Nostalgia and black style politics

This is a bit late and unnecessarily long. I thought I would be able to go back and edit it down, but I just wanted to get it posted. Apologies.

I want to map some of the temporal threads that run through Mercer, Davis and hooks’ work, as I am fascinated by how nostalgia and romanticism centrally function in their configurations. And, I think it’s an important point of convergence between these articles.

Angela Davis offers a personal account of how her images, which have been used by the FBI to criminalize her and by black cultural movements to heroize her, have recently circulated as emblems of style. She points to how her subjectivity and her political work have been conflated with the Afro, attributing this remarkably stubborn association to a visual commodity culture that is more invested in shaping the criteria for fashion, or more specifically, black fashion (she refers largely to a spread in Vibe magazine), than repossessing the political histories of how these photographs circulated in the first place. Davis, of course, holds an ambivalent relationship to these recent trends. She notes, “The unprecedented contemporary circulation of photographic and filmic images of African Americans has multiple and contradictory implications,” as they “promise the visual memory of older and departed generations” but faces the “danger that this historical memory may become ahistorical and apolitical” (38). She then borrows from John Berger’s About Looking to note the problems and possibilities of photography: the photograph can either become a part of everyday historiographic practice, a ‘living context,’ or be petrified as ‘arrested moments,’ incapable of being laced into present. Indeed, Davis understandably bemoans the nostalgic function, the temporal freezing, performed by the dissemination of her images in contemporary fashion magazines, as her Afro-donning image becomes paralyzed as an empty sign or artifact and ignores the political heft they carried in speaking on behalf of the number of black women who were persecuted and harassed by law enforcement for also wearing their hair big as well. But, Davis hardly calls for a return to the past; rather she calls for ‘strategies of engagement’ with these types of historical images in order to disarticulate romanticized attachments to once politicized style choices, like the Afro.

bell hooks’ chapter moves between an address of erotic desire for the racialized subject and the commodity desire or fetishism for the Other, which for her are linked. Central to her argument is the notion of ‘imperialist nostalgia,’ which ‘takes the form of reenacting and reritualizing in different ways the imperialist, colonizing journey as narrative fantasy of power and desire, of seduction by the Other” (25). In other words, the Other, for the desiring white subject, embodies the ‘primitivism,’ the ‘exoticism’ and ‘wildness’ that was supposed to be supplanted by modernity and imperialism. This temporal loss is recovered by the white subject’s consumption of the racialized body, which enacts itself not in the form of suppression, as it once was before, but through a supposedly exonerating desire for diversity and pluralism. This nostalgic function also accounts for a resurgence and commodification of black nationalism, a ‘fantasy of Otherness that reduces protest to spectacle and stimulates even greater longing for the primitive’ (33). Thus, hooks and Davis share a fundamental mistrust of these historical evacuations of black political culture of the 1960s.

Mercer, of course, offers a more nuanced take on black style politics, paying particularly close attention to black hair in the 1950s and 1960s. He refutes the association of the Afro and dreadlocks with the natural blackness, carefully articulating the ways in which these hairstyles required meticulous manipulation and maintenance. Rather, these hairstyles’ connotative links to ‘the natural’ functioned symbolically as ‘strategic contestations’ against European aesthetics of ‘artifice’ and beauty. That is, in order to be strategic, the Afro had to be defined against the associations of beauty with whiteness; in true post-structural style, Mercer moves away from strict binaries and reminds that there is a certain ‘western inheritance’ that comes with the ‘natural’ written into the significations made by the Afro. However, what is particularly interesting and useful in Mercer’s article, in my opinion, is the way he points out the nostalgic constructions of black style politics of the 1960s. The Afro and dreadlocks were imagined to hold historical roots in Africa. These connections were indeed ‘strategic’ as well. There were no actual connections between these hairstyles and African culture; the Afro and deadlocks would actually most likely read in Africa as distinctly first world. So, I think that this particular reading is an important one to make because it allows for a complication of the more blanketed argument about the commodity fetishism of black style politics made by hooks and Davis. Although, it would have been nice for Mercer to pose some readings about black women's hair. He seems to focus more on black male hair styles.