Prefiguring Postblackness

Cultural Memory, Drama, and the African American Freedom Struggle of the 1960s

Carol Bunch Davis

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781496802996
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Drama
• Index: Literature

Prefiguring Postblackness explores the tensions between cultural memory of the African American freedom struggle and representations of African American identity staged in five plays between 1959 and 1969 during the civil rights era. Through close readings of the plays, their popular and African American print media reviews, and the cultural context in which they were produced, Carol Bunch Davis shows how these representations complicate narrow ideas of blackness, which often limit the freedom struggle era to Martin Luther King's nonviolent protest and cast Malcolm X's black nationalism as undermining the civil rights movement's advances.

These five plays strategically revise the rhetoric, representations, ideologies, and iconography of the African American freedom struggle, subverting its dominant narrative. This revision critiques racial uplift ideology's tenets of civic and moral virtue as a condition of African American full citizenship. The dramas also reimagine the Black Arts movement's restrictive notions of black authenticity as a condition of racial identity, and their staged representations construct a counter-narrative to cultural memory of the freedom struggle during that very era. In their use of a "postblack ethos" to enact African American subjectivity, the plays envision black identity beyond the quest for freedom, anticipating what blackness might look like when it moves beyond the struggle.

The plays under discussion range from the canonical (Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun and Amiri Baraka's Dutchman ) to celebrated, yet understudied works (Alice Childress's Wine in the Wilderness, Howard Sackler's The Great White Hope, and Charles Gordone's No Place to Be Somebody ). Finally, Davis discusses recent revivals, showing how these 1960s plays shape dimensions of modern drama well beyond the decade of their creation.

CHAPTER ONE

“One for Whom Bread—Food—Is Not Enough”: Beneatha Younger, Uplift Ideology, and Intellectual Freedom

BENEATHA: Well sometimes it seems like Mama and Walter and Ruth and even Travis—well, they are all sort of rushing through life working hard for the right to be like everybody else. Do you know what I mean?—And do you know what I want George, what I really want—? All I want is the right to be different from everybody else—and yet—be a part too.

—Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun, Original Playscript with Annotations (1957)¹

Twenty-seven years after Beneatha’s assertions about black subjectivity in Hansberry’s original play script, writer Lisa Jones offered parallel observations about her participation in the Rodeo Caldonia High-Fidelity Performance Theater, a black feminist performance collective. Jones composed Carmella & King Kong and Combination Skin, the two performances the group staged between 1986 and 1988, and proclaimed that the ensemble’s twelve African American women were “in [their] twenties and giddy with [their] own possibilities.”² Reflecting on their work, Jones posed their representations as a departure from those of previous eras—they were not “career girls or call girls or Bess or Beulah” but instead were black women “breathing intelligence, mischievousness, and triumph.”³ Finally, Jones points to the significance of the Rodeo’s intervention in black female representations, as she asserted that “this was a brand new image. Had young black women been presented this way before in the mainstream? Apparently not.”⁴

Jones’s description of the Rodeo’s representations seemingly responded to Beneatha Younger’s call for the right to shape identity that is simultaneously distinct from, yet reflective of, “everybody else.” Yet Beneatha could have easily been one of the women of the Rodeo who breathe intelligence, mischievousness, and triumph as her desire throughout the play to “experiment with different forms of expression” as she puts it, or to “flit so from one thing to another” in her mother’s words, would seem to align her both ideologically and expressively with the Rodeo collective.⁵ Jones suggested that the ensemble’s take on black female representations where “Diana Ross’ whine matters as much as Mary McLeod Bethune’s institution building” were not present in mainstream representations before the Rodeo began performing in 1986.⁶ However, Beneatha’s representation in Hansberry’s 1959 play has not been viewed as the innovation that it was because cultural memory too often frames the play as a singular response to the euphemistic Negro Question and the nascent African American Freedom Struggle of the 1960s. She was hidden in plain view, contained in a text that many onlookers believed took up nothing beyond the pressing issues propelling the Freedom Struggle, including voting rights and fair housing and employment access, among many others. The notion that the Freedom Struggle would seek to create something beyond attaining those tangible legislative goals might appear to be secondary, less important concerns in the pursuit of civil rights legislation that would then enable access to life opportunities. Yet the yearning for a discursive space where the subtle shadings of an interior life concerned with exploring questions about identity can be discerned in Freedom Struggle era texts such as A Raisin in the Sun. Embedded in the early steps into the Freedom Struggle era was a desire to explore questions of African American identity. Hansberry, like other writers and their texts during that era, championed political and social issues, but in the interstices of her play she also addressed the subtleties of African American identity just beginning to become apparent in the mainstream public sphere and that had been hinted at in the black public sphere.

