racist and negative narratives of black identity, rather than creating new, seemingly positive counter-representations, in a process that they hope will ultimately lead to the disruption of these narratives’ power. These artistic strategies make the audacious claim that black people cannot be represented outside of racist constructions. Racism has a critical influence on black representation. Anti-racist black images (those created to counter racist stereotypes) are always created and viewed in opposition to racist ideology because of the dominance and entrenched nature of stereotypes. These constructions, whether visible or not, always shape perceptions of black people.

This claim and its implications have caused intense public discourse and debates surrounding Randall, Walker, and The Source. Many critics reveal a heightened anxiety caused by the exposure granted to these works and their regressive imagery. Unable to control the visibility or reception of these representations, the popular nature of these products both enliven questions of race and representation, and create a crisis of representation for many black people. Walker and The Source, in particular, face vehement and unprecedented attempts to censor their work, much of which comes from black communities. Many members of the African American community believe that black artists and cultural producers have a responsibility to “uplift the race,” therefore, in their eyes, these producers transgress acceptable racial roles that dictate conformity to this strategy of resistance. The representations of black identity and subjectivity by these producers stir up both intense anger and abundant support.

The critical reception of each of these cultural producers points to a key tension within contemporary black cultural production: the question of ownership. The appropriation of the black body and its labor (including its cultural labor) during slavery has created an ongoing crisis of legitimacy. Concerns of what is black and what is black art/culture come to the forefront. It leads one to ask, “What is the purpose of black art/culture?” “Who is authorized (read, ‘black enough’) to create it?”

This question of ownership becomes especially loaded with Randall, Walker, and The Source because they use negative imagery of blacks and run the risk of reifying racist ideology by further associating black identity with stereotypes. Of equal concern are the cultural producers’ aims. Are they utilizing stereotypes in a way that supports the goals of African American communities, or do monetary motivations drive their work? Additionally, from whom do they receive patronage? Do they cater (advertently or inadvertently) to the exoticization and exploitation of black people? Slavery and its legacy make these questions salient by raising the stakes of black cultural representations. Black cultural producers must navigate the concerns and desires of black communities that are driven by fears of appropriation and the further entrenchment of stereotypes.

Despite their sometimes-contentious relationship with black communities, Randall, Walker, and The Source do not intentionally alienate themselves or thei...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Race, Racism and Black Popular Culture
• 2 Making the Past Accountable: The Wind Done Gone and Stereotypes of Black Women
• 3 Audience Reception through the Lens of a $10 Million Dollar Lawsuit
• 4 Unholy Narratives and Shameless Acts: Kara Walker’s Side-Long Glance
• 5 Racist Visual Images?: Museum Comment Books and Viewer Response
• 6 Troubling Blackness: The Source Magazine and the Hip-Hop Nation
• 7 The Narrative Disrupted: Reading Letters, Rewriting Identity
• 8 Conclusion: Reframing Debates and Analyses of Controversial Black Culture
• Notes
• Bibliography