The Trouble with Post-Blackness

Houston Baker Jr., K. Merinda Simmons

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780231538503
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

An America in which the color of one's skin no longer matters would be unprecedented. With the election of President Barack Obama in 2008, that future suddenly seemed possible. Obama's rise reflects a nation of fluid populations and fortunes, a society in which a biracial individual could be embraced as a leader by all. Yet complicating this vision are shifting demographics, rapid redefinitions of race, and the instant invention of brands, trends, and identities that determine how we think about ourselves and the place of others.

This collection of original essays confronts the premise, advanced by black intellectuals, that the Obama administration marked the start of a "post-racial" era in the United States. While the "transcendent" and post-racial black elite declare victory over America's longstanding codes of racial exclusion and racist violence, their evidence relies largely on their own salaries and celebrity. These essays strike at the certainty of those who insist that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are now independent of skin color and race in America. They argue, signify, and testify that "post-blackness" is a problematic mythology masquerading as fact—a dangerous new "race science" motivated by black transcendentalist individualism. Through rigorous analysis, these essays expose the idea of a post-racial nation as a pleasurable entitlement for a black elite, enabling them to reject the ethics and urgency of improving the well-being of the black majority.

1

“What Was Is”

The Time and Space of Entanglement Erased by Post-Blackness

MARGO NATALIE CRAWFORD

To this day I have a strong aversion to cramped spaces like those that nearly destroyed my youth. But I am even more terrified by the literal, material, open ground of white enemy territory.

—Houston A. Baker Jr., Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era

Don’t call me out my name.

—Everyday Afropessimistic Afrofuturist

Amiri Baraka’s introduction in his short story collection Tales of the Out & the Gone (2007) begins with the following words: “What should be obvious in these tales are the years, the time passing and eclipsed.” Baraka then wonders, “What is left of what has left” (9). This play with what changes and what remains (in this introduction to a collection of short stories written from 1974 to the twenty-first century) is one way to understand the pulse of black post-blackness. This feeling does not emerge after the 1960s and 1970s Black Arts movement (BAM); the notion of “black post-blackness” is a way to understand the continuity between the BAM and twenty-first-century African American aesthetics.

At the 2012 Modern Language Association conference, a special session was devoted to Kenneth Warren’s What Was African American Literature? (2011). One of the presenters, Sharon Holland, deftly used William Faulkner’s words “what was is” as she framed her response to this book.¹ Warren’s book is one version of a current post-black discourse that cannot be homogenized due to the many approaches and forms. The trouble with many performances of post-blackness is the failure to remember Ralph Ellison’s temporal dimension of invisibility—the “different sense of time,” that time that leaps ahead and backward.² These performances fail to realize that “black is” and “black ain’t” (Ellison’s underground tutelage) (1952, 9). Post-black advocates’ claims about the lack of room for experimentation, abstraction, and play in 1960s and 1970s black aesthetics are faulty. When we uncover the productive play and fierce experimentation during the BAM, we see that even texts that are more subtly post-black (such as Darby English’s How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness and Kenneth Warren’s What Was African American Literature?), texts that are not a part of the “post-black” public intellectual writing, still flatten or simply ignore the complexity of the BAM.³ A more honest engagement with the BAM would force these advocates of the post-black representational space (Darby English) and “post–African American literature” (Kenneth Warren) to admit that the impulse to envision a next step (after a collective racial enterprise or representational art) is not new and not distinct from the project of a nonassimilationist black aesthetics that first gained the shape of a movement in the 1960s.

During the BAM, outer space, abstraction, and the eccentricity that Larry Neal simply referred to as the “weird” were steadily invoked but they were not imagined as being post-black. The BAM pivoted on a dialectic between collective mirrors and collective collages that layered and gave blackness depth. This depth was a spatial and temporal strategy of resistance that insisted on blackness as the past, present, and future. Black aesthetics’ time of entanglement (echoing Achille Mbembe’s words) is what the post-black performances erase. Post-black advocates fail to understand black abstraction, black improvisation, and, even, black post-blackness. The irony of the post-black critiques of essentialized blackness is that the current emerging post-black “marketing” is obscuring the transnational motion that was created when “Black” was mobilized as such a powerful unifying concept full of layers and different temporalities. Post-blackness is stuck in a misunderstanding of black aesthetic movement.

I first started thinking about the relation between the neologism “post-black” and “post–Black Arts movement” when I read Thelma Golden’s introduction to the catalog of the 2001 Freestyle exhibit at the Studio Museum. In this framing of the exhibit as “post-black,” she pauses at one point in order to say that “post-black” may be shorthand for “post–Black Arts” movement.⁴ The notion that this elision is sometimes shorthand (not any attempt to erase the significance of the Black Art movement to post-black) competes with many other circulations of the term “post-black” that do not cling, in any manner, to the words “black arts” or the “black aesthetic.” In the United States, the words “black aesthetic” first begin to circulate widely as a way of thinking and seeing during the 1960s as the BAM begins. The movement was often the black aesthetic movement as people engaged in a constant theorizing about the black aesthetic. In the pages of the most central archive of the movement (Hoyt Fuller’s Black World, first named Negro Digest), there is a steady attempt to flesh out the meaning of the words “black aesthetic”. This steady need to figure out what the neologism is differs from the current circling around “post-black” and its performance of the unnaming.

