Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Module 4- Atlantic/Pacific/Black/White/Other
This module explores intersecting histories of racial formation in the Atlantic and Pacific troubling the
black-white binary by exploring the intersecting histories of other racial groups. How might you
see racial performance as what Shannon Steen calls "a kind of geometry to measure the Earth; a way to take stock
of America's place in the world" (2010,70). As you post your blogs this week, what examples might you offer
on contemporary performance that reflect the shifting racial formation in the United States
in our so called "post-racial" moment?
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THR 702
ReplyDeleteRace and Performance
In many ways, it seems as if the texts included in Atlantic/Pacific/Black/White/Other are still working to disrupt the black/white binary. While Vijay Prashad work on polyculturalism took a step forward, challenging the binary through the inclusion of atypical sources (amongst other methods), Shannon Steen’s Racial Geometries worked in the reverse direction: by reaching into our past, and through utilizing sources that may prescribe to more scholarly standards, Sheen furthers attempts to complicate the texts of black/white/other playwrights, directors, and actors.
Sheen frame the Negro social drama as a pedagogical opportunity; this harkens back to early colonial American theatre and the attempt by theatre companies to advertise the moralistic possibilities of staging plays. What are the parallels between early (white) American drama and the black dramatic experience since the 1950’s, where Sheen inaugurates the monograph? Is it possible (or productive) to trace a similar, materialistic read of the trajectory of history? Or, by trying to parallel two distinct sets of theatrical, am I running the risk of reinscribing the American racial imaginary of the black/white binary?
The raw aggression, and anti-authoritarian rhetoric rapped about by Public Enemy offers a possibility for a scholarly excursion. Flava Flav exists somewhere in between Sheen and Prashad: as both early arbiter of the black movement, as with P.E., and as cultural minstrel construct with his later work in Flava of Love, Flava Flav has become rearticulated by the capitalist society into a harmless clown (a role, admittedly, he played even during his P.E. days.) How does this sort of rearticulation serve to reinforce the black-white binary? Other rappers I might look at include Ice Cube, Ice-T, the Beastie Boys, even Jay-Z – these rappers offer a set of conscious social performances undertaken to disavow earlier violent or nihilistic lyrics in favor of politically minded, conscientious rapping.
Jeanne Tiehen
ReplyDeletePaul Gilroy writes about Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson: “Their work can be used to identify the folly of assigning uncoerced or recreational travel experiences only to whites while viewing black people’s experiences of displacement and relocation exclusively through the very different types of travel undergone by refugees, migrants, and slaves” (133). In the texts of this module the themes of travel and movement are inescapable, be it of people, ideas, music, or theatre. Gilroy’s focus on the Atlantic and Steen’s focus on the Pacific proves that boundaries of nationality, race, and ethnicity share a “concept of connectedness” (Gilroy 120) that are consistently united if not blurred by travel.
M.C. Solaar and Guru’s “Le Bien, le Mal” illustrates how rap’s artistry and versatility travels far beyond American shorelines in a hybridity of thought and language. Steen’s book shows countless examples of how theatre and film defies tidy racial categorizations, such as the “Japanese Jitterbug” in Hot Mikado, reconfiguring the geometries of race itself. The Emperor Jones tells the tale of a pullman porter “who benefits from…enhanced mobility” (Gilroy 133). Brutus Jones’s travels provide him opportunities to ascend in power, but in doing so “requires a melancholic prohibition against identification with other black men over whom he rules” (Steen 78). Travel brings many advantages but in the celebration of travel the history of the slave trade and diaspora and the fact that many performances used “blackness as the face of US foreign policy” (Steen 164) cannot be forgotten. Mark Twain once wrote, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” Twain’s quote is an oversimplified idealization. However, perhaps in travel we see “the instability and mutability of identities” (Gilroy xi) and we find the fascinating gap between “we are the same—No we’re not the same” (“Fight The Power”)
The themes of authenticity and progress seemed to recur often in the texts for this module. What is authentically American? What is authentically Black or Asian culture? Gilroy forces one to look at the way modernity and progress are founded on the basis of slavery. In so doing, that complicates the way we normally view authenticity. Progress and modernity are often considered a Western and solely white achievement. Gilroy and Steen both demonstrate this in their acknowledgement of jazz and swing (mainly a black enterprise) as being progress which was then touted as the new American (or white) cultural contribution to the world. This brings the question of authenticity into question.
