Category Archives: Black Perspectives on Neoliberalism

Academy & Mass Consumer Culture: Hip Hop

Posted on by

My lenses on Hip Hop are framed within what many people would label as Old Skool.  To be sure, there is a certain nostalgia for me.  I think back to 1984 when I was 13 years old. When boys tried to step to you, they often took on a set of identities from UTFO: Kangol Kid, the Educated Rapper, or Doctor Ice.   It was corny, annoying, and offensive, even to a 13-year old like me. Here is their infamous song, “Roxanne, Roxanne”:

(a moment of pause, please, for a brotha in a red leather suit, dry jerri curl, white Kangol, and white boots with the pant legs tucked IN!)

I don’t really remember UTFO at all.  What I remember, growing up all the way west in Ohio, was a 14-year old from Queensbridge projects: Roxanne Shante.  As the story goes, UTFO canceled its appearance on a show promoted by Marley Marl and Mr. Magic, an unthinkable and arrogant thing to do to your friends in the world of Hip Hop especially in those early days.  Legend has it that Roxanne Shante was on her way to the laundry, washing clothes for her mother who was at work and took breaks between cycles to record this song in one take in Marley Marl’s apartment.  As a 13-year old, doing my share of the same daily chores, this was someone who I saw worth emulating.

Every girl I knew could recite these lyrics and it infuriated the boys our age.  To learn lyrics like this took real work too.  For the most part, someone like Roxanne Shante was played for only a few hours on the radio station where I grew up, certainly not all day.  You waited until that hour came and taped the show on a boombox using a cassette tape.  Then you played that cassette tape over and over until the ribbon wore out.  That’s how we all became Roxanne Shante.  We didn’t need to go shopping or get our nails done to become like her, which was a good thing because there wasn’t enough money for food and lights, much less outfits and manicures. We didn’t need a new weave, make-up, or plastic surgery.  Of course, nostalgia can be romantic and, highly inaccurate, but it is also always politically loaded and carries a material effect.  I can’t help but think back on many of my black female college students today who, upon first hearing Roxanne Shante in my classes on Black Women’s Rhetoric, are stunned by how “aggressive” she is and question whether or not this is appropriate for a “lady.” I don’t think I am merely being romantic in suggesting that my female peer group didn’t construct ourselves so wholly within this cult of white womanhood (no one ever fully escapes it) as indicated in these social fantasies of wanting to always be seen as “ladies” who do not directly confront men (or wash clothes for their mommas who are at work vs. staying at home to service their middle class homes/families.)

This is all more than simply nostalgia for me; it is a different relationship to mass consumerism and, thereby, capitalism.  It wasn’t that consumerism was not there; it was.  After all, calling yourself Kangol in the 1980s was as obnoxious in its signs of wealth as talking about the cars/houses/women you own.  And that’s why Roxanne Shante disses him: he goes by the name of a hat; it is a hat and nothing more. The sign is stripped of its meaning. I bring up these issues because many only talk about what always gets simplistically talked about in relation to Hip Hop: mass consumer culture as the sum value of Hip Hop.  Instead , I want us to wonder if/how the academy is as consuming and domesticating as any other capitalist industry.

Hortense Spillers has particularly inspired a new lens on the academy’s mass consumption. My Old Skool disposition might then mean something much more than the rather simplistic issues of a choice in artists and songs.  Instead I am talking here about ideological positions, intellectual trajectories, and black political histories. What Spillers contextualizes as the history of feminism could very well apply to Hip Hop and it is this application that I hope students will take up. In a discussion with Saidiya Hartman, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Shelly Eversley, and Jennifer Morgan, Spillers says:

I think that the feminism as of the 1980s became curricular objects… all of a sudden, it would seem, the conversation changes, and it is so sudden it is institutionally traumatic…there are women in this country today who legitimately wonder what happened to their movement?  But it went to the university.  To the disciplines. With fund-raising imperatives, and hiring practices; and that’s a different animal from the movement, from the polemics that come out of jail time and confronting the police.  So what feminism has become is a curricular object that, in the living memory of at least one of its generations, has a very different source— a movement component…

We haven’t figured out a way to carry historical memory… the cost of Americanization, of equality, is to forget…

I am not suggesting here that Feminism and Hip Hop are interchangeable, not ever.  What I am interested in is the politics that Spillers offers us of what “curricular objectification” does to even the things that we consider radical and outside of the purview and bounds of the Western academy.  In Spillers’s representation, the academy will sell you and your stuff just as fast as any other auction block.  Mainstream success in the academy comes with as much of a price as mainstream success on MTV, VHI, BET, or Hollywood.  This might be the reason college students who are willing to see themselves as neoliberal subjects are also unwilling to see themselves as Roxanne Shante; she is not mainstream success.

