Passing Strange and post-civil rights blackness

Abstract

The American in Europe is everywhere confronted with the question of his identity.2 In her groundbreaking 2000 article 'Black like this: race, generation, and rock in the post-civil rights era', anthropologist Maureen Mahon describes the 'contemporary condition of double-consciousness' that shapes the experiences of African-Americans growing up in the decades after the black freedom struggle of the 1950s and 1960s. 3 Focusing on members of the Black Rock Coalition (BRC), a group of musician-activists working to reclaim the blackness of rock-and-roll, Mahon finds that these predominantly middle-class young African-Americans - most born after 1960 - inherit a historically specific set of challenges regarding race and racial self-definition. Whereas earlier generations struggled against de jure segregation and second-class citizenship, this 'post-civil rights' generation, as Mahon and others dub it, inherits a world in which important legislative and juridical victories have already been achieved. As middle-class Americans, they have been the beneficiaries of civil rights victories in school desegregation, affirmative action and equal employment. On the other hand, this generation must negotiate new challenges that emerge from new expressions of racism and changes in racial discourse. As Mahon discovers through detailed interviews with BRC members, even economic privilege does not mitigate this younger generation's struggles against exclusion, discrimination and racial definition. It is simply that these struggles take place amid a new set of social and political challenges. Post-civil rights double-consciousness is the thematic, aesthetic and political terrain of the critically acclaimed musical Passing Strange, which had its most visible run at the Belasco Theatre on Broadway in 2008, and appeared in 2009 as a film by the director Spike Lee.4 In Passing Strange - the title is simultaneously a riff on Othello, a meditation on the 'strangeness' of identity, a commentary on expatriate/eira/Tger experience and a reference to racial passing - we find a lively and robust engagement with the contradictions of post-civil rights racial discourse, in which blackness is represented as multiple and shifting and in which identity is assumed to be performative rather than natural. Indeed, in taking blackness for granted as a complex and dynamic experience rather than a determinate state of belonging or being, Passing Strange is a passing narrative for the post-passing era: hip to anti-essentialist critiques of race as a social construct, tuned in to the ways that blackness is lived through class, gender, embodiment, sexuality and geography, and self-conscious about the histories of black American cosmopolitanism and the contemporary social and political minefields delineated in phrases such as 'acting black' or 'acting white'.5 Like other passing narratives in the twentieth-century American canon -including James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Jessie Fauset's Plum Bun and Nella Larsen's Quicksand - Passing Strange sends its protagonist across national borders, to Northern Europe, where he experiences a welcome reprieve from US racial definition.6 As a post-civil rights passing narrative, however, Passing Strange is also acutely aware of the mutableness of black experience in the diaspora and of the ways that black Americanness, in particular, circulates as a fetishised and desired cultural commodity for white Europeans. This is, in other words, a tale of black bohemian cosmopolitanism in which the middle-class black protagonist is already schooled in the twentiethcentury history of black bohemian cosmopolitanism. And while the ending of Passing Strange returns the protagonist home - to mother love and to 'mother' country - the musical is reluctant to find resolution in the protagonist's embrace of what Michelle Stephens, in her article 'What is this black in black diaspora?', calls 'color' or 'race' consciousness. …