Spice, Neo-Imperialism and Resistance (Reading Response)

It’s telling that we’re reading bell hooks and Kobena Mercer right after Halloween since the holiday clearly sanctions and institutionalizes even, the sampling of otherness. Admittedly, this isn’t quite the same violent sampling as Ivy League young white men taking a veritable sexual cruise of otherness before they dedicate their sexualities to pure, white femininity. Nevertheless, it’s hardly religious revelation to suggest that images can be a sort of violence too.

hooks talks about consuming the other for the perpetuation of white male breadth of desire and experience in the context of the “current wave of ‘imperialist nostalgia,’” which, for me, resonates rather well with Paul Gilroy’s 2006 lecture on the national rhetoric of multiculturalism in times of war. Gilroy of course discusses the British situation, where the realties of fallen empire produce a “postcolonial melancholia,” which, in its own turn, attempts to re-invigorate an image of nationhood (Britishness). Because political wisdom dictates (however erroneously) that diversity undermines national solidarity, a rendering of national homogeneity becomes the standard. Gilroy calls this revival a “neo-imperialist spirit,” and in the aftermath of Katrina, 9/11, recession, and war, the strange affinity for post-race in contemporary U.S. discourse seems curiously similar. I hate to assign Barack’s win to liberal tears and neo-liberal agendas, but considering the nation’s over-zealous commitment to all things impotently interracial, multicultural and post-racial (We, the Democrats, have a new coalition. Have you heard?), coupled with some serious global PR problems, the imperialist nostalgia that both hooks and Gilroy, albeit in rather different contexts, reference has some traction.

These days, interracial coupling is hardly confined to Benetton ads – it’s everywhere and it’s selling us everything, padded by a shiny promise of multicultural journeys that leave us better, more enlightened liberals. I’m pointing to coupling (and it’s of course, only hetero coupling) because it’s literal sexual consumption that we’re indulging in, the wildly progressive dramatization of the historical rape construct (I’m not very good at irony, but that’s it). The narrative is always about newly conscious whiteness venturing into the depths (and marketable eccentricity!) of the urban jungle, which makes whiteness mobile, transnational conqueror and otherness passive, eager to have their rhetoric colonized by all sorts of “post’s” and Foucauldian-type endless social constructivism. And all so timely! The nation, after all, needs a morale boost and neo-imperialism is here to negotiate power expectation for fallen heterosexual whiteness.

Ok, I’ve strayed and ranted… And with no attempt at smooth transitioning, I want to turn attention to Angela Davis, who, in discussing her Afro, criticizes the empty nostalgia of the hairstyle’s revival. It’s nothing but pastiche, she says, severed from its historical referents and contexts, a symbol of commercial appropriation of the margins. Fair enough, but is there really no space for style politics, for using the principles of postmodernity to poke at capitalism? Mercer expresses some careful optimism, and I want to chime in: what about Zoot Suits? Removed from traditional binary identity affiliations, criticized by people like Octavio Paz for being too blurred, too removed from history, the Zoot Suit movement was all about asserting a third space of political identity through style. Sounds like politics making postmodern pastiche do its dirty work of identification and strategic marginalization (if only for a contained moment). Is it lame to lean on Hebdige and glorify the one second of pre-market-appropriation subcultural formation that manages to actually use consumer capitalism for resistance?

Apologies for the disjointed nature of this post.