Tuesday, October 4, 2011
Module 3- Disrupting the Black-White BInary
During this Module we explored texts that challenged the black-white binary that shapes the American racial imaginary. By interrogating places of intersection, overlap and omission between and within theories of racial formation, our readings and performance reflected shifting perspectives of race over time and the limitations inherent in theories of raciology (Gilroy) when we read them within a transnational socio-economic and historical framework. How are scholars and artists interrogating shifting definitions of blackness and whiteness over time? What do we make of the multivalent and conflicting language used to describe race, its ascription to particular groups and its regulation by the state? How might cross-racial performance and transnational comparisons of racial formations foster social, cultural and political connections between and within communities that can enable new ways of thinking about race and ethnicity?
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Though this Module’s title was “Disrupting the Black-White Binary,” Vijay Prashad seems considerably more interested in destroying the binary. The erection of false walls as a method of separation – which is then insidiously manipulated into a method of identification – can be seen as a reflection of Hall’s work on “Societies Structured in Dominance.” The Black-White Binary is, as it exists in the racial imaginary, a multicultural project itself: it exists to privilege certain cultural exchanges at the expense of other sites of cultural exchange. The viewing of these other subaltern moments of heavily coded racial projects can be extremely empowering.
ReplyDeleteThe use of comedy as a lens for disruption/empowerment was a common thread in the texts in this module. While Hall and Kondo were relatively somber and academic, Chappelle, Cho, Murphy and Culture Clash demonstrated a playful willingness to dismantle stuffy, multicultural institutions. Through mockery, the spectator is empowered to laugh at – and thus, disrupt – the multicultural process. Indeed, all of these comedians used their own bodies as a site of racialized performance.
The use of embodiment is underscored by Anna Deveare Smith’s work. In (Re)Visions of Race, Kondo quotes Smith: “We live in a society of visual rhetoric. For better or worse for most people, what you see is what you get” (96). Comedians resist such a fatalistic view, and are empowered because of their resistance; comedy acts as a language/text through which polycultural readings of race/ethnicity/gender can be understood. Comedy is empowering because it allows the performer to make difficult and divisive observations; it makes manifest and visible the invisible. Through a polycultrual lens, the comedic texts we saw this week function as a transnational/ethnic/racial economy of power, undermining/subverting power/resources in multicultural processes by demonstrating/embodying the inherent constructivity multiculturalism privileges.
Reading Prashad’s Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting I asked myself whether polyculturalism could resonate in everyday life. Theoretically I comprehend polyculturalism and how it “uncouples the notions of origins and authenticity from that of culture” (Prashad 65). Prashad intelligently traces polyculturalism through history, but how can polyculturalism in the present reply to people who have a stake in belonging to and verifying particular cultural authenticities? It is hard for me to look ahead to “the project of creating our humanity” (Prashad 69) without feeling “our humanity” will inevitably slip into being defined by the current dominating ideological frameworks that uphold whiteness as primacy. Stuart Hall writes, “racism discovers what other ideologies have to construct; an apparently ‘natural’ and universal basis in nature itself” (342). Even if the definition and use of ‘culture’ can be broadened, can we shake off the ways racism has shaped the frequently unquestioned idea of “our?”
ReplyDeleteCho, Chappelle, the Culture Clash trio, Smith, and Murphy tackle the idea of “our.” Murphy highlights the privilege of whiteness as a discrete community of shared acknowledgements. Cho refuses to define herself as anything but American and blames consumerism on minority definitions based on size, color, gender, and sexuality. Chappelle shows the absurdity of claiming an individual as ‘ours’ and not ‘theirs.’ Smith’s House Arrest depicts the “the intertwinings of race, sexuality, and power that have been [a] part of American ‘democracy,’” (Kondo 87) ignored under the dominance of white, male power. Yet, the diversity of characters and the actors that play them challenges “the very definitions and formations of race itself” (Kondo 83). Culture Clash humorously performs Chicano-Latino experiences otherwise largely absent on American stages. As the audience laughs or empathizes with these performances I begin to see how the exclusivity of “our” can maybe begin to widen.