ReplyDeleteSteen also demonstrates this in her relation of Mei Lanfang. Lanfang was marketed to America as authentic Asian culture. As Steen also points out, Lanfang actually incorporated Western ideas into his performances. What was truly authentic about Lanfang’s representation of Chinese culture? As I try to think of a contemporary example of racial formation, I find myself noticing how the mixed race couple or family has become the new “it” item of American TV. Shows like Modern Family, Glee, Happy Endings, and Whitney all contain relationships that are interracial. Is this the updated version of Steen’s observances? The majority of these shows are sitcoms which I think speaks to the power of this view. I am sure there are dramas that contain mixed race families, but I could not personally think of any.
It seems the powers that produce much of our pop culture are trying to portray the protypical American family as diverse as possible. As with everything we have read so far, this has a good side and a bad side. The good side is fighting the hegemonic norm of one race families and relationships. On the bad side, is it reinscribing racial stereotypes and highlighting difference rather than de-emphasizing it?
- Heather
I read Steen’s description of The Emperor Jones after I watched the film. Among many differences of perception, I did not understand the comment she made about Jones’ visions in the forest. She states, “he becomes haunted by the specters of his personal and collective racial past.” (77) I saw a murderer haunted by the souls of those he’d killed. While Steen does acknowledge these killings in parentheses later, she categorizes them as “his worst personal memories.” (77) This removes his own agency in the murders and instead places him as the victim. This adds to my opinion that the anti-imperialist argument Steen puts forth seems to be contradictory. She claims that blackness has been used to heighten this argument, but it is quite difficult for me to imagine any less of an anti-imperialist impact if a white man were to have played Brutus. Steen also uses Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice in a similar way, saying that “blackness is called upon as a kind of disguise, a cover for the ritual humiliation, exploitation, and violation of those outside its borders.” (164) While I acknowledge that their appointments constitute added meaning to the political climate and actions of the time she refers to, I think Steen is not being as careful as she claims one should be. She says that we “should resist the easy temptation to label Powell or Rice as Uncle Toms,” but the narrative she is choosing to foreground is doing exactly that in my view. Though perhaps unintentional, Steen is claiming that these figures are betraying their race in some way by taking part in the political conversation at all. This, to me, seems to be trapping us back into the historical narrative from which most of the texts we have read wish to break out.
ReplyDeleteThe texts of this unit all involved the inter- and intra-national movement not just of people but of culture, as well. Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic is the key theoretical concept underpinning his and others’ analysis of the mutability and mobility of culture and the breakdown of nation-state-based paradigms that were flawed from the outset. The primary example throughout much of Gilroy’s work is the transnational invention of musical genres and forms like jazz that become “distinctly American” exports. Macka B and Kofi’s “[‘So Proud of Mandela’]”, for example “was produced in Britain by the children of Caribbean and African settlers from raw materials supplied by black Chicago but filtered through Kingstonian sensibility in order to pay tribute to a black hero whose global significance lies beyond the limits of his partial South African citizenship and the impossible national identity which goes with it”(95). Here is the polycultural manifestation of the black Atlantic—embodying thousands of miles traveled and drawing upon countless cultural influences to create such an amalgam text.
ReplyDeleteMoving to Shannon Steen’s Racial Geometries of the Black Atlantic, Asian Pacific and American Theatre, Steen refigures her approach to studying theatre in a text rife with theatrical wordplay and various case study examples to show how “we can see how the theatricalization of domestic racial formation was created in a dialectical relationship with America’s attempt to become a major player on the world stage”(5). So, again, we’re returning to Butlerian (ugh) performativity, or so it seems—American racialized performance is not just an “export” but really more a cultural imperialist project. The refiguring of the movement to the Pacific embodies what Steen and others have termed racial geometry (again, on the inter-national level)—“race become as means to organize international power, global space, and the bodies within it”(5).
