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Celebration or Pathology? Commodity or Art? The Dilemma of African-American Expressive Culture

2000; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 20; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/779468

1946-1615

Berndt Ostendorf,

Caribbean history, culture, and politics

In the mid-1970s, Ralph Ellison and white social historian shared panel on blacks in Hollywood film. The historian analyzed in agonizing detail the demeaning role that Hollywood had assigned to Bill Bojangles Robinson in Shirley Temple movie and attacked the representation as pure and simple racism. Clearly, this film confirmed Stanley Elkins' pathology thesis, popularly known as Samboism. When Ellison's turn came to judge the film's merits, he merely asked, Did you notice how Mr. Robinson danced? The African Americans in the audience instantly got his point and chuckled. Ellison had signified on the pathology thesis by celebrating Bojangles' artistry, which, although back-grounded in the film and incidental to its plot, no amount of pathological ascription could write out of the picture. How times have changed. On the back page of Dissent, Todd Gitlin (1999) reports the following social drama: In 1995 employees of the Library of Congress protested photographic show, Back of the Big House: The Cultural Landscape of the Plantation, that documented the buildings where slaves led their lives around the plantation manors, juxtaposing photos to the texts of slave narratives. Employees protested that the show made them feel bad, whereupon squeamish Library administrators took it down. The president of an African-American Cultural Association told reporter, An exhibit is supposed to celebrate something positive. Gitlin comments that, as painful as the bad news in history may be, a smiley-face theory of history is worse. The celebratory turn in African-American Studies may be identified as an all-American or, pace Albert Murray, omni-American affirmative commodification of symbolic cultural capital. African-American historical memory is torn between the dual and alternating heritages of pathological ascription and celebratory achievement, between outside habits of racist ascription and the appreciative inside view, and between past significance and present meaning. Both poles are inscribed, as overlayered palimpsests, in the representational logic of black cultural productions. They have settled in historically grown patterns of commodification that are in turn controlled by an ever-changing tyranny of expectations. To complicate things further, the social playing field in which these representations are made public is marked by the binary push and pull of the color line, racialized killer opposition that controls and choreographs the conceptual frameworks and discursive traditions. To balance these conflicting narratives of achievement or ascription and to negotiate solomonically between the dual pull of past (historical) significance and present (political) meaning is anything but easy. Several new voices from outside the United States have entered this contested public sphere and tried to do new justice to African-American expressive culture. They address themselves to the conflict-ridden discursive traditions in the push and pull of ascription and achievement. Individually, these new studies cover much new ground, but when placed in conversation with each other and with past debates, they help us map the territory in which black music acquires its political place and its cultural meaning. Like Gitlin, I suspect that the market and the Arminian disposition of American popular culture, both of which are subject to local contingencies and present passions, join forces to favor, in the long run, smiley-face theories of history. In that spirit, one of these new studies, Stylin': African American Expressive Culture (White and White 1998), successfully celebrates the je ne sais quoi of black style, not only in the dance style of Bojangles Robinson but also in dress, in the grooming of hair, in body gestures, in the kinesics of music or dance, and in second-line parades. The period covered extends from early slavery to the zoot-suit riots of the 1940s. …