RED, WHITE & BLACK: CINEMA AND THE STRUCTURE OF U.S. ANTAGONISMS

Abstract

RED, WHITE & BLACK: CINEMA AND THE STRUCTURE OF U.S. ANTAGONISMS Frank B. Wilderson III. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010, 341 pp. In Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, Frank B. Wilderson III challenges readers to rethink current ideas on race, representation, and socially engaged cinema. Wilderson, associate professor of African American Studies and Drama at the University of California, Irvine, won the Hurston/ Wright Legacy Award and the American Book Award for his last book, Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid, and this followup provides important discourse on the ontology of blackness in the United States and how it relates to film. Wilderson's central tenet is the impossibility of analogizing the suffering of black people with that of any other race or group of people since the continued gratuitous violence that characterizes black existence is found nowhere else in history. The structural, noncontingent violence on the black body and psyche has continued from the Middle Passage through slavery and the Jim Crow era and continuing on to today's ghettos and prison-industrial complex. So although the meaning of suffering for whites (or non-blacks), with few exceptions, is based on issues of exploitation and alienation, the ontology of suffering for blacks is based on issues of "accumulation and fungibility" (14, original quote Saidiya Hartman). In Wilderson's theory, this condition of being owned and traded is not simply an experience, like, for example, the experience of wage exploitation, but it is the essence and ontology of blackness. For Wilderson, this contrast in white and black essential positioning, and the white creation of and parasitism on the situation, is so polarizing that the relationship between whites and blacks, or "Masters and Slaves" (10), can only be considered an antagonism, as opposed to a negotiable, solvable conflict. Afro-pessimist theory is difficult and taxing for those who would like to imagine the relations between whites, blacks, and Native Americans as better-off, improving, or even fixable. Wilderson is neither simple nor soothing, with dense academic style and an unapologetic disinclination to posit solutions, as his conclusion addresses. "To say we must be free of air, while admitting to knowing no other source of breath, is what I have tried to do here" (338). But Wilderson seems clear in his writing and in interviews that his book is intended as a way of opening up new avenues of dialogue on race in America, and readers will certainly find his work thought-provoking and worth the time it may take to process. Wilderson addresses the inability of most film and political theory to adequately portray the reality of the structures of these relations. He asserts that a new wave of theorists (bell hooks, James Snead, Manthia Diawara) improved Black film theory by taking the discussion beyond the realm of "positive/negative" (60) representations, working more importantly on interrogating film "as an apparatus or institution in relation to the derelict institutional status of Black people" (64). But Wilderson asserts that these theorists fail to address or recognize the utter impossibility of black agency in civil society's institutions. Wilderson aligns himself with Afro-pessimists such as Hortense Spillers, Ronald Judy, David Marriott, Saidiya Hartman, Orlando Patterson, and Jared Sexton, whom he references throughout the book. In the lengthy and dense chapter "The Narcissistic Slave," Wilderson builds heavily on the work of Franz Fanon to argue against the possibility of Lacan and Lacanian film theory to apply to black people. "Whereas Lacan was aware of how language 'precedes and exceeds us,' he did not have Fanon's awareness of how violence also precedes and exceeds Blacks" (76). Wilderson sees Lacan's process of full speech for whites as contingent on the black Other as a frame of reference, "which remonumentalizes the (White) ego" and "is an accomplice to social stability, despite its claims to the contrary" (75). …