Lynn Deboeck
ReplyDeleteOctober 5, 2011
Module 3 - Disrupting the Black-White Binary
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The goal set by Prashad of a polycultural society is the most compelling theme for me in this module of “Disrupting the Black-White Binary.” We discussed the fact that we do not have the terms to define and explain polyculturalism. My question is, how or can white bodies contribute to the formation of such a language? The authors of our texts would all be referred to as “minoritarian subjects.” (Kondo, 82) Margaret Cho, a minority on several levels (being a woman, Korean, bisexual) shows polyculturalism to be something attainable. Just as Kondo described Anna Deavere Smith and Culture Clash’s performances, Cho offers “(re)visions of conventional definitions of race and suggest(s) forms of progressive political alliance.” (Kondo, 83) She does this in her representations of racial stereotypes and the challenges she makes to the stereotypes enacted upon her own body. Cho’s choice not to explain or apologize for how she lives exemplifies Prashad’s ideal. By completely ignoring boundaries between groups and instead claiming rights to all, she is living out a polycultural life and indeed extending it to encompass sexuality and class. The humor utilized by Cho as well as Dave Chappelle and Eddie Murphy are all attacks on multiculturalism. I felt as I watched them that they could be the first step towards the future Prashad envisions. I saw the beginnings of a polycultural language woven in the comedic performances we watched targeting white privilege as well as articles like Robin Kelley’s “People in Me,” spinning the “what are you?” question around to apply to everyone. If cultural boundaries are extinguished in a polycultural system, I am assuming minority subjects would not exist. But then, how can white people contribute now when it seems that the current moment necessitates a minority voice to create an acceptable language?
For me, this module was about orientation and nuance—only through nuanced research and careful rhetoric, we can upset the persistence of the historically-situated black/white binary model and its insidious offspring like multiculturalism and the postracial. Vijay Prashad’s strategy in Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity—reorienting racial formation around polycultural thinking—reminded me of Sarah Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology, which examines how bodies become “orientated by how they take up time and space(5).
ReplyDeletePerhaps only by queering our phenomenology with regard to the black/white binary can we upset it. Margaret Cho rejects normative notions of race and gender, instead orienting her body in a way through which she can challenge normative presumption. In the same way, Kondo writes that Anna Deavere Smith “approaches character from the ‘outside’”(96); she attempts to reorient how she represents them. Hall, too, examines racial formation around economic and sociological tendencies, arguing that race is composed by and defined within these terrains, which are themselves imbricated.
When Prashad writes, “There is little space in popular discourse for an examination of what goes on outside the realm of white America among peoples of color,” he too sets up a reorientative approach against assimilation-based research and instead with the hope of liberation from the constraints of the binary, both for the subjects and the research surrounding them, itself.
Later, in an important step, Kondo criticizes the use of transraciality as a “potentially utopian third term between a binary”(101). I believe polyculturalism is a strong methodological move in the right orientative direction for challenging race, but, unfortunately, it is not a panacea.
Stuart Hall’s articulation and Vijay Prashad’s polyculturalism both suggest ways in which we can observe and understand the creation of culture and identity as an amorphous blend of different structures, forces, and economies. More specifically, Prashad’s polyculturalism develops out of the use of a type of articulation. Althusser’s simple phrase “complex unity, structured in dominance” (qtd. in Hall, 325), offers one of the most succinct definitions of articulation. Cross-racial performances by Anna Deavere Smith, Culture Clash, and Eddie Murphy often highlight the way that identities and cultures interact within “structures of dominance.” But what type of work does cross-racial performance actually accomplish?
ReplyDeleteDorinne Kondo’s “(Re) Visions of Race” points out the primary benefits and at least one possible danger of cross-racial performance. In short, these performances can destabilize essentialist concepts of identity, but can also re-inscribe and strengthen stereotypes and categories (Kondo 82-83). Kondo takes this fairly obvious analysis further by suggesting that such performances create political alliances, and ultimately intervene in “comfortable places” (107). Elin Diamond’s discussion of mimesis/mimicry might be applicable and offer a way to understand cross-racial performance as an intervention in the repetition of acts that constitute identities. Diamond variously describes mimesis-mimicry as an overflowing of mimesis into mimicry, a form of challenge or questioning, and a recovery of the place of exploitation. Mimicry might be considered a hyper-mimesis, where mimetic forms of representation become over-performed to the point that they lose their mimetic qualities and pass into the realm of mimicry. (see footnote #1) This is the extraordinary quality of performance! It can combine the recognition and analysis of theoretical models—like polyculturalism and articulation—with “on-the-ground” interventions in society and culture. Mere recognition of a polycultural or variously articulated societies is not enough. Artists and scholars must engage these concepts with acts and performances that actually intervene.