Too often, Beneatha Younger is viewed as the play’s “overintellectualized daughter,” “the giddy adolescent,” or in one instance, the “spoiled” sister, but rereading her with an eye toward her engagement with her immediate family’s and her suitor’s ideologies shows us that she is far more complicated than such simplistic characterizations would have her be.⁷ In Beneatha, Hansberry demonstrates that representing both the broader Freedom Struggle’s pursuit of full citizenship for African Americans and black female identity’s complexities are not mutually exclusive, and in so doing she reveals that such exploration is not exclusive to postblack cultural production. Hansberry and A Raisin in the Sun can be considered a part of a loosely affiliated group of writers and texts within the Freedom Struggle era that address those so-called secondary concerns within the civil rights era.⁸ Although Hansberry temporally situates her character’s observations “sometime between World War II and the present,” Beneatha’s representation anticipates the Rodeo Caldonia’s innovative representation and exploration of black feminine identity. Accordingly, this chapter contends that Lorraine Hansberry was one among several writers during the Freedom Struggle era that understood and demonstrated the complex representation of African American identity in ways that predicted postblack discourse of the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s and further argues that A Raisin in the Sun’s Beneatha Younger anticipates narrative tropes that inform postblack identity. As Beneatha navigates the social constraints and expectations imposed by her family and her suitors, she offers a compelling prelude to the postblack feminine identity that Jones and the Rodeo Caldonia would sketch.

Before detailing how Beneatha Younger’s representation in A Raisin in the Sun prefigures the postblack move, an exploration of the ideological tenets that shape the NBA/PSA will help to clarify the tensions and the continuities between the cultural production of the Freedom Struggle era and the New Black Aesthetic/Post-Soul Aesthetic’s cultural products. The Rodeo performed Carmella & King Kong and Combination Skin and also developed a poetry review, Welcome to the Black Aesthetic, which was never staged. However, this group and its performances or what Jones called “rites of self-discovery staged in supper-club basements, church sanctuaries, and bars” gave rise to the upstart New Black Aesthetic (NBA), sometimes called the Post-Soul Aesthetic (PSA), taking shape in the mid-1980s.⁹ Acknowledging the growing interest in “a new way of looking at the world by young black artists,” Jones not only argued for the significance of the NBA/PSA taking root during this period, but asserted that Rodeo Caldonia and its representations ushered in the new wave of inventive cultural production occurring during that era when she wrote, “It’s clear to me that our take on blackness and femaleness did trumpet the cultural explosion that followed.”¹⁰ What seemingly propelled the cultural explosion and what the artists and the art they produced shared was their willingness to critique, lampoon, and otherwise utilize events, figures, and ideologies from the Freedom Struggle era often viewed as beyond reproach for discussion and exploration. Participating in the NBA as both an author and critic, writer Trey Ellis argues that it is ultimately an “anti-aesthetic that defies definition” and an “attitude of liberalism rather than a restrictive code.”¹¹ While there is clearly an attitude of liberalism or what Ellis further explains is the NBA’s ability to be “more honest and critical of ourselves than ever before,” there also exists within the NBA/PSA discourse since the mid-1980s three recurring themes that can help to track its overriding concerns. As is the case with other artists of the NBA/PSA, the Rodeo sought to cast off threadbare representations of a fixed and collective black identity deeply informed by, or perhaps even burdened by, a convention that was retooled and repackaged in the Freedom Struggle era: racial uplift ideology. In a broad swath of NBA/PSA texts, unpacking racial uplift ideology is a central concern.

Racial uplift ideology describes a social and political strategy employed in the era of de jure segregation during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that charged black middle-class spokespeople and leaders with refuting the pervasive stereotypical representations of African Americans widely circulating in US culture. Presenting themselves as living rebuttals to such stereotypes, this select group of African Americans cultivated images of civility and respectability that depended on class stratification among African Americans as well as a narrative of upward mobility that would aid in “reforming the character and managing the behavior of the black masses”—of families like the Youngers—steadily streaming into northern industrial cities from the South during the Great Migration.¹² But this strategy was not limited to the Progressive Era. Uplift ideology’s focus on representing black homes and family life within the parameters of respectability and civility continued through the Freedom Struggle era where the images of civility and respectability played a key role in the mass protests of the period. Traces of uplift’s agenda are visible in the actions of participants who demonstrated respectability and civility in their manner of speaking, their dress, and their attitudes toward the angry mobs they might, and in many instances did, encounter in civil rights era demonstrations.¹³ As previously noted, uplift ideology likewise informed the selection of Rosa Parks instead of Claudette Colvin to become the face of the challenge to segregation in public transportation in Montgomery in 1955. Yet its basic premise, which contends that through the black middle-class’s leadership, the black masses can be “rehabilitated” and can then usefully contribute to proving that all of black America is fit for full citizenship, is a notion that the NBA/PSA rejects wholesale. For example, in framing how uplift’s influence has prohibited a discussion of what might be considered problematic representations of black identity, critic Mark Anthony Neal has warned that “efforts to create the most ‘positive’ historical read of the black experience and its various icons have often denied a full exploration of the humanity of black folks.”¹⁴ In short, a key element of the new world view proffered by the NBA/PSA seeks to end “efforts to sanitize black life and culture” by prohibiting \cultural producers from “teas[ing] out radical political and social sensibilities in existing and often problematic (stereotypical) caricatures of black identity.”¹⁵ Perhaps the most visible rejection of uplift ideology in the work of Jones and other NBA/PSA artists is their refusal to accept its premise that adhering to its conventions results in freedom for all African Americans. In all of its iterations, the NBA/PSA proposes that freedom, however the artist in question defines it, cannot be achieved through uplift ideology because in seeking to dispute or respond to stereotypical representations there is an implicit acceptance of them. Moreover, these artists have refused the individual autonomy versus collective freedom dichotomy which proposes that “race” men and women are meant to stand in for and represent the collective—the broader black community. Instead, they have argued for more complexly drawn representations that reject the position, held by W. E. B. Du Bois and other race men and women in the early twentieth century, that black art should serve to counter racist propaganda. This is clear in Jones’s declaration about the Rodeo’s representational agenda as she wrote, “Our need was to get out in public and act up; to toss off the expectations laid by our genitals, our melanin count, and our college degrees. Rodeo heralded our arrival: young, gifted, black and weird (so we thought), and in search of like souls.”¹⁶ In this assertion and others like it, the Rodeo’s rejection of racial uplift ideology echoes the rejection of racial uplift ideology visible in other iterations of the NBA/PSA’s products. This rejection of collective identity as well as the notion of race men and women who represent the race shape every trope endemic to a wide swath of NBA/PSA texts.

