http://websites.umass.edu/nalahmed/

Rolland Murray opens his book, Our Living Manhood with a death of man. The man, Malcolm X, his experience as an African American and his status as a father of Black Nationalism and his ultimate assassination makes it a great metaphor that reflects historical, cultural and ideological complexity of the Black Power Era. Malcolm X lived experiences of many black men: he began his life as a victim of racism, then became a hustler and later evolved into a pious and intelligent man. Later he submitted himself to the hegemony of patriarchy but died as a man open to different voices and ideologies. His death triggered both Black Power and Black Arts Movements and signified a change in nature and significance of Black masculinity, which is at the heart of Murray’s argument.

Patriarchal family at the core of Black institution and ideology since the 19^th century, also propagated by the Nation of Islam and the early Malcolm X, gave way to new ideological constructions of masculinity. Unlike the earlier bourgeois structures, the strengthening Marxist ideologies and institutions like Revolutionary Action Movement and the Black Panther Party reinforced masculinity and masculine body alone as a goal for new Black ideological formations. Murray poignantly points out that due to absence of a specific geographical terrain and solid Black nationalist institutions, identity and ideology become the backbone of Black nationalism. And this new, masculine identity and its lionization becomes the new ideological and aesthetic goal, many writers and scholars rush to highlight its dangers.

In order to effectively recruit people into the armies of Black nation, Black Artists chose poetry and drama to as dominant methods of artistic expression. These genres, Murray argues, posses the interpolative effect so needed for the survival of Black Nationalism. Due to this phenomenon, scholar explains, novel became a marginalized genre, and therefore, the last resort for criticism of the ideologies of misogyny homophobia that were eroding the black national consciousness. This brings up another Black Power aspect that Murray effectively deconstructs in his book: cultural nationalism and its obsession with male performance and male rhetoric, along with its problems.

My concern with his choice of novel as a vehicle for deconstruction of Black masculinity is that Black Arts and Black Power, was, in many ways about seeking new, alternative cultural forms and cultural spaces, which were found in innovative and radical aesthetics of the Black Arts Movement . I believe that drama, and, especially poetry, are deeply rooted in African diasporic culture and that is why Black Arts poetry and its experiment with poetic forms and music became the major historical and aesthetic legacy of the movement. By rejecting poetry and its legacy as an ideological matrix of Black Power, Murray makes his argument fragmented and incomprehensible.

Even though Murray examines a wide scope of writers: James Allen McPherson, James Baldwin, John Edgar Wideman, Clarence Major, Hal Bennett, and John Oliver Killens. His initiative of introducing a discussion of a marginalized genders and sexualities by the means of a marginalized genre is innovative and interesting, however, its accuracy and depth are at question.

Murray poignantly highlights James Baldwin’s evolution from a prolific and audacious critic of gender and sexuality, to his later adaptation of phalocentric ideas due to his adherence to Black Power. Murray reveals Baldwin to be the major force behind the change in masculine ideologies of Black Americans triggered by Black Power. Murray carefully traces the ways in which Baldwin’s early criticism of oppressive masculinities fades away with the growth of his alliance with Black Power and reveals the gradual deterioration of his earlier radical views.Nevertheless, Murray’s standing towards Baldwin’s writing lacks confidence, since he simultaneously tries to justify Baldwin’s decisions and phalocentric literary and ideological practices.

The scholar’s argument discusses the building blocks of Black nationalism : ideology, identity, performance, and illuminates the controversy embedded in masculine and phalocentric ideas and aesthetics. The major problem with his analysis is the purely theoretical nature of his discourse. In other words, even though Murray discusses multiple dimensions of what Black nationalism strived to be theoretically and ideologically, but does not pay enough attention to the history of the movement and what it came to be.

hystericalblindness-blog.blogspot.com

In Digital Diasporas, Anna Everett fleshes out a history of the people she had referred to earlier as “Afrogeeks.” Like the writers of Diaspora whom she cites as the foundation of her study, she attempts a history from the point of view of everyday people living as Afrogeeks and Black Early Adopters of technology, and Black technomasters. Everett, here, produces a history of, in a word, Black diasporic technolust, and the cultural responses to the phenomenon, including its enforced silencing in the mass-media.

The book is playful and simultaneously engaged in a search for real political change. Everett is interested in revolution – a term that this reviewer finds conspicuously absent from new media studies. Thusly, culture becomes blinded to black technomastery, technolust, and other ways of viewing Afrogeeks. She notes at the end of the book that we recently elected one to the Presidency.