The key problem with many of the post-black frames now being set up is the celebration of unnaming for the sake of unnaming (not very different from the art for art’s sake that the BAM critiqued). As the whispers and murmurs about the post-black slowly turned into television interviews of “post-black” Touré unpacking Obama’s administration, we saw that the nonrevolution will be televised. Gil Scott-Heron’s iconic poetic song still resonates, but now the question becomes, how does the nontelevised nature of the cultural revolution that produced so much reflection on the black aesthetic and black self-determination enable the current dominant culture industry to televise its distorted version of black consciousness raising as it markets post-blackness. Scott-Heron’s iconic critique of televised blackness and the Black Power movement’s critique of Blaxploitation reveal the movement’s great understanding of the market forces eager to reduce Black Power to a televised brand. In the novel The Nigger Factory (1972), Scott-Heron situates the problem of “televised” cultural revolutions as the problem of a certain generation’s inability to really know the struggle because they did not live it. But the key tension that we often fail to realize is that Scott-Heron and others locate this post-knowing in the 1970s; they begin to think about the “post” generation as the movement is about to end. Just as Blaxploitation films do not really start after the movement, the worry about the black counterrevolutionary and the post-movement lack of understanding happens during the movement. Scott-Heron, in The Nigger Factory, depicts post-movement consciousness as a certain process of gathering and responding that does not shape one era into an ending and set up the other as a beginning. This is the challenge of black post-blackness. This is the challenge facing those of us who want to resist the recent performances of the end of black aesthetics.

There is, of course, no way of knowing the first utterance of “post-black,” but Thelma Golden’s 2001 explanation of the affect tied to the term lingers. The affect is comparable to a nod. It is the feeling of just taking something for granted and therefore not needing to remain defined by that term. It could be also likened to a wink. The affect of the wink is exemplified in the following performance (by a performance artist and curator) that could easily be understood as “black post-blackness”: “Lowery Sims: Are you still black? William Pope.L: Obviously. Of course not” (Bessire 2002, 62). The wink here becomes “black post-blackness” in the space between “obviously” and “of course not.” In the definitive space (with the period mark), the wink makes the name “black” seem less important than the “obvious” issues of antiblack racism that “still” make being black, for the majority of blackened subjects, an experience of racial and economic terror. This is the note of the “obvious” structural racism that limits the significance of any individual embrace or rejection of the name. This questioning of the usefulness of names has a long history in African American critical thought. At the end of Bayard Rustin’s 1971 essay on the historical trajectory of names used by African Americans to name themselves, he writes, “The problems confronting Negroes are formidable, and they will not be solved by altering a name, or by dressing differently, or by wearing one’s hair in a new way. We should not be fooled by names or appearances. The real problems lie beneath the surface” (1989, A25).

Rustin wrote these words during the era of the BAM (as this self-naming movement was beginning to end). This essay is best read not as a Black Arts / Black Power movement manifesto but rather a reflection on black cultural nationalism written by someone whose political sensibility is produced by the Civil Rights movement. When Rustin sets up the question about names as, finally, a question about surfaces as opposed to the depth of the lingering problems facing African Americans, his tone matches the tone of the iconic hip-hop song “99 Problems.” As Jay-Z says, in this song, “I’ve got 99 problems,” but the next Rustin-inspired line is: “But a name ain’t one.” The surface and depth tension is at core of the post-black and black tension. Post-black (when it leaves Thelma Golden’s and William Pope.L’s initial affect of the wink—the black post-blackness) becomes a dangerous surface, a surface that pretends to have the depth and enlightenment that blackness seemingly cannot contain. Rethinking the hard-core thinking about black abstraction and black improvisation during the BAM may be the only way to demystify the dangerous surface, the nascent reification of “post-black.”

GESTURES AND NAMES

Gestures were always about to turn into definite action. In the meantime, people learn that style has substance and that something powerful happens when people discover “the essential gesture” of blackness. This dynamic abounds in the literature and visual art of the BAM. The words “essential gesture of authentic blackness” are used by Kimberly Benston in Performing Blackness. The force of this notion that the BAM broke the false boundaries between gesture and essence explodes when we couple Benston’s theory of “essential gesture” and the BAM principle of “mimesis at midpoint.” The African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists (AfriCobra) used the phrase “mimesis at midpoint” in their manifestos, as they explained their aesthetic sensibility. In a 2012 interview, Gerald Williams, one of the AfriCobra artists explained:

