reading response

Mercer views the appropriations and counter-appropriations between black and white youth sub-cultures, and between black revolutionary cultures and mainstream white commodity culture, as a semiotic "style war," a constant back-and-forth, with influence running in two directions in a productive way.  The model of power Mercer is working with is Foucaultian: power is never simply repressive, but rather productive, energizing a field of inter-cultural relations in continual struggle.

In contrast to Mercer, hooks seems to be working with a view of the appropriations of black culture by "commodity culture" as unilateral.  While this paints a pessimistic picture of racial oppression and thus may be politically tactical (work to galvanize militancy), it has the disadvantage of making black people appear to be passive victims of the White Machine of "commodity culture."  Both hooks and Angela Davis reference "nostalgia" as a politically retrogressive elision of the historical past in favor of commodity, fashion, and consumerist pleasure in the present.  What such "nostalgia," for Davis, elides, in this specific instance, is a history lesson: the "reign of terror of young Black women" who were sadistically targeted by law enforcement because of their resemblance to her Wanted poster.

Is it possible, however, that Davis and hooks enact a nostalgia of their own--a nostalgia for the days when oppression was so overt that it gave one a gigantic sense of purpose--namely, a Manichean contest between good and evil, which electrified the stakes of individual existence?  Davis laments the atrophy of historical memory; especially in light of an Obama victory, however, (and, granted, we are 14 years after the publication of Davis's article), such dwelling-on-the-past seems to be counterproductively back-looking insofar as it enacts a cynicism about the distance we have come and even, at times, seemingly, about the very possibility of progress (too "Enlightenment" a notion?).

Hooks remarks on a contemporary trend of white male inter-racial sexual conquest, which she reads as racist since it recapitulates an imperial logic.  In "The Bitter Tea of General Yen" (1933), however, it's a woman who subversively desires the Chinese warlord.  This seems a slap-in-the-face to any patriarchal imperial logic.  It's no wonder the General must die in the end, since he's succeeded in arousing a white woman's erotic interest.  Sarah Berry notes that, despite the persistence of discourses of racial purity in '30s Hollywood, the amount of publicity given to "cosmetic illusionism" and the prevalence of the trope of the "makeover" tended to "undermine the racial essentialism that required stereotypes to be taken as signs with real-world referents" (99).  While the portrayal of Yen is obviously racist, I was also interested in the possibility that the Danish actor Nils Asther's masquerade as Yen possibly activates, in its performative ability to embody the Other, an empathic extension of oneself that, while is also enacts a racist iconography and imperialist expansionist logic, must also at least get the actor thinking about the "humanity" of the (in this instance, ultimately not unsympathetic) character he is embodying.  There is something potentially de-essentializing about Asther's masquerade as Yen in its "cosmetic illusionism," even if, simultaneously, this dip-into-Otherness also tends to recuperate an essentializing imperial logic based on the binary of subject/object, self/other.