The book begins with a close-reading of computer boot-up language on a DOS page that labels the two hard drive sectors as Master and Slave. She notes that it is of importance to her that this relationship is what predicates her access to the technology she is writing about, and links this to the middle passage, and African diasporic consciousness. Her introduction notes that some of her inspiration in studying the digital world in terms of diaspora comes from CLR James, WEB Du Bois, Amiri Baraka, Aime Cesaire, Black Nationalism, Kwanzaa, Huey Newton, James Brown, Malcolm X, Afros, dashikis, drum language, Swahili, and other people places and things of the African Diaspora. The intro reads like a trip through Wikipedia or a black web ring, where one clicks on the links for a seemingly endless flow. She argues that these migrations, rooted in African diasporic migrations (forced and unforced), characterize the “migratory trek through the evolving technospheres of cyberspace…” (6)

She claims it is nearly impossible to study the internet in the same way one studies other forms of media, due to its hyper-ephemerality. She tries to make up for this problem by using a “moment-in-time” approach. She has saved entire websites from the mid-90s through the mid-late 2000s in order to do so.

She argues as well that the revolution was televised in the 60’s and 70’s, but the “conservative televisual panopticon” is able to create a backlash against anything by framing it as “unsafe.” This is precisely what she argues happened with Civil Rights struggles, and Black Nationalist movements in the 60s and 70s. The urban and the black public was framed as forbidding of the “orderly advancement of democratic ideals.” It is these black publics that Everett studies seeks to explore and expand.

After defining these reasons for the absence of a discussion around Black technomastery, Everett embarks on a dizzying series of stories about several Black technomasters. She includes among their ranks science fiction writers Samuel Delaney and Octavia Butler, and Hip Hop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa. Of interest to Everett are ways in which the internet was utilized in its early stages by African Diasporic virtual communities like Naijanet to have conversations regarding their political differences, and possibilities. In addition, Everett revisits the internet mastery of the Black organizers and Black female e-commentators of the Million Woman March, simultaneously being snubbed by, and raising nuanced critiques of the white media system. She ends several chapters by positing the possibility of digital grassroots activism, emancipation and liberation, but interestingly posits these possibilities by accessing de Certeau’s notion of the everyday, via Sly Stone’s Everyday People.

Chapter four is about video games, and is framed as a challenge to mainstream media’s discursive practices, and academia’s discursive practices regarding them. Everett challenges video game studies to address the physical and epistemic violence in video games, but not to presume to know their real life affects. She then goes on to do just that: discussing what she calls “high tech blackface” and orientalism. Other objects of study for Evertt’s notion of video game studies, are civilization simulation games, which range from promoting a 19th century colonial project, to the unapologetic angry white backlash against political correctness that was Ethnic Cleansing: the game. Everett also interviews a black female gamer who claims to have usurped mastery of the game from its creators, consistently leading the Zulu nation to world domination.

Next, she focuses on Anita Brown, who used AOL to be a “cyberflaneur,” and on several African websites and databases that offer services to Black women. Here, real people are confronting the entrenched assumptions against a “thinking black” person on what Everett claims is a Cartesian medium. In the process, they are revolutionizing the prevailing assumptions about the internet.

http://websites.umass.edu/lcw/

In 2008, Entertainment Weekly published a list of what they considered to be the 25 best High School movies to date. Only two of the movies had casts with more than a few token Black actors, and both of those movies (Cooley High and Boyz N the Hood) take place predominantly outside the school and feature only one or two students who are striving to achieve academic success. This disparity is not only due to oversight on the part of Entertainment Weekly, but stems from a widespread lack of representation of African American students in the media.

This blog seeks to examine images of Black students in film,

television and literature and to try to understand what types of messages are being communicated, and why.

The discussion will incorporate a consideration of the history of African American education until the present time as a comparison between the representations in the media and actual events.