As we look at these issues tonight, I also think back to Heather Andrea William’s book, Self-Taught.  In that book, we saw an entire people committed to the Word, to literacies, to reading and writing, not for material gain, but for the radical humanity that they themselves were defining.  I think  back on those masses of black people after emancipation giving all that they had left— both time and money— to learning to read and write regardless of that fact that it would not provide social access or material gain.  As Williams shows us, their work in creating the very meaning and practice of a free, public education was then taken away from them and co-opted for and by dominant groups.  When I think back to early Hip Hoppers, I see this same history.  There was very little material reason for Roxanne Shante to have spent so much time carving out her verbal skills back then; there was no Bentley promised to her at the end of that Hip Hop rainbow but she was committed to the Word anyway.  If we are at the same place with a new Post-Reconstruction redefining and taking away black communities’ literate commitments and creations, exactly like what happened with newly emancipated slaves’ schooling, we need to be clear about it.  And we need to indict all of the expressions of capitalism when it is culpable, especially the academy.

Related posts:

No related posts.

Power, Dominance & Acquiescence

Posted on by

I often wish that I could be faster and more critical in how I respond to oppressive circumstances in my everyday life.  I admit that there are times when I am simply dumbstruck when I should be expecting foolishness and should, therefore, be able to respond much more quickly.  Instead, I just sit there stupidly wondering: what is goin on up in here?  I can forgive myself for being slow on the uptake, but I am beginning to question how many times I am not counter-acting/counter-thinking at all.

For some reason, today, my mind goes back to a professional conference that I attended at least three years ago now.  The panel discussion that I attended was designed to be a conversation about various issues related to the labor and organization of prominent college writing programs. It should go without saying, given the trends of this particular conference/ field, that the panel was all-white and predominantly male.  Like I said, I am used to those trends so this alone was not what bothered me.  One of the panelists, a well-regarded white male scholar/administrator (at least by some), who I will here call New Henrickson, rightly problematized the ways in which the teaching of writing in his program was gendered as female labor, a trend that scholars have shown to be dominant when looking at contingent/part-time labor in colleges today, especially when it comes to the teaching of college writing.  Then the scholar went on, in what he thought was a clever quip, to say that he felt like the main character from the HBO series, Big Love, Bill Henrickson (hence, the inspiration for my re-naming here).  The audience chuckled… but my jaw almost dropped to the bottom of my chair.  Did he really just say that? Does he NOT know that he is talking out loud and that, hence, people can HEAR him?  I never said anything to anyone, just sat there, with the violence of this discourse hanging over me.

I have never actually watched Big Love— I just know it was about a Fundamentalist Mormon polygamist and Republican senator in Utah and his many wives. Supposedly, there is good social commentary about male dominance and patriarchy in the series but I never sat through it long enough to find out.  The one and only conversation that I have ever had about New Henrickson’s comment at this conference was with another male scholar in the audience. This scholar was perturbed by the comment but mostly because his program was not given an award for its innovation the way that New Henrickson’s program had been.   It wasn’t a conversation that I could really relate to: such an award is not something I would ever covet if it is offered to white men who metaphor-ize themselves as polygamist heads-of-households in relation to the underpaid/under-valued women who do the bulk of the work in the U.S. of teaching college writing.  I am reminded here of Marc Bousquet’s work:

As for gender, the rendering of faculty positions to the extreme of economic irrationality (six courses a year for $15,000, eg)  assigns them disproportionately to women, especially persons–whether male or female–married to professionals and managers. The other, primary wage earner supports the economically irrational partner, a person teaching for what used to be called pin money. This structural feminizing of the job was traditionally associated with converting the positions formerly held by men (such as secretarial positions, once a high-status job) to those held increasingly by women… a “pyramid scheme” especially for women faculty.