The images on the covers of The Black Atlantic by Paul Gilroy and Racial Geometries by Shannon Steen have a great deal in common. Both Images suggest the connection between different locations, races, and nations. Steen’s book proudly displays a picture of Paul Robeson, Anna May Wong, and Mei Lanfang—a Black American actor, Chinese American actor, and Chinese actor. Gilroy’s book reproduces Aaron Douglas’ “Building More Stately Mansions,” which is a palimpsest of architecture that traverses time periods and indicates major locations across the globe. The images richly suggest the content of the books by visually depicting diverse and distant locations as interconnected. The texts take a broad approach to racial formation by examining the links between distant cultures, nationalities, and races to interrogate the exchange of ideas, peoples, and commodities. I read these books as maps that specifically highlight given locations and draw lines of explanation and analysis between them.
ReplyDeleteA contemporary map is currently being drawn by the occupy Wall Street movement. The movement now claims that a total of 2,296 cities across the world have begun an “occupy” protest. What are the connections between a protest started by disenfranchised middle and lower class US Americans and the diverse list of nations, races, and peoples across the globe that are joining the movement? When Steen traces the connection between Eugene O’Neill’s Irish heritage, African Americans, Black Caribbeans, and Paul Robeson’s Anti-colonial activism the reality of global interconnections becomes clear. But such a simple geometry seems impossible in our contemporary age of instant communication and global influence. Information and ideas expand and infest like a “plague”—to borrow from Aratud. How can we expand the methodologies of the black Atlantic, racial geometries, polyculturalism, articulation, etc. to take into account the reality and complexity of our contemporary world?
Note: See the following link for information on these protests and a map depicting the worldwide phenomena: http://www.meetup.com/occupytogether/
The texts of this module recalled themes of performativity discussed in previous modules in the semester, particularly the second module. Paul Gilroy’s thoughts on tradition, and the idea that the “traditional” is the “given” circumstance or the “assumed” way of life aligns very much with Butler’s thoughts on performativity, and the notion of certain bodies always existing only in relationship to the bodies that matter, or the “traditional.” Shannon Steen’s entire project is based on the reflections of racialized national and international performativity that can be seen within performance.
ReplyDeleteSteen identifies performance as a way to comprehend racial configuration, and how America acts within that configuration. Specifically, Steen uses a number of live theatre performances (as well as subsequent film versions) from the era between the first and second world wars. We can see examples of this idea of negotiating race on stage within the context of the United States' place (and aspirations) in the world at that moment, in the visual texts of the module as well. Steen analyzes the Federal Theatre Project's performance of The Swing Mikado as a piece of theatre coming out of East Asia, performed through a predominantly African American music and dance, for a white audience. This, she claims, is reflective of America's past dominance and absorption of the African and Atlantic diaspora, and it's interest in capitalizing on East Asian countries.
Post-WWII, we can see examples of how what has become not necessarily a capitalist dominance of the United States over Japan, but rather an ongoing negotiation of dominance over the Pacific. On the first day of class, we watched the music video for Nicki Minaj's "Superbass," which is a song belonging to what was originally a predominantly African American musical style being compared to the predominantly white image of Barbie, while simultaneously using images inspired by Japanese anime. What this reflects about current racial geometries is presented simultaneously with a larger idea of America’s capitalist influence internationally.