#1 Diamond, “Mimesis, Mimicry, and the “True-real,”” 368-373.
I was immediately intrigued by two methods of theoretical approach within this module. Vijay Prashad and Stuart Hall wrote about racial construction within a historical context, using specific examples and cited evidence, which is an approach I admired about Cheryl Harris from the first week when discussing the black-white binary. Coupled with this approach, the visual texts (and the analysis of them offered by Dorinne Kondo) use the same body-transgressing performative styles as the artists we have look at before to create comedy that unapologetically calls out societal constructions of race. For me, the effect of these approaches was not only a disrupting, but a machete-ing of the black-white binary, and of racial formation and construction in the west overall.
ReplyDeletePrashad and Hall looked to history to deconstruct racial formations, grounding their theories in primary source evidence. Vijay Prashad in particular used a vast amount of cross-national, cross-generational source material to appropriately complicate the picture of the evolution of racial construction in the west. It is a critical analysis that pins down the harms of superficial “solutions” like the multicultural movement, and in doing so offers the theory of “polyculturalism” which does not pretend to be a solution to racism, but rather offers a lens to begin to understand the complexities of race in America, while removing racial identity away from the capitalist gain of multiculturalism.
The videos further demonstrate what Prashad and Hall are saying about how we identify race, and how race is placed in a complex hierarchy where even the bodily and linguistic identifiers of race change over time. Culture Clash devotes their entire set to comedic racial, gender, and sexual transgression. Dave Chappelle’s “The Racial Draft” sketch reveals race as a social construction in less than 10 minutes of comedy. Similarly, Eddie Murphy ends his parody by asserting, “But I’ll tell you something, I’ve got a lot of friends. And we’ve got a lot of makeup. So the next time you’re hugging up with some really groovy white guy…don’t be too sure, they might be black.”
-Anna-
In Everybody was Kung-Fu Fighting, Vijay Prashad explores the need for a polycultural approach that recognizes the always-already interconnected nature of cultural development and identity; cultures are not separate, unchanging monoliths that can be examined in isolation and opposition. On the surface, gender- and race-crossing performances such as “Culture Clash in AmeriCCa,” “White Like Me,” and “The Racial Draft,” attack these boundaries and offer “potential connections across multiple lines of difference” (Kondo 105). However, these performances also run the risk of reinforcing racial stereotypes and boundaries. Unlike Prashad’s approach, while the actors themselves cross racial and cultural lines, their characters rarely move beyond monolithic notions of identity. Ultimately, in order to identify and be identified with other groups, these artists assume a set of mannerisms and visual signifiers that seem to say “we can identify, but they’re different and this is how.“ Thus, these performances show that separate identities can be picked up, assumed, and imitated, yet never establish a polyidentity that recognizes the influence of one culture on another’s identity. Eddie Murphy must adopt a completely different style of movement, speech, and clothing in order to find any commonality with a white person. To be identified as Arab, Culture Clash performers must don highly stereotypical outfits and speak with an accent. Of all the performances, “The Racial Draft” comes the closest to establishing a polycultural identity, with its comic attack on the need to categorize people according to a single race or identity and its use of groups such as the Wu Tang Clan, who are adopted as Asian despite a lack of direct Asian heritage. Contrasting and crossing between identities can thus potentially create new spaces of commonality, but as long as these are established by comparison between separated spaces, a polycultural understanding is still beyond reach.
ReplyDeleteKatya
The texts were very engaging and informative. While this module was entitled disrupting the black white binary, it attempts through the various performances of Anna Deavere Smith’s cross racial performance to dismantle that very binary. Vijay Prashad argues that a multicultural project merely reinforces and reinscribes the same binary that one seeks to displace and thus strives for what he calls Polyculturalism.
