It seems like a serendipitous convergence that we're taking this course amidst such a dense web of conversations about feminine consumption and politics. I never cease to be fascinated by the media (and our own) obsession with these political ladies' wardrobes and the constant ties made to questions of class in America, especially at a moment when the global and national economy is absolutely tanking. Maybe Imelda Marcos really did set the model for first lady fashions...
And, Nancy Reagan was a size 2??
Sunday, November 9, 2008
Friday, November 7, 2008
Visceral Impressions: The Fashion-Music Discussion + Angela Davis
First, I apologize for the extreme lateness of this post. Blogger has just allowed me to sign in after a couple hours of 'server not found' madness.
I have been ruminating recently on the relationship between music and fashion that appeared here on the blog a few weeks ago. I think that music and fashion share some interesting commonalities in the ways that they are recognized and consumed. Each of them is made up of a host of minute details—notes, sounds, instruments, fibers, fabrics and textures—but each is also very frequently processed at a macro level of mood or tone without the consumer’s (in this case meaning anyone encountering and visually or aurally consuming the music or fashion in question… “perceiver” might be a more suitable word) attention being paid to the often significant details of the article's construction.
While it might easily be argued that any media or art may be approached with varying levels of attention to detail, I would contend that fashion and music (among other possible social or artistic projects I’m not thinking of right now) are uniquely consumable and recognizable from a distance without enjoyment being predicated on notice and processing of said detail (unlike, for example, a story or film). The style of a given ensemble is most frequently perceived as a hazy combination of colors and shapes, just as a piece of music is initially a collection of sounds. Each has a specific emotional character. Without further attention paid, they remain just those hazy constructions in a person’s consciousness, but this lack of attention to detail does not mean that the article has not been enjoyed. I think consumers frequently have a very strong visceral sense of a particular fashion (be it an entire style or a specific outfit) or song, without being able to recall or describe many of the components of its construction. When people do attempt to describe the qualities of something with which they have come in contact, they often do so in terms of comparisons with other styles, outfits, pieces or songs that have a similar qualities or evoke a like feeling. It is often only at the level of emulation or connoisseurship that a consumer actually invests their attention in the individual components that actually make up the feeling of a particular presentation. I think this experience is one in which the consumer processes the form of an artifact and then may or may not ever proceed to engage with the details that create the individual artifact’s content.
In some ways I think that this relates to Angela Davis’s discussion of her experience as a photographic subject. Above, I am suggesting that the impression of a style is essentially that style for viewers that do not undergo further investigation. The photograph compounds this issue, as it further distances the article from its detail and context. This impression of an impression becomes permanently encapsulated in the two-dimensional image. Davis’s photographs divorce her from the content of both her physical style and her larger persona in general, reducing her to a synecdoche of her form—the Afro. Like many cultural or historical figures, she remains a vague impression to the uniformed or uninitiated. The strikingness of her image may actually impede consumer’s inquiry and understanding of her cultural meaning, as her form, via the photographs, is so richly endowed with impressions and associations, that they are assumed to be that image's content.
I have been ruminating recently on the relationship between music and fashion that appeared here on the blog a few weeks ago. I think that music and fashion share some interesting commonalities in the ways that they are recognized and consumed. Each of them is made up of a host of minute details—notes, sounds, instruments, fibers, fabrics and textures—but each is also very frequently processed at a macro level of mood or tone without the consumer’s (in this case meaning anyone encountering and visually or aurally consuming the music or fashion in question… “perceiver” might be a more suitable word) attention being paid to the often significant details of the article's construction.
While it might easily be argued that any media or art may be approached with varying levels of attention to detail, I would contend that fashion and music (among other possible social or artistic projects I’m not thinking of right now) are uniquely consumable and recognizable from a distance without enjoyment being predicated on notice and processing of said detail (unlike, for example, a story or film). The style of a given ensemble is most frequently perceived as a hazy combination of colors and shapes, just as a piece of music is initially a collection of sounds. Each has a specific emotional character. Without further attention paid, they remain just those hazy constructions in a person’s consciousness, but this lack of attention to detail does not mean that the article has not been enjoyed. I think consumers frequently have a very strong visceral sense of a particular fashion (be it an entire style or a specific outfit) or song, without being able to recall or describe many of the components of its construction. When people do attempt to describe the qualities of something with which they have come in contact, they often do so in terms of comparisons with other styles, outfits, pieces or songs that have a similar qualities or evoke a like feeling. It is often only at the level of emulation or connoisseurship that a consumer actually invests their attention in the individual components that actually make up the feeling of a particular presentation. I think this experience is one in which the consumer processes the form of an artifact and then may or may not ever proceed to engage with the details that create the individual artifact’s content.
In some ways I think that this relates to Angela Davis’s discussion of her experience as a photographic subject. Above, I am suggesting that the impression of a style is essentially that style for viewers that do not undergo further investigation. The photograph compounds this issue, as it further distances the article from its detail and context. This impression of an impression becomes permanently encapsulated in the two-dimensional image. Davis’s photographs divorce her from the content of both her physical style and her larger persona in general, reducing her to a synecdoche of her form—the Afro. Like many cultural or historical figures, she remains a vague impression to the uniformed or uninitiated. The strikingness of her image may actually impede consumer’s inquiry and understanding of her cultural meaning, as her form, via the photographs, is so richly endowed with impressions and associations, that they are assumed to be that image's content.
Thursday, November 6, 2008
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.
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.
