White Imagination Research Articles

Addressing the “Negro Problem”: Rethinking the Coon and the Mammy in <em>King of the Zombies</em> and <em>Revenge of the Zombies</em>

This article explores two 1940s B-horror zombie movies to argue that the revitalization of the “coon” and the “mammy” from the slave era in the early twentieth century was part and parcel of the dominant culture’s efforts to contain and control the “monstrous black” of the white imagination. Furthermore, I posit that the dehumanization and Othering that characterized white America’s treatment of African Americans is not a thing of the past. The article advocates for a transatlantic and trans-temporal orientation from scholars, which would allow them to reassess Hollywood films in relation to the systemic racism that pervades American culture and that circumscribes the choices that African American actors had in the past and continue to have today.

“What is Critical Whiteness Doing in OUR Nice Field like Critical Race Theory?” Applying CRT and CWS to Understand the White Imaginations of White Teacher Candidates

Critical Race Theory (CRT) revolutionized how we investigate race in education. Centralizing counter-stories from people of color becomes essential for decentralizing white normative discourse—a process we refer to as realities within the Black imagination. Yet, few studies examine how whites respond to centering the Black imagination, especially since their white imagination goes unrecognized. We propose utilizing