ReplyDeleteMy suspicion of the Deavere performances is that while she seeks to displace and disrupt the mantle of whiteness and unsettle our conceptions of Identity, at times I think these systems of oppression are held firmly in place. The problem of Identities and performing them is often the fear that you will scar the very body that you seek to heal from wounds of Racism. For example, In Culture Clash, the presumed Hispanic male notes that America is building fences to keep Mexicans out and that they themselves are the very ones building the fences. Does this seem to suggest that marginalized groups contribute to their own oppression. Secondly, the idea of crossing colors for racial minorities is dangerous waters. The hegemonic discourse of the dominant group will always construct and craft an analysis that will use those performances to justify their white supremacy. Hegemony cannot be dismantled using the masters tools and especially in his house.
Most compelling to me was Eddie Murphy’s crossing over and passing for white in “White Like Me”. He does not seek to fool the audience or become the “other” in this case but to highlight the various cloaks that white capitalist patriarchal supremacy dons. It is ever-changing.
After reading “(Re)Visions of Race” by Dorinne Kondo, I watched the “The Return of Che” by Culture Clash. In this piece, the revolutionary is brought back from the dead only to find the sorry state of revolution in California in the 1990s. Through this comedy skit, Culture Clash reveals the commodification of revolutionary icons, presents the media as the new “opiate of the masses,” and exposes the shallow popularization of revolutionary discourse. This immediately reminded me of an interview in the 2008 documentary “Examined Life: Philosophy in the Streets” between the writer and director Astra Taylor and literary theorist and political philosopher Michael Hardt. Hardt describes getting interested in revolutionary politics of Central America in the 1980s. In a student meeting in El Salvador, a comrade suggests that the American students would be most helpful if they could start revolution in their own country. Hardt wonders how they could possibly start a revolution and overthrow President Reagan. The comrade states the obvious; go into the mountains, collect arms, then come down and revolt. Hardt says this suggestion was completely outside of the realm of possibility for him, practically and conceptually. Hardt offers another form of revolution, the removal of the power of the state and capital, which impedes our ability to self-govern. Ultimately, he says, it’s a question of human nature. Hardt argues human nature is constituted through daily routines, the history of struggle and victory or defeat, and past hierarchies. Identity is not essential; it is a “historically shaped axes of power and inequality” (Kondo, 82). Democracy, then, is not about replacing one dominant ruling class with another. Hardt argues revolution needs to transform human nature to enable people to be capable of self-governing. Butler and Kondo might find this a difficult, if not impossible task.
ReplyDeleteThe Return of Che:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uP1VUWNJLg
(Video is awful. Content is amazing. Don't miss parts 2 and 3).
Michael Hardt on Revolution:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0IopdH1e3s
(Just watch all of "Examined Life" for that matter.)
This module began with Vijay Prashad demonstrating how the movement from a discourse of black/white binarism toward multiculturalism is problematic. His text argues that multiculturalism is an insufficient model for examining culture because it views groups as static, homogeneous, unchanging entities and stresses the boundaries between them. Prashad calls for a polycultural perspective that emphasizes the dynamic complexities of varying racial/ethnic/religious groups and provides several examples throughout history to illustrate how aspects of culture are constantly in flux and reside within boundaries that have always been permeable. The various comedic clips we viewed (Cho, Chappelle, Murphy, and Culture Clash) are all examples of savvy performances that illustrate this permeability in order to disrupt and satirize notions of cultural stasis and homogeneity. Cho has been utilizing stand-up to critique stereotypes of gender and race throughout her career by disrupting notions of Asian-Americans as model minority and openly touting her bisexuality. Chappelle’s “Racial Draft” satirizes the idea of distinct racial categories by demonstrating how easily individuals can move from one category to another depending on circumstance and public perceptions of their place in society or popular culture. Murphy and the three members of Culture Clash utilize ‘race-shifting’ in order to explore aspects of dominant culture and illuminate the privileges of white hegemony. Kondo and Hall help put these performances into converstion with texts from our previous modules. Kondo ties Culture Clash to Anna Deavere Smith in order to “reveal the limits and contradictions of contemporary racial discourses… (and) offer a way to rethink enduring political inequities and the possibilities for political alliance and social justice for minoritarian subjects.” (82) Hall is reminiscent of Omi and Winant in calling for a re-examination of race through a combination of economic and sociological lenses. Hall’s description of ‘articulation’ also reminds me of Butler’s argument that gender identification is a process that is constantly reiterated and juxtaposed with heteronormativity. Hall asserts that particular classes appropriate cultural forms for their own use and that in many ways it is the articulation itself that establishes class position.
ReplyDelete