I'm Not Perfect (But I'm Perfect for You)
Funny enough, all of the readings came together for me tonight in Grace Jones’ 1986 video “I’m not Perfect (But I’m Perfect for You).” The video is outrageous (as is Grace, always), and in a very non-subtle way, addresses issues of blackness, whiteness, exoticism, appropriation, the creation of image, cosmetics (not to mention gender ambiguity; she is a figure we can address on so many levels). One of the first shots of the video is Grace being smeared with white face cream, and throughout there are references to beauty production/creation and “putting on a face,” especially racially. Grace is shown in white-face and being lowered into a bath of white paint, harkening the past ideals of lily white skin that Peiss discusses.
Berry and hooks both discuss the creation of the image of the “Other” as “sexually licentious and exotic.” What was striking to me about Berry’s chapter, in conjunction with the other readings, is that the exoticized/sexualized subjects of 1930s Hollywood were not black, they were mostly Spanish/Latin, exotic European, and sometimes Asian. This got me thinking about Grace Jones in A View to a Kill; her character May Day epitomizes erotic exoticism and the fantasy of “primitive sexuality.” At the same time, her character is masculine, buff, and dangerous, occupying the space of a titillating exoticness that threatens. This is an extreme example of the exoticism that Berry discusses, except that it was rarely seen in the black female characters of Classical Hollywood. Although hooks would look on May Day as representing an “alternate playground” for white men who seek to experience “real” pleasure, it is important to note that Grace Jones is a shocking juxtaposition to what came before her, about as far away from the Hattie McDaniel type as you could get.
The issue I found that really coursed through all the articles was the idea that the potential political or social impact of blackness or Otherness is nullified when appropriated into mainstream culture. Like the use of make-up in the films of the 1930s, the commoditization of the Afro erased its political impact. What Mercer’s article takes into consideration that hooks' doesn’t is the idea of mutual appropriation-re-appropriation. Grace Jones seems to epitomize this back and forth of appropriations, using culturally defined white make-up techniques, at the same time that she wears men’s clothes, and has a flat-top. Grace Jones has made a career by defining herself as Other, in terms of race, sexuality, gender, she crosses and traverses all boundaries. But then you have to think about the song itself, “I’m Not Perfect” with juxtaposed images of white vs. black Grace Jones? Within popular culture, it seems that strong political messages do get a bit mixed up. Grace Jones and Madonna have a lot in common, as the lack of depth in their messages make it seem that they are using appropriation and Otherness to sell a product rather than to make political statements.
It’s hard to say whether or not Grace Jones has read bell hooks, but her new single is called “Corporate Cannibal.”
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.
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.
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.
Hair today, Barack to the Future, a reading response
I love to read bell hooks. People who were alive when Pauline Kael was writing for the New Yorker tell me that folks were drawn to her at the time not because of her taste, necessarily, but because she was so fun to argue with as you read along -- after you’d seen a film. hooks is even better, for her writing is so powerful, so confident, so well-argued that you’re nodding your head along -- totally in agreement with her -- until about an hour or so afterward, it hits you: Hey, wait a second! Then you want to read the chapter again.
It’s difficult for me to address race and culture without being thrown back to Tuesday’s historic election. I was enjoying the “punditry” on CNN, post-acceptance speech, and the commentators made a point I had recognized in my brain and in my bones, but had never articulated in a sentence: Barack Obama’s campaign addressed the United States of 2050 (the one we were promised in elementary school that seemed like a lie once we got to college). In that US, today’s minority is the majority.
After reading chapter two of Black Looks, I began to consider what will become of the hard line hooks has drawn between appropriation and appreciation in the future. Who is allowed to do what in an increasingly multi-racial world? I began to re-engage celebrity and tv journalists' annoying, oft-repeated question over whether Obama was "black" or "black enough."
hooks’s statement, “They claim the body of the colored Other instrumentally, as unexplored terrain, a symbolic frontier …” though it was intended to describe white male sexual desire for dark-skinned females, actually served to bum me out about the news that several top designers are “fighting over” the totally awesome Michelle Obama. I was really excited about that, and now it’s all imperialism. Talk about anhedonia.
Mercer does a lot to recoup the absence of possibility provided by the hooks and Davis texts; she acknowledges that intercultural appropriation is possible from both vantage points, and that the associations of hairstyles with Africa -- which were empowering for Davis and many of her generation -- are exaggerated.
It’s difficult for me to address race and culture without being thrown back to Tuesday’s historic election. I was enjoying the “punditry” on CNN, post-acceptance speech, and the commentators made a point I had recognized in my brain and in my bones, but had never articulated in a sentence: Barack Obama’s campaign addressed the United States of 2050 (the one we were promised in elementary school that seemed like a lie once we got to college). In that US, today’s minority is the majority.
After reading chapter two of Black Looks, I began to consider what will become of the hard line hooks has drawn between appropriation and appreciation in the future. Who is allowed to do what in an increasingly multi-racial world? I began to re-engage celebrity and tv journalists' annoying, oft-repeated question over whether Obama was "black" or "black enough."
hooks’s statement, “They claim the body of the colored Other instrumentally, as unexplored terrain, a symbolic frontier …” though it was intended to describe white male sexual desire for dark-skinned females, actually served to bum me out about the news that several top designers are “fighting over” the totally awesome Michelle Obama. I was really excited about that, and now it’s all imperialism. Talk about anhedonia.
Mercer does a lot to recoup the absence of possibility provided by the hooks and Davis texts; she acknowledges that intercultural appropriation is possible from both vantage points, and that the associations of hairstyles with Africa -- which were empowering for Davis and many of her generation -- are exaggerated.
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