When I slid Beretta E. Smith-Shomade’s Shaded Lives: African-American Women and Television off the library shelf, the first thing to catch my eye was its cover. The painting taking up most of the space is one by Phoebe Beasley, entitled “Shaded Lives”—presumably the source of Smith-Shomade’s title. It features a series of four windows, giving us a side-view of an apartment building and allowing us to peer in beneath the window-shades, which are pulled down to various levels. I was intrigued by the picture because of what it so immediately brought to mind: a commercial from the mid-nineties promoting Oprah Winfrey’s talk show. In my vague, decade-and-a-half-old memory of the commercial, the camera pans across an apartment building peering into windows as various occupants (all women) suddenly notice the time and pull down their shades, which are all emblazoned with Oprah’s logo. “Oprah’s o-o-on,” they all sing.
The association is apt considering Smith-Shomade’s long chapter focusing solely on Oprah Winfrey, and perhaps the reference is intentional. On the books cover and the commercial as well, we must squint into the interior, trying to make out the details of what is going on in these women’s lives through shadows and partial views. The viewer is a voyeur, and the subject cannot control the lens or the size of the window—she can only pull down the shade. Similarly, Smith-Shomade suggests that Black women have been constantly viewed: “they command a substantial amount of coverage regarding their literary achievements, political activism, and perceived public welfare participation” (1). Yet this exposure “belies actual Black women’s limited access to societal resources and institutions” (1). She goes on to trace a history of Black television criticism showing how (with a few exceptions), Black women are glossed over, ignored or denigrated, even when Blackness is centered. Smith-Shomade frames this project as an intervention of sorts, to address this seemingly paradoxical contradiction between Black women’s visibility and their disempowerment. She seeks to “contrast African-American women’s positioning as objects, their to-be-looked-at-ness, against their agency or assumption of subjectivity” (4).
Smith-Shomade is certainly successful in this intervention, adding copious and useful critical material to the canon of Black televsion criticism. She begins by leading us through a historical overview of women in visual culture, revealing the stereotypical images of servants, harlots, mammies, tragic mulattos and religious zealots which have pigeon-holed Black women and laid a framework for their subsequent limitations onscreen. She spends a significant amount of time on Black women in sit-coms—unsurprising, since throughout the 1990s, sit-coms provided the vehicle for more representations of Black women than any other genre. Smith-Shomade, while taking joy in the affirmation provided by many of these figures, argues that most of them were not central roles. Continuing from the history of the ‘mammy’ and other always-supporting roles, these women remained one-dimensional, in the background or as peripheral to main characters and their problems.
Subsequent chapters identify reincarnations of other historical tropes influencing Black women’s images in the music industry (namely, here they are harlots). She uses the stories of Vanessa Williams and Anita Hill as examples of the paradox of “elevation and castigation” endured by black women in the media. The chapter on Oprah comes last, and presents some of her most interesting arguments with regard to the desires and anxieties projected onto Oprah, and written on her body by the American public. With particular resonance for us now, in the age of Obama, Smith-Shomade argues “that Winfrey’s figure symbolized and embodied the binaries of American culture, of multiculturalism itself” (149). Mapping her rise to immense cultural power, Smith-Shomade characterizes Oprah’s life as a Cinderella story where “Winfrey served as both the Colored Cinderella and Prince Charming” (176). This is a fascinating examination which really does the best job of any chapter in pulling together the contradictions Smith-Shomade observes into context.
Shaded Lives sets itself apart in its conclusion, where she sounds a call to action rarely found in academic texts of this ilk. “We can all act,” she reminds us. Academics can teach media literacy beyond the walls of the academy—in K-12, community centers, religious houses, many venues. Students can share the tools learned…with friends and family” (187). She goes on to point out the myriad of venues available for those of us demanding fuller representations of Black women to voice our opinions, in this digital age of blogs and comment-boxes. Smith-Shomade’s work is extremely valuable in arming us with the history and theoretical background we need to take such action, and readers will finish this book feeling not only inspired but implicated in the struggle to render Black women as more than two-dimensional shadows behind the window shade.

Joan Flores

Part One
Elan Riggs

Part Two

Carter Hall

Part Three

Ricardo Bilton

Eboni G. Rafus

Book Review: The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, The Black Femme and the Image of Common Sense.

Kara Keeling, author of The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme and the Image of Common Sense, leaves no room for interpretation as to how she came to the title of her book. She explains in the introduction, appropriately titled “Another Litany for Survival”, that she is inspired by Gilles Deleuze’s assertion that “to think is always to follow the witch’s flight”. For our purposes, the witch is the black femme whose flight, Keeling pursues throughout the text. In seven well-articulated chapters, Keeling searches for the black femme in films, both independent and studio-supported, the television show The L Word, and even in images of the revolutionary group the Black Panthers. Keeling takes her readers on this journey, this witch-hunt, only to discover that it is the black femme’s absence that we are looking for and analyzing all the while.

In the first two chapters, “The Image of Common Sense” and “In the Interval” Keeling lays down the theoretical foundation for the rest of the book utilizing Fannon, Deleuze and Gramsci to create universal definitions for terms such as “affectation”, “cliché”, “historicity”, “memory-image” and “common sense”. Keeling explains that when a film starts a viewer must constantly travel on a circuit that shuttles them between the present perception of the current set of images and the past memory-images in order to make sense of the film.

Therefore, she asserts that for filmmakers involved in aesthetic projects having to do with representing identities that have been negatively or unrepresented, merely placing in front of the camera an image presumed to be identical with the category needing to be represented is not enough to challenge the forces that deny that category representation. The filmmaker also must interrogate the very notion of that image as representative and whether film can adequately represent populations such as black people or queer people that are presumed to be easily identifiable.