Broadly speaking across many disciplines and institution types women still tend to disproportionately hold low-paying, low-status, insecure teaching-only or teaching-intensive jobs while men continue to disproportionately hold high-paying, high-status, secure research-intensive and top administrative positions.

When I look at Bousquet’s work, I begin to think New Henrickson’s quip— with all its attending meanings related to race, capitalism, and gender— may have been a soberly, accurate portrayal of the academy and the field.

So how did I handle this moment?  I stayed quiet and then always steered clear of New Henrickson, his mentees, and all of his homies.  All well and good, maybe, except that this is beginning to feel like selling out.  At what point does silence become the co-signing of hegemony? And at what point do women trade in this silence in order to acquire a kind of professional comfort and ease in their disciplines, even if it means they do so at the expense of their own bodies and minds?  New Henrickson is not of my generation but his misogyny is not done, especially in this world where it is rewarded (the award his program received is an accolade that surely fared him well in the institutional hierarchy in which he can now insert himself at his college campus.)  And while women of color may be reluctant to publicly critique male scholars of color for fear of the violent, black-on-black intra-fratricidal display it will offer to white audiences, women of color are not publicly criticizing New Henrickson either and it’s not always clear where the private critiques of his male comrades of color are.   Racial respect/nonviolence in white spaces is not the sole issue here.

I am not saying that I should have jumped up and slapped this fool in the mouth– either with my hands or with my words. Like I said, I am not quick enough for that anyway.   But it does seem that if I want to claim radical anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-heterosexist, anti-consumerist work, I need to reach a more definitive point where I say something, counter-theorize these very real and very everyday moments of epistemic violence, and/or set up intellectual-political shop elsewhere to really do the work that is needed.  That’s the best plan that I have for the present and future as of right now.  I am working on it!

Related posts:

No related posts.

Protest, Mourning & Remembrance (Personal Notes on Thanksgiving)

Posted on by

“Well, here we go with another holiday that America loves to celebrate, Thanksgiving Day. I know this has been said numerous times by many Native people of this country, but it is just not a day for many of us to celebrate. Although some things have improved on some reservations, there are an overwhelming number of us that have nothing to celebrate. These are the people who still have my concern, my hope and my love that things will get better. I’m talking about the people of Big Mountain, some of whom have already received their eviction notices. It’s about the Western Shoshone, about the people all over this continent who are fighting for their treaty rights and sovereignty. It’s about the people in Chiapas, the people in Central and South America who are being tortured and slaughtered every day. It is about the people whose stories we do not hear. The people who are resisting by simply surviving the “third world” conditions that they live under in the wealthiest nation on Earth.

As you gather today at this historic spot, remember those who struggled and gave their lives before you. Remember those who are in prison and those who are being tortured and denigrated today. Remember those who gave you the teachings that were handed down generation to generation. Remember as you continue the struggle for justice and equality in this land that is ours to caretake…Thanksgiving is every day. Wake up and thank the Creator for a new day every day.” ~Leonard Peltier, 1998 Thanksgiving Statement

Thanksgiving is a tricky concept for me.  On the one hand, the moment of pause, reflection, and gratitude that the concept suggests is one that I support.  On the other hand, we have enshrined yet another European celebration/manifestation.  The National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) actually offers a short lesson plan and extended curriculum for grades 4-8 that help classroom teachers begin to dig deeper into the ongoing imagination of the Indigenous people breaking bread with the  “pilgrims” at the “First Thanksgiving” in what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts. Certainly, Indigenous nations have designed systems for giving thanks to the earth but the trope of Thanksgiving that we often celebrate is actually a mixture of Puritan religious practices and  European festivals of Harvest Home (which included sports, like our current marriage of Thanksgiving with football), and that incorporated the Indigenous foodways that we take for granted.  All of this information is widely known and accessible and yet most elementary kids will still come home with the same things that were used to teach me about Thanksgiving more than 30 years ago: sketches where you trace your fingers and make that into a turkey; some sort of headband with a paper feather; and/or drawings or texts that enshrine pilgrims in that classic black and white attire.  I can walk for ten minutes, in any ethnic direction, through the segregated neighborhoods of my Hometown-Brooklyn and tell when there are small children in the home: these textual representations of the myth and dominant fantasy of Thanksgiving are glued everywhere to front windows and doors this week.

