September 2007 Archives
A Thug's Humanity?
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A Thug's Humanity?
At this point--as if there was ever a previous point--any discussion about the artistic merit of Curtis Jackson's "music" is little more than a banal exercise in corporate music journalism. Mr. Jackson has never been interested in art, no matter how we might shift the signifiers to fit into the expectations of a music industry that seems to have little use for actual music. Yet Mr. Jackson's literal body and its cartoonish doppelganger, 50 Cent, continue to stimulate curiosity, if only because of his deft performance of late stage American masculinity.
Considered purely within the context of a constructed masculinity, 50 Cent might rank as one of the most compelling examples of black masculinity since Jack Johnson. Signature generational figures like Malcolm X (El Hajj Malik El Shabazz) or Tupac Shakur, challenged notions of black masculinity in their respective historical eras, in part, because they complicated how black masculinity functioned in distinct political, cultural, social, religious and sexual spheres. In the case of Jack Johnson it was the blunt force of his masculinity and the anxieties produced in response to fears of how that force might be employed beyond the boxing ring, that made him the projection of so many racialized and gendered fantasies. In the case of Mr. Jackson such fears are purely the product of the capitalist wet dream that literally feeds upon--consumption as literal practice--the "body" 50 Cent willingly provides.
If Forbes Magazine can credibly describe Mr. Jackson as a "masterful brand builder", what exactly is his brand? I would argue that it is literally his body--a body offered up for whatever sexual confection we can concoct as easily as it becomes the "bootstrap" muse for a generation of vitamin water addicted professionals. Two decades ago popular comedians like Chevy Chase and Eddie Murphy were described as "Reagan's Jesters"; In 2007 Mr. Jackson is clearly Bush's "nigga"--the literal embodiment of three centuries of American hegemony in the capitalist and militarist realms--allowing us to dually pleasure and replenish our fears--with the ease of an I-Tune transaction--in a moment of distinct uncertainties about national security and an eroding infrastructure.
And it is his body that Mr. Jackson asks us to consider as he attempts to stall the feeding frenzy. "Don't think I'm not human," Mr. Jackson quips in London's Sunday Telegraph, presaging the provocative insert photos--shot by Alexei Hay--that accompany Curtis. Stunning is the fact that when you see Mr. Jackson sitting down to a helping of 9mm--a piece of the weapon is carved out and sits on the fork in Mr. Jackson's hand--there's not even a hint of irony present. So successful has been Mr. Jackson's melding of his body to corporate imaging that even the most absurd image is rendered as logical. The same goes for the photos of Mr. Jackson donning sport jackets reading the New York Post befitting a man rumored to worth half-a-billion dollars in the era of the "News Corporation-ing" of mainstream media.
Taken as a simple gesture though, the photo's of a bare-chested Mr. Jackson hoisting [insert brown-skined celebrity eye-candy of your choice] in the air as she straddles his waist, is nothing more than what we might expect from somebody who uses phrases like "Candy Shop" and "Amusement Park" to describe sexual intercourse. Seeing Mr. Jackson's large hands on the woman's buttocks captures the kinds of wordless objectification that policing hip-hop lyrics will never address. But in the very next frame, it is the women's probing hands that exploit the metaphor that exists inside Mr. Jackson's pants--and it is in that moment that Mr. Jackson is bore naked, capturing for a fleeting moment the very pleasures associated with black masculinity, while rendering said black masculinity flaccid in the aftermath.
That the black body that keeps America warm in bed is so often the boogeyman that keeps America up at night is not a new phenomenon. In the case of Mr. Jackson though, he has at least demanded that he be well compensated for all of his labors. That Mr. Jackson has managed to get paid for what is little more than auction-block theater, is significant I think.
Domesticating Violence
Six years after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, time once again stood still in remembrance of that first moment of death. It has become one of the defining rituals of contemporary America; Indeed the depth of the tragedy need not be remarked upon anymore, because of how potent a symbol of loss it has become--the loss of life and as some might argue, the loss of America's innocence. But even in the midst of mourning, there is no denying that the 9/11 attacks have been deftly manipulated, in an effort to domesticate terrorist violence, so that for the average American, terrorist violence is no longer far-fetched in a far-away land, but as real as the corner supermarket. That Americans would seemingly move in lock-step--politically at least--because of fears both real and imagined, only highlights the value of domesticating forms of violence that have never really been tangible for most Americans.
This is not to de-legitimize the possibility of terrorist attacks in everyday life--the recent experiences of British citizens are duly noted here--but to put into high relief that for some American citizens terrorist violence has long been a fact of life. This was the point that Cornel West trenchantly made when he suggested in the weeks after the 9/11 attacks that America had been "niggerized"--a point he reiterated in his lively discussion with Mos Def on Bill Maher's Real Time--suggesting that for many white Americans, they had come face-to-face with the kind of literal and symbolic violence that has long marked the experiences of black folk in this country. The same can be said for the thousands of women, who succumb to forms domestic and sexual violence at the hands of men in this country every year. The recent rape and torture of Megan Williams in West Virginia was a visceral reminder that as we memorialize those who died in the 9/11 attacks, as a nation, we have not expended nearly as much energy addressing the violence and terror that is regularly directed at women in this country, particularly black women.