Keeling moves forward by examining films from the Black Arts Movement, the Los Angeles school of filmmaking and Third World Cinema, seeking out the black femme but only finding evidence of the legacy her absence has created. She links the lack of Black feminine representation with the attraction some women felt towards the militaristic image of the Black Panthers. She traces the career of Pam Grier from her roles as the sexy, yet masculine heroine in films such as Foxy Brown and Coffy, who because of the queer reading of blaxploitation films must engage in a violent confrontation with a character easily recognizable as a butch lesbian in order to assert her heterosexuality, to her role as Kit Porter, the only heterosexual reoccurring female character, and as one of only two black characters (at the time of her publication- Tasha a black solider was introduced in Season 4) the only one who is associated with the culturally masculine street world of drugs and pimps. And yet, the black femme remains elusive.

Finally, Keeling interrogates Queen Latifah’s character, Cleo Simms in Set it off, and the absent and yet ever so present character of Eve Baptiste in Eve’s Bayou and argues that one of reasons the black is femme hard to find, is because she must compete with other memory-images of the slave, the urban criminal, the prostitute and the butch lesbian.

Kara Keeling is an Assistant Professor of Critical Studies in the School of Cinematic Arts and of African American Studies in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Although I found Keeling’s close reading of Kasi Lemmon’s Eve’s Bayou in her final chapter only tangentially related to the premise she originally puts forth, her keen observations are nonetheless appreciated and her text as a whole is tied together nicely. The Witch’s Flight, well grounded in theory, is also well written in accessible English, and is well suited for serious academics and informal media scholars alike.
Book Review-The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, The Black Femme and the Image of Common Sense

Book Review-The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, The Black Femme and the Image of Common Sense

Christine Acham: Revolution Televised – Prime Time and the Struggle for Black Power

In her book Revolution Televised – Prime Time and the Struggle for Black Power, Christine Acham provides the reader with the historical background of the evolution of black agency within the realms of mainstream television, focussing on the period of the 1960’s and 1970’s. While other critics have dismissed the ‘black’ TV shows of this time as simply negative representations, she argues that this approach has been fairly limited and reductive. Instead, she states that African American actors and producers disrupted TV’s traditional narratives about blackness and portrays how TV has been used as a tool of resistance against mainstream constructions of African American life. Furthermore, Acham shows how these actors challenged the development of story lines and characters, which ways they found of covertly speaking to a black audience, and how they used other media outlets like magazines to question TV producers’ motives. She selects particular shows of the 1960’s and 1970’s to demonstrate these aspects, like Julia, a TV milestone for being the first show to star an African American since Amos ‘n’ Andy and Beulah; Black Journal and Soul Train, which stand as landmark non-fiction programs that specifically addressed the African American community; the Flip Wilson Show, Sanford & Son and Good Times, being popular within both the black community and mainstream society; and finally The Richard Pryor Show, which represents critical black engagement with television in the late seventies.
Beginning with a review of the historical development of African American participation within mainstream society in chapter one, Acham investigates how factors like Jim Crow, segregation, integration and de facto segregation led to the formation of black communal spaces. “Reading the Roots of Resistance,” she provides the point of view she applies for the observation of the particular shows, in order to show the flaws in the shape of African American cultural criticism, which has often operated on the basis of binary positive/ negative representations and thus being simplistic. She states the importance of the historical period these shows were broadcasted, namely the period of Black Revolution, and how this moment in history was made more public by the use of television. Acham further portrays the multifaceted nature of the African American community and the ways in which the ideology of uplift operates within black society, in order to show how television can still be a source of empowerment and/ or resistance. By briefly exploring the term “sellout” and its meanings, she illustrates the diversity of ideas within the African American community, and the way the black community has always been multifaceted, with class, social and cultural differences. Within this perspective, Acham investigates what was going on behind the scenes of the before mentioned shows, how black actors were trying to achieve the uplift of African Americans and to which extent they were able to achieve this. Quoting episodes, sketches and interviews, she sticks to the ‘primary texts’ and avoids applying the binary view of positive and negative representations, but keeps in mind the circumstances of mainstream television and the limits in which black actors were struggling for control over their own images. In her conclusion “Movin’ On Up,” Acham addresses the problem of white producers having a stranglehold on the network system, and the lack of African American programming outside the situation comedy reveals that the networks remain unwilling to deal with black material outside this genre. Yet, she offers a hopeful prospect, when she mentions HBO and cable television and Chris Rock, portraying him as an assertive, politically charged comedian who brings us back to the present day lives of African Americans.
Christine Acham’s book is a must read for anyone dealing with or interested in television and black popular culture. She offers a perspective that goes beyond the former simplistic criticism and applies an approach that copes with the historical background and the actual conditions of mainstream television. By observing the overall picture from more than one angle, she provides a scholarly wide ranging point of view, and shows how television can become a medium of resistance.