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The Persistence of Sentiment. Mitchell Morris
Читать онлайн.Название The Persistence of Sentiment
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780520955059
Автор произведения Mitchell Morris
Жанр Музыка, балет
Издательство Ingram
Part of the mystique of Barry White’s earliest Records was tied to his claim that this fusion was unprecedented; the various styles he was conversant with had always been, one might say, “segregated.” Under the aegis of black capitalism, this segregation was to be no more, and now the musical style could show it.
BLACK MASCULINITY TRANSFORMED
In the development of black culture during the 1960s, masculinity was an important issue of discussion and debate. Black Power, particularly as formulated within the Nation of Islam, included an emphasis on the careful maintenance of traditional gender roles and the concentration of power within male hands. As Malcolm X would have it: “The true nature of a man is to be strong, and a woman’s true nature is to be weak, and while a man must at all times respect his woman, at the same time he needs to understand that he must control her if he expects to get her respect.”21
The sexism of Malcolm X’s ideal was of course still resolutely patriarchal in the 1960s; the most distinctive features of sexual politics in the Nation of Islam arose from its determination to link ideals of masculinity and femininity to a general revolutionary austerity. The proper relations between men and women were of a piece with sobriety and lawfulness. Black Muslims were separatists, but they were not exactly freethinkers.
The increasing celebrity of Cassius Clay (soon to be Muhammad Ali) offered a way for the Nation of Islam to have its notions of black masculinity affect the general public. As Cassius Clay, he had won his first title in 1964 in a celebrated match against Sonny Liston in Miami Beach and defeated him again in the following year. Almost as important as his superlative athletic ability was his virtuosity in “signifying,” making those rhyming boasts about his skill and handsomeness that were the verbal equivalent with his boxing skill.22 It is also worth remembering the resolutely embodied quality of these chants of triumph—Clay’s body, proud sexuality included, was always center stage as the ground of his confidence. The intense controversy around Clay’s refusal of the draft in 1967, which led to a court conviction and a prison sentence, heightened public awareness of the personal costs of racism in an enormously productive way; his conversion to Islam and assumption of the name Muhammad Ali during this period only added to his symbolic weight. By the time the Supreme Court overturned Ali’s conviction, he was on his way back to championship in boxing. The legendary 1974 fight between Ali and George Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire (since 1997, The Democratic Republic of the Congo)—“The Rumble in the Jungle”—was a visible sign of the pride fostered by the Black Power movement, as Ali’s other slogan for the fight, “From the Slave Ship to the Championship,” showed.
Ali’s impact on rising black power consciousness was thus enormous. Boxing seemed the quintessentially masculine sport, as Eldridge Cleaver observed, all the more in the 1960s because it offered a way to refocus the traditional image of masculine aggression, keeping it from being transvalued into nothingness.23 But to have a “free” black champion like Ali—that is, one who proclaimed his allegiance to a totally whiteless organization and who maintained a conspicuous detachment from boxing’s usual engines of celebrity—this dramatically opened the possibilities for representing black men as autonomous agents with “dangerous” sexuality intact.24 (Consider a later example in the 1975 pop song “Black Superman [Muhammad Ali],” by Johnny Wakelin and the Kinshasa Band, which was released soon after “The Rumble.” Using a strongly reggae-inflected style well before reggae had acquired a demographically lucrative listenership in the United States, Wakelin and his band celebrate Ali’s career in Ali’s own signifying language as a Black Power apotheosis. For a one-hit wonder that peaked at number twenty-five on the charts, it achieved a lot of important work.) When detached from the conservative moral positions of the Black Muslims, Ali’s image could help reinforce the ideas of masculinity circulating among groups such as the Black Panthers. Of course, Ali’s strict adherence to the sober lawfulness of the Nation of Islam limited his usefulness to more rebellious groups; his physical presence and his courageous defiance of the draft board, though, were so powerful that they circulate far and wide.
In fact, a crucial difference between the Nation of Islam and the Panthers came from their contrasting attitudes toward law and negotiations with white power structures, with inevitable consequences for representations of black sexuality. The Panthers, interested in using violent language and symbolic action to set the conventional power dynamics of American race relations into disequilibrium, found it helpful to imagine possible links between criminality and the empowerment of black men. Because anxiety over masculine privilege and concomitant misogyny was at least as intense among the Panthers as among their white counterparts (on the left) and adversaries (on the right), the rhetorics of criminality more often than not acquired a strongly sexual character.25 In effect, the Panthers sometimes deliberately incited the racist panic about the untrammeled sexuality of black men that had partly grounded the white rationalizations for Jim Crow. They did this as part of a general assertion of patriarchal privilege, with the added excitement of upsetting the white majority. To the extent that the image of racialized sexual violence at least raised the larger question of individual sexual autonomy as shaped by the pressures of racial categorization, the Panthers performed a service for many people, white as well as black.26 But the symbolic terrors of black male sexuality ran much too deep to be played with in this way without backlash.
The fate of the Panthers in the mass media is instructively shaped around the issue of black male sexuality, and the strategies by which journalists shaped public opinion by calling the Panther’s sexual imagery into question resonate strongly and dishearteningly with the “Disco sucks” campaign. Although most newspapers and magazines had treated the Panthers with relative neutrality during the late 1960s, the increased animosity of the federal government in 1969, especially by means of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), sparked an intense burst of media representation in the service of creating a moral panic.27 Charges by the Panthers that they were targets of government persecution were received with sympathy by some well-known liberal white public figures, sending some journalists into a frenzy of character assassination. The most well-known attack came in Tom Wolfe’s famous article “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s,” which appeared in New York magazine on June 8, 1970, and was later reprinted in book form.28 In a masterpiece of barely veiled bigotry—racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, anti-intellectualism, and class hatred—Wolfe explicitly links the Panthers’ unruly black masculinity with their politics and portrays Leonard Bernstein and his guests alike as hot with desire at the very thought of proximity to such primal virility. And in Wolfe’s terms, to imagine a politics driven by eros is to trivialize that politics automatically. In frameworks such as Wolfe’s, “Too black, too strong” suddenly means “too attractive, too frivolous.” Disco sucks. The verb says it all. And yet the ground of this condemnation can be turned back upon the condemners.
THE HOLLYWOOD MODEL
Melvin Van Peebles’ film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, released in 1971, condenses some of the issues I have been sketching. The title character is a heavily exploited sex worker in the LA ghetto who, witnessing the especially brutal beating of a black militant by two LA cops (imagine that!), suddenly rises up out of his abject state to take on the police. In doing so, he becomes the special target of the LAPD: the rest of the movie revolves around Sweetback’s escape from a vicious police chase. While getting out of LA and safely across the Mexican border, Sweetback finds several occasions to display his sexual and combative prowess. (These episodes make him very different from the figures played by Sidney Poitier, the only other black leading man that mainstream white American filmgoers of the time were likely to have seen.) Accompanying all this action is a brilliantly dissonant, difficult score by the early lineup of Earth, Wind and Fire. Their music is situated within a dense soundscape that often approaches musique concrète; in this context it is worth remembering Van Peebles’ strong connections to the European Art cinema. Although essentially an avant-garde film, Sweet Sweetback was an enormous success within the black community and alerted Hollywood to the large amounts of money that could be made by designing films with black audiences in mind.