This was a point that the Chicago Foundation for Women recently made during their 22nd Annual Luncheon, which was symbolically held on September 11th. The luncheon was preceded by the release of a report by the Foundation that suggested that "Violence against women and girls is a cradle-to-grave epidemic that includes: child abuse and incest, bullying, elder abuse, domestic violence, stalking, sexual assault, street harassment and the trafficking or prostitution of women and girls for sexual or labor exploitation." The foundation also made clear, via a morning symposium "Violence in Language, Art and Culture: Images to die for?," the ways that popular culture and mainstream media are complicit in the reproduction of violence against women and girls. The popular culture and media piece is critical as the Foundation's report suggest that "A study of American high school students found that the majority of girls and three-quarters of boys thought that forced sex was acceptable under some circumstances, including when a woman had had past sexual experiences or when a boy spent a lot of money on the girl."
Megan Williams, who currently lies in a hospital recovering from a week of rape and sadistic/terroristic abuse at the hands of a group of purported white supremacists, need not read the report from the Chicago Foundation for Women nor be reminded of the historic terror experienced by Black Americans, as she bore witness to the "blood" at the intersections of race and gender. Ironically as reports have surfaced that Williams might have had relations with one of her attackers--kidnappers--and thus Federal prosecutors are reluctant to view the attack as a "hate crime," some are viewing the attack as simply a case of domestic abuse. As Diary of An Anxious Black Woman, rhetorically asked in her brilliant critique of the case, "So, how does 'domestic violence,' which is now being raised as an issue since details revealed that the victim was involved in a case of domestic violence assault with one of those assailants--Bobby Brewster--back in July this year, necessarily shift the way we are to read the heinous nature of this torture and abuse story? As far as I'm concerned, it doesn't. In fact, now that we know the victim was in a previous relationship, we should be even more outraged."
In a society that has made the possibility of domestic violence by terrorists one of the dominant concerns of the contemporary moment, violence against women in literal domestic spaces is little more than an afterthought in the national consciousness.
Live Arts and Fresh Cut Chips
I’ve been in the UK the past few days, specifically Birmingham, where I’ve been attending the opening days of the 3rd Decibel Performing Arts Showcase and Symposium. Sponsored by The Arts Council of England, the event brings together Afro-Caribbean, Asian, and African artists and programmers from across England. I had the privilege of delivering the opening keynote address—yet another incarnation of my ongoing meditation on Jay Z as cosmopolitan—which was quite an honor considering the fact that folk like Carl Hancock Rux, Hip-Hop Theater pioneer Benji Reid and longtime Harlem Stage/Aaron Davis Hall Inc. Executive Director Patricia Cruz were all in the audience and could have provided a brilliant keynote address in their own right. The same goes for my brilliant interlocutor Robert Beckford.
The real beauty of the event though, is that it afforded me a wonderful opportunity to break bread with a range of artists and thinkers from across the diaspora such as Sydney Bartley (Director for Jamaica's Ministry of Tourism, Entertainment and Culture), Dr. Vena Ramphal (who specializes in South Asian Dance), Myung-Joo Chung (who consults Korean Theater companies) and David Tse, who directs the Yellow Earth Theater in London. Like progressive artists in the US, they are all struggling to convince State institutions and various other potential benefactors that their art is worthy of support, while also struggling to provide progressive art that doesn’t cater to lowered expectations.
The highlight of my trip was Courtney Pine’s performance on the opening night, with a band which featured violinist Omar Puente (who played with a wah-wah for a bit) and guitarist Cameron Pierre. Because he’s in the UK, Pine doesn’t get enough recognition for his genius, but his was simply one of the best live jazz performances that I’ve seen in some tine. Of course there were less than 200 people in the audience and I could only think of seeing Grover Washington, Jr. wannabe Boney James perform in an outdoor venue a few weeks ago with an audience of thousands, while possessing a small fraction of Pine’s virtuosity.
The Katrina-Politans: A Meditation on Movement, Citizenship and the Katrina Generation
Can “niggas” be cosmopolitan? The answer was emphatically no, two years ago, as we all witnessed the drama(s) of misery and suffering unfold in New Orleans and the rest of the gulf coast region. To be cosmopolitan suggests an access to economic resources and the leisure time to travel the world unfettered by the demands faced by everyday folk. But those black bodies that that made themselves visible in the days after Hurricane Katrina made its landing were not “everyday folk”—they were “niggas” and “niggas” is perhaps apropos for a nation that struggled to name the landlocked and waterlogged black bodies that encroached upon the casual comforts and carefree expectations of our tiny little worlds. We called them “looters,” “refugees,” “unfortunate,” “sinners,” “animals,” “hapless” and “helpless”—anything but citizens. And it is in this context that I’d like to offer yet another linguistic reference: “Katrina-Politans,” a term that obviously references notions of cosmopolitanism, but more so draws from Taiye Tuakli-Wosornu’s decidedly classed concept of Afro-Politians—those Africans who live in the world. What is to be said about the humanity, desires and survivalisms of those black bodies that bore witness to Katrina’s fiercest moments, even as they are deemed expendable, and dare continue to think themselves citizens of the world?
What I am suggesting here is a form of cosmopolitanism, that speaks to the relationship between those black bodies so many observed two years ago—bodies that were rendered visible, yet invisible at the same time—and the State. This is a type of cosmopolitanism marked, in part, by a symbolic homelessness from notions of mainstream American morality, political relevancy and cultural gravitas; a cosmopolitanism that finds resonance in the “Katrina Generation”—those black bodies that were deemed as little more than “refugees” by mainstream corporate media. In this regard the evoking of the term, “refugee” duly reinforced the inhumanity and foreignness of this population. In the early moments of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, the evoking of “refugees” also cast illegitimacy on those so called “refugees” who might view themselves as national subjects—citizens—deserving of relief in a moment of national crisis. The term “refugee” also cast aspirations on the desires of the “Katrina Generation” to seek citizenship in whatever locale they chose—or likely were forced—to relocate.
When Walter Mosley makes the point, as he recently did in The Nation, that “not only did our government fail to answer the call of its most vulnerable citizens during that fateful period; it still fails each and every day to rebuild, redeem and rescue those who are ignored because of their poverty, their race, their passage into old age,” he captures the tragic irony of Katrina’s aftermath: many Americans and dare I say the State, have never deemed those black bodies as legitimate citizens. In her book Black Cosmopolitanism, literary scholar Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo suggests that efforts to deny black bodies access to the resources of the State, are historically related to fears among whites that blacks might view themselves as cosmopolitan subjects.
Writing about the Haitian Revolution, Nwankwo argues that “the denial of access for people of African descent to cosmopolitan subjectivity coexisted with a denial of access for that same population to both national subjectivity and human subjectivity…effectively determining the possible parameters of identity for people of African descent.” (10) Thus the naming and misnaming of black Katrina survivors was as much an effort to deny them relief—as relevant in a natural disaster as it has been historically in relation to pursuing of legal recourse for racial and gender discrimination—as it was an attempt to dictate from above how those particular black bodies and all the black bodies who were forced to account for the images those black bodies projected, would be interpreted as political subjects. Thus the human misery that crusted and festered over in the Louisiana Superdome and the New Orleans Convention Center was not viewed as failure on the part of the State, but the failure of civil rights era legislation that rendered those black bodies as incapable of taking care of themselves and perhaps more tellingly, indicted black leadership for their failure to police those black bodies.
Nwankwo’s notion that the collapsing of cosmopolitan possibilities is related to efforts to limit the breadth and diversity of black identity is particularly compelling in an era where black identities are intensely wedded to racial truisms, that while often legitimized by some of the most visible (and highly compensated) “celebrities”—Michael Vick, R. Kelly, Whitney Houston, and William “Flava Flav” Drayton to name a few and indeed the images that were transmitted from New Orleans—often distort the realities of contemporary black identity. For example, like most major urban areas, New Orleans contained sizable immigrant communities made up of African nationals and Afro-Caribbeans, which were reflective of the historic ethnic diversity of the city. Most media outlets glossed over the complexity of black identity in those days and weeks after Katrina’s landing, in part because such complexities challenge corporate media’s desires to manage evolving news stories. More broadly though, the mainstream press and the mainstream public at large, has rarely been willing to grant black bodies such complexity, choosing instead to embrace “exceptional” blacks, often at the expensive of the black masses.
In his memoir We Won’t Budge: An African Exile in the World, Malian scholar Manthia Diawara tells the story of spending a recent sabbatical in Paris. Concerned about the historic treatment of Africans in the city, Diawara wore his Black American Intellectual status on his sleeve, but when stopped by a pair of law enforcement officers who rifled through his bag only to find his Malian passport, he was symbolically undressed. The passport was evidence in the minds of the officers that Diawara was just another African—another nigga—and thus not deserving of the common courtesies extended to citizens or visitors for that matter. Diawara’s exchange with the police was prefaced by a conversation with the cab driver, also an African, whose cab he was in when they were stopped by the police. “Where are you originally from?” the driver queried Diawara in response to Diawara’s earlier claim that he was from the United States.” Seemingly an innocent question, in many ways it was meant to demean Diawara’s site of origin and to undermine any privilege associated with his cosmopolitan identity.
If such a major Black American Intellectual is undressed in such a fashion, what can be said of those whose cosmopolitanism isn’t clothed in class and ethnic privilege. Indeed, I can’t imagine that there isn’t a day when the Katrina Generation, as it is dispersed throughout the country and denied access to its “homeland,” is not faced with the like-minded query: “Where are you really from?” For all of the good will offered to Katrina transplants and in light of Barbara Bush’s ridiculous claim that they had bettered their fortunes, the reality is that many municipalities viewed Katrina survivors as a further burden on already overtaxed resources. But the Katrina-Politians are citizens of the world, by the vestige of their humanity, and they have every right to make claims on that citizenship, wherever they choose or are forced to lay their heads.
