Celebration or pathology? Commodity or art? The dilemma of African-American expressive culture.

In the mid-1970s, Ralph Ellison and a white social historian shared a panel on blacks in Hollywood film. The historian analyzed in agonizing detail the demeaning role that Hollywood had assigned to Bill "Bojangles" Robinson in a 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 a 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 a 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, a 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. Chief evidence and witness is the black body, both that of rural slaves and of urban free blacks, with more attention paid to black men than to black women. The authors dutifully take note of the scars of slavery and therefore view black bodies as "contested terrain, the sites on which a struggle between racial groups was often destructively played out" (4). But even more so, it was played out creatively, as the authors demonstrate in overwhelming detail, and with far greater enthusiasm. Their central thesis is that a distinctive African-American style emerged early and continued to develop both in the South and North, albeit within the constraints of race relations and of the shifting rural-to-urban demographic parameters. But throughout these changes, as the infectious enthusiasm of the authors suggests, the emerging styles are grounds for current celebration.

The story begins with the characteristics of black attire under conditions of slavery. White and White isolate three black sartorial habits that were in place quite early: the use of bright and clashing colors, bizarre juxtapositions of clothes items, and a tendency to dress not down but up. They identify the first two characteristics as West African, on the authority of Robert Farris Thompson (1983); the third invites a New World explanation. In a process that Orlando Patterson (1982) identified as the "social death" of Africans in a New World, slave society gave to dress, the second skin, an overdetermined cultural function. The intention of slaveholders was to deny slaves any social space, in order to cultivate attitudes of absolute dependence, and to let no slave escape that iron rule (Berlin 1998, 1-14). Hence, sartorial transgressions acquired an existential political significance and social urgency. By stealing clothes of the master and "dressing up," White and White (1998) state, slaves gained a modicum of respect. We tend to forget that, in contrast to our postmodern dressing habits, Victorian culture held to a highly normative dress code as a marker of identity. Gentility and status were clearly coded, as were the dress guidelines for slaves. Yet the sartorial markers of station and respect were not only rigorously maintained but also easily copied, transgressed, and exaggerated in parody. In doing so, the authors aver, blacks were not, as white observers claimed, merely "imitating" white values but were also "subverting white authority" (16). To control such aspirations or to assuage white fears, the minstrel show, a ritualistic and parodic mirror of racist ascription, added the "overdressed" Zip Coons to the "underdressed" Jim Crows and thus completed the range of black character types on the American popular stage (Ostendorf 1979).

Slaves were not only of African origin but were also part of the New World commodity culture that at times could encourage such survivals. When cloth imports from Britain stopped after 1776, slaves needed to make their own clothes, and here the West African traditions of dye making could be maintained and even expanded. White and White pay special attention to dressing up for carnivals and feast days, times that represented moments and spaces of freedom (Fabian 1998). As a reprieve from the backbreaking work of slavery, such days were particularly important to the slaves. At the Pinkster festival, Negro Election Day, or Jonkonnu, a king or governor would be elected and presented in great finery. This elevation of one of their own was an "act of cultural bricolage, the imaginative meditation of an African born slave in a new, European dominated environment" (White and White 1998, 19). John Winslow Homer's painting Dressing for Carnival (1877) is reproduced but only in black and white (34); considering that the clashing of colors is the chief point of the illustration, this flattening of visual effect is unfortunate. The authors pick up the discussion about dress with blacks moving into freedom. The end of slavery made new sartorial options available to free blacks enter the Dandy--but it also problematized the relationship between urban blacks and working-class whites on a contested urban turf.