I don’t think I can afford to ignore these tensions when the United American Indians of New England (UAIME) have declared Thanksgiving a Day of Mourning since 1970.  Instead, the UAIME marks this day as one of remembrance and spiritual connection alongside protest of the racism and oppressions that Indigeneous Nations experience NOW. This year’s 43rd Day of Mourning is dedicated to the political prisoner and artist, Leonard Peltier (all artwork on this page is by Peltier). I see the UAIME as letting us know that we all have some mourning to do.  And even though I won’t be attending the Day of Mourning in Massachusetts this year, I recognize, in both my head and heart, the remembrances, spiritual connections, and fight against oppression that the UAIME represent.  I also recognize, in my head and heart, the very gift of seeing the new day, the Thanksgiving everyday, as Peltier suggests. So this Thanksgiving will mean doing some small-scale recognizing of events and people in my individual life alongside the large-scale work of recognizing and mourning human loss under oppression.

As corny as it may sound and as trite in comparison to the history I have talked about here, I want to remember my closest friends and family, making sure that I recognize who they are and what they bring to my life.  I think about a girlfriend with a family, home, exacting teaching load, heavy service expectations at her university, administrative assignments, and publication demands who never, never once, put me aside when I needed to think through some piece of writing or idea I was working on, though her schedule doesn’t easily accommodate the time and depth we usurp for our emailing alone.  I will never consume her real-time support and spirit and then dissolve her presence by comparing/juxtaposing her with someone else.  That kind of consumption would only mean that I have sacrificed her collegiality, friendship, and loyalty to the forces of oppression in an inability to recognize her true, unique value.  As simple as it seems, maintaining friendships and the value of human lives outside of the patterns of exploitation that permeate everything is quite radical: that’s how I understand the remembrance that UAIME asks of us.

I think about my mentors who, just in their letters of reference, took the time to craft words that offered such vivid descriptions of me that I sound like no one else and who, in turn, made me see who I am.  They seemingly transformed even a bureaucratic and bourgeois process so that I would not be another woman-thing in the academy to be institutionally-exchanged, discussed, dissected or claimed as an object of ownership, desire, or tokenism.  I recognize their ability to stand outside of the current econo-cultural climate and really see and do.  I think about my real friends and family who let me be BOTH weak and strong, loud and quiet, scared and bold, focused and confused and who never conflate my achievement of professional success with my experience of joy and pain.  I think about girlfriends with whom I mine the darkest depths of trauma and hurt— both theirs and my own— without letting that dictate a negative path and spirit for our conversations and very foundations of friendship/soulship.  Living one’s life past/beyond oppression is no small task but, at least amongst one another, we have offered one another our whole selves with realness, clarity, and vision.

That we have survived is a feat in and of itself. When it comes right down to it, it’s about connection and remembrance… and sustenance through the material, everyday practices of what we say and do.  Although the culture sets us up to alienate the very real labor of maintaining friends and family in our daily lives, we do not have to abide by that culture.  That’s the kind of Thanksgiving worth having.

Related posts:

No related posts.

Miranda’s Daughters & Consumer Culture

Posted on by

The last time that I taught African American Women’s Rhetorics, I received a thank you letter from a black female student at the end of the term.  I am always deeply touched when I receive such letters, and always from students of color, who I don’t think always give themselves enough credit for the deep intellectual work they do themselves and want to, instead, credit the teacher.