It was a puzzle back then, and more puzzling later as I realized that it was little noted in dialogue about the group over the years. I’ve taken fresh looks at the work that was produced by members at that time, finding myself to have become more critical. I haven’t come to any conclusions yet, but feel as though mimesis was the one principle that should have been more intellectually challenging to pursue. In direct answer to your question, I do not recall how others felt about the concept, and I do not think that most of the work even deals with it. But that begs the question as to what mimesis is and what were we trying to do with it? And how did or do we define it? A point between abstraction and realism, I think, was reached by originators of Africans, Australasians, etc., many years ago, but doing the same thing within the environment of the sixties and seventies, or even today, is still a viable endeavor. I’m not sure I fully agree with the sentiment of Spellman’s quote. (“Abstraction didn’t cost consciousness.”⁵) I have to see it within the context of his whole assertion. There are probably some mandates required for black consciousness and probably some universally agreed upon parameters. Identification with black consciousness has always been a complicated matter for some artists, who may easily find comfort in the contemporary notion of this supposedly post racial period.⁶

Mimesis at midpoint may, quite simply, be the way that these BAM visual artists were wrestling with naming their art and also keeping that name in a state of productive suspension. Just as the AfriCobra artists made “process” a part of their visual aesthetics, the writers in the movement were thinking deeply about the process of “becoming black.”

The movement’s love affair with blackness has been misread as a love affair with something known and stabilized. The collective love affair with blackness was actually a collective process of falling in love with the idea that “black” could be beautiful and powerful and known more intimately than the sticky white masks. As the process (“becoming black”) was performed in the poetry, drama, and visual art, the movement could not help but dramatize the next step after blackness. This drama often took the form of “after the cultural revolution, what will we have created?” Nation-building was invoked as a way of thinking about the work that needed to happen after minds were decolonized. The art of cultural revolution was tinged with the fury and joy of collective artistic movement and the melancholy of not knowing what these new collective self-images (“becoming black”) would enable. Too many current performances of post-blackness treat investments in blackness as an investment in an old tired badge as opposed to an investment in an individual and collective process of putting on new clothes (one of the most lucid BAM images, in In Our Terribleness, of the corporeal enactment of black consciousness). The process of putting on new clothes continues as the wardrobe expands, but the “post-black” T-shirt does not seem to be tied to this process of black consciousness raising. Indeed, the prefix “post” suggests that a process has ended.

The process of black consciousness raising was transnational, and the word “black” was a unifying concept that enabled people to see the global nature of white supremacy. During the 1970s, U.S. mobilizations of the word greatly inspired a similar hailing process in the South African Black Consciousness movement. During the 1975–1976 trial, Steve Biko, the founder of Black Consciousness in South Africa, is asked to explain why black South Africans refer to themselves as “black” as opposed to “brown.” As the trial puts “blackness” itself on trial, Biko and Judge Boshoff have the following exchange:

JUDGE BOSHOFF: But now why do you refer to you people as blacks? Why not brown people? I mean you people are more brown than black.

BIKO: In the same way as I think white people are more pink and yellow and pale than white.

JUDGE BOSHOFF: Quite . . . but now why do you not use the word brown then?

BIKO: No, I think really, historically, we have been defined as black people, and when we reject the term non-white and take upon ourselves the right to call ourselves what we think we are, we have got available in front of us a whole number of alternatives.

(Biko 2002, 104)

Biko claims the power of the word “black” when it is reclaimed as a strategy of self-decolonization. The word “black” is also put on trial when the post-blackness becomes the new brand that translates the 1960s and 1970s unifying concept into a twenty-first-century divisive relic that fails to acknowledge the complexity of fluid, liminal identities. We need to pause and put “post-black” on trial. If advocates can make the case that this neologism is a gesture (not any name or new brand) that signals post-1960s black movements and postnaming, we might feel hope that the embrace of this word will not continue to put “black” on trial. But even this claim, that the playful term was never supposed to settle and become an object of study or way of understanding twenty-first-century African American cultural productions, must be troubled. Between 2001 and 2012, we have moved from the use of post-black in art catalogs and literary journals to the use of po...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Dubious Stage of Post-Blackness—Performing Otherness, Conserving Dominance
• 1. “What Was Is”: The Time and Space of Entanglement Erased by Post-Blackness
• 2. Black Literary Writers and Post-Blackness
• 3. African Diasporic Blackness Out of Line: Trouble for “Post-Black” African Americanism
• 4. Fear of a Performative Planet: Troubling the Concept of “Post-Blackness”
• 5. E-Raced: #Touré, Twitter, and Trayvon
• 6. Post-Blackness and All of the Black Americas
• 7. Embodying Africa: Roots-Seekers and the Politics of Blackness
• 8. “The world is a ghetto”: Post-Racial America(s) and the Apocalypse
• 9. The Long Road Home
• 10. Half as Good
• 11. “Whither Now and Why”: Content Mastery and Pedagogy—A Critique and a Challenge
• 12. Fallacies of the Post-Race Presidency
• 13. Thirteen Ways of Looking at Post-Blackness (after Wallace Stevens)
• Conclusion: Why the Lega Mask Has Many Mouths and Multiple Eyes
• List of Contributors
• Index