In The Black Atlantic, Gilroy highlights the problematic contrast between ideals of “modernity” and “progress” and the racial reality of enslavement that constructed them, creating a double consciousness torn between racial and national identities. This same struggle can be used to describe contemporary society, contrasting the reality of an increasing gap between rich and a disproportionately racialized—African-American and Latino—poor against the ideals of “capitalism,” “democracy,” and “color-blind” society. Since the current economic situation also has a substantial effect on the white poor, racial discussions of class issues are discouraged. At the same time—like Mei Lanfang’s tour brought the Chinese population into new spheres, making them more visible—the economic crisis and its resulting migrations (both to new areas and to jobs that whites might not previously have considered) have helped make visible the increasingly non-white population of the United States—projected to become the majority by 2050. The unease created by this demographic shift is reflected in popular television shows which generally fall between two extremes: nostalgic returns to an un-racialized past or fantasy (“PanAm,” “Mad Men,” “Once Upon a Time”) or contemporary visions of an integrated, equal, unproblematic racial dynamic (the multi-race police forces of every cop show—frequently with the “other” in positions of power, the high numbers of interracial couples/friendships in sitcoms). In both cases, these performances respond to uncertainties about white American identity and position, reflecting the wish to return to a less complex, more powerful position contrasted with the idea that racial questions have been solved and require no more discussion or changes to the status quo. While strong representation in popular culture is certainly an important step towards solving racial prejudices, the question remains of how to provide these representations while still engaging the unequal and increasingly complex realities of race.
ReplyDeleteI enjoy thinking, reading, and talking about modernity: its emergence, promises, complications, and unintended consequences. After reading The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness by Paul Gilroy, I thought back on all of the articles and book chapters I’ve read for other courses discussing modernity, particularly the problem of it. For many scholars and intellectuals who lost faith in modernity, it seems the world wars were the biggest blow to seemingly empty promises of progress. Off the top of my head, I can’t recall one article that addressed the fact that the slave trade continued into the Enlightenment period. I don’t remember an article that discussed how non-white, non-Western men were perceived as lacking the cognitive faculties of reason. I can’t point to one that highlighted the use of modern, Western thought by Atlantic blacks to fight for their freedom from European colonial powers. It is precisely this omission of history which prompts Gilroy to state, “A concept of modernity that is worth its salt ought, for example, to have something to contribute to an analysis of how the particular varieties of radicalism articulated through the revolts of enslaved people made selective use of the ideologies of the western Age of Revolution and then flowed into social movements of an anti-colonial and decidedly anti-capitalist type” (44). Gilroy seeks, then, to complicate the “tidy, holistic conception of modernity” (45). In addition to complicating the idea of modernity itself, Gilroy also wants to complicate the modern believe in “the coherence of the subject” by highlighting the experience and work of several black writers, demonstrating their double consciousness as men rooted in the enlightened West and in relation to oppressed blacks within the Atlantic (55). In doing so, Gilroy offers an “intellectual history of the black Atlantic” (58).
ReplyDeletePaul Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic” presents such an incredible multitude of ideas and concepts that, despite its relatively thin two-hundred and fifty pages, it feels like a thousand: almost every single sentence seems to carry enormous weight. His many projects include defining and locating the African diaspora’s position in regards to modernity, aligning the very concept of diaspora in Pan-African and Black history with that of Jewish scholarship, and disrupting the bonds of geographic confinement that surround traditional ideas of nationalism and ethnicity in Black cultural studies. He seeks a truly Pan-African, fully inclusive diasporic discourse in place of a prevailing sense of African-American exceptionalism. He borrows Du Bois’ concept of double-consciousness, adds a few layers of his own, and develops a trans-national cultural construction that embraces a triangulation of U.S., Carribbean, and African continental diasporas into one collective cultural consciousness: the Black Atlantic. In “Racial Geometries”, Shannon Steen looks toward the Pacific and attempts to continue this project of disassembling binaries and exploring the interconnectedness of various racial formations through the lens of theater. She investigates a series of racially complex texts by examining the author’s and actor’s personal biographies, the various renditions on stage and screen, and the contemporary historical/social/political contexts in which they were written/performed. Steen traces the echoes of minstrelsy that were perpetuated in American performances post-Blackface, unpacks the utilization of Blackface versus Yellowface, and looks at how these types of cultural productions influenced and were influenced by racial identity formation in the U.S. (as well as in the foreign cultures they were mimicking). Both of these texts provide a great deal of fodder for further study by succeeding generations of scholars. With Gilroy, every other sentence could be borrowed for a separate thesis, and Steen’s ‘coda’ abruptly attempts to tie the period between the World Wars with recent politics in the U.S. and leaves a rich period of 50 years or so relatively untouched.
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