This letter, though, was a bit intriguing.  In it, the young woman thanked me for getting her to love reading and writing again: the last time she was so engaged was when she was reading and then mimicking in her writing, the Twilight series.  Now, I consider myself someone well-versed in popular culture, or rather in the context of new capitalism today in its creation of what should be more aptly called: mass consumer culture.  Nonetheless, I just hadn’t paid any attention to this series at all.  I’m not sure what my fog was about since the reminders, ads, and paraphernalia are everywhere.  This past summer I decided that I needed to really hear what it was that my student was saying to me so I watched the entire series.  I am so thankful that I had my sister-friend and professor at Spelman, Michelle, one of the fiercest thinkers I know, who really helped me deal with how traumatized I (still) am by this series.  Imagine my surprise when I learned that this series was about…drumroll… vampires!  And white vampires, at that, in white cake make-up so that they can look even whiter within uber-wealthy elite circles, aesthetically enamored by white canons of art. Meanwhile, a community of Indigenous folk are animals/wolves living in poverty and out in the wild who cannot fully control their primal urges.  At the center of this foolishness is a young, sweet, innocent white virgin who everyone loves, adores, protects, and builds their life around to the point where she has no authority or personality (except for pained, cross-eyed, seemingly-constipation-induced, facial expressions… the acting is just horrible!)  I watched the series almost frozen… and deeply impacted by how much work still needs to be done when young black women are coerced into believing that any part of this story, a story that my student is/was literally reading and writing into her own life, will ever represent their own social circumstances or life opportunities as black women.  I have heard many activists argue that we need to stop criticizing young women for consuming popular culture like this because we have to meet these young women where they are.  I agree.  Of course, we need to meet them where they are (and where else would we meet them anyway: the moon?) but we need some analysis to comprehend these locations.

Of course, I go straight back to Wynter’s essay, “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings,” that I have already talked about here.  It seems that the mass consumer culture that is targeting youth has simply recreated Prospero, Caliban, and Miranda where the presence of black women is again in absence.  Wynter’s essay takes Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest, and shows how Miranda, the only woman in the New World/Island is a “mode of physiognomic being” that gets canonized as the only “rational object of desire” and, therefore, the “genitrix of a superior mode of human life.”  In sum, she argues that being a black feminist/womanist means contending with this mode in a way that must rewrite the entire episteme.  Black women’s absence is, thus, always “an ontological absence… central to the… secularizing behaviour-regulatory narrative schema… by which the peoples of Western Europe legitimized their global expansion as well as their expropriation/marginalization of all the other population-groups of the globe.”  I can’t think of a more relevant context for Wynter’s essay, despite post-modernist pundits that would suggest such categories are no longer entrenched (Have they not watched this movie?) than this movie/series my student is so compelled by.  It becomes even more horror-laden when you think that Twilight has its adult-counterpart in the mega-million-selling sensation, the Fifty Shades series, whose story almost mimics the plot of Twilight.  Obviously, it ain’t just kids who like Miranda’s saga and for whom mass consumer culture continually reproduces her, what Wynter more aptly calls a “regime of truth.”  This seems directly related to what Wynter called the “situational frame of reference of both Western-European and Euroamerican women writers,” a frame that she contends even critical theorists like Irigaray did not fully escape.

From the time I first read  “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings,” I have been drawn to Wynter’s notion of what it means to shift or mutate an age/epoch/episteme into another, a shift she doesn’t feel most bourgeois African American feminists actually achieve (often mimicking or refiguring “Miranda” and other forms of empire).  Her 2000 Interview with David Scott in Small Axe (Volume 8) also challenges how I think about popular culture/mass consumer culture.  In the interview, she argues that an economic/bio-economic conception of the human mandates that capitalism currently functions as the only mode of production for our everyday expressions (see page 160). Her argument convinces me that what we often do theoretically and academically in scholarship about mass consumer culture reifies these bio-economic conceptions.  There seems an undeniable willingness to engage scholarship itself as a commodity for writing/researching about grossly commodified, popular culture. I do follow popular culture and think it is critical to understand how oppression and domination look and get maintained.  However, Cedric Robinson‘s warning is one I can’t ever forget: black intellectual work always gets commodified, as easily and readily as the work of any rapper, singer, dancer, actor/actress.   Investigating popular culture in a way that shifts our current bio-economic overdetermination is a feat different from producing writing/research that will be widely consumable.  Maybe many of us have gotten to a place where we think the commodification and mass appeal of black intellectual thought are the same things as a deep, political and intellectual engagement with it.

As for my Twilight-loving student, I think/hope she will still hold on to what she walked  away with: a deep anger that Twilight was imposed on her will and imagination rather than the singular text of the semester that really rattled her and got her to love to read and write… Ida B. Wells’s The Red Record.  In other words, I hope she/we will move beyond Miranda’s meanings and I hope she/we can move closer towards that kind of epistemic shift that Wynter always describes.

Related posts:

No related posts.