But uplift ideology’s remainders are not the only convention identified by the NBA/PSA as suppressing fuller explorations of black identity. The representational politics of the Black Arts Movement in particular are referenced throughout postblack discourse as both enabling and restricting post-soul representations. As an example, Trey Ellis wrote in “The New Black Aesthetic” (1989) of the NBA’s willingness to parody Black Arts Aesthetics and to “flout publicly the official, positivist black party line” but reiterates the NBA’s indebtedness to the Black Arts Movement.¹⁷ Similarly, curator Thelma Golden argued in the introduction to the 2001 Freestyle catalogue that she “holds a certain degree of nostalgia for the passion and energy that created the nationalist/aesthetic dogma of the 1970s Black Arts Movement,” yet she is compelled to exhibit the work of artists whose work speaks to “the quest to define ongoing changes in the evolution of African American art and ultimately to ongoing redefinition of blackness in contemporary culture.”¹⁸ This turn away from what is often described as the proscriptive aesthetic agenda of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, which in some iterations mandated what Ellis called “a propagandistic positivism” in its representations, marks a key element of postblack cultural production and criticism.

Aside from the rejection of racial uplift ideology and a critique of the Black Arts Aesthetic is the final defining feature of the NBA/PSA—the varied cultural genealogies it claims in producing its art.¹⁹ Critic Greg Tate has argued that the NBA reflects “a maturation of a postnationalist black arts movement, one more Afrocentric and cosmopolitan than anything that has come before” and further that it is peopled by artists “for whom ‘black culture’ signifies a multicultural tradition of expressive practices.”²⁰ Ellis echoed Tate in the former’s essay, “The New Black Aesthetic,” as he identified himself and his NBA peers as “cultural mulattos . . . educated by a multi-racial mix of cultures” and who are committed to creating what philosopher Arthur Danto has called “Disturbatory Art.”²¹ Moving beyond such imposed boundaries on how black identity can be represented, the NBA/PSA emphasizes an “elastic” notion of black identity that embraces a wide range of cultural influences and genealogies that stands as the distinguishing aspect of its cultural production.

Shifting from these discussions of the NBA/PSA in the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, these three tenets can be found in Thelma Golden’s and visual artist Glenn Ligon’s discussion of postblackness in the early 2000s. Golden, director and chief curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, was responsible for the influential 2001 Freestyle exhibition there. Emerging from conversations with Ligon, her take on postblackness is significant because she posited that the difference between the Freestyle show artists and the black artists preceding them was that the newer generation of artists did not feel they had to address questions of what makes “black art” or black aesthetic practices, yet all the while maintaining that they created black art. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction The Postblack Ethos in “Texts Out of Time”: Rosa Parks and the African American Freedom Struggle in Cultural Memory
• Chapter One “One for Whom Bread—Food—Is Not Enough”: Beneatha Younger, Uplift Ideology, and Intellectual Freedom
• Chapter Two “A Ghost of the Future”: Racial (Mis)perception and Black Subjectivity in LeRoi Jones’s Dutchman
• Chapter Three “Ghost(s) in the House!”: Black Subjectivity and Howard Sackler’s The Great White Hope
• Chapter Four Gathering Black Subjectivities and Cultural Memory in Alice Childress’s Wine in the Wilderness
• Chapter Five Prefiguring Postblackness in Charles Gordone’s No Place to Be Somebody: A Black Black Comedy in Three Acts
• Coda Postblackness’s Ancestors and Relatives or “The Past Pushing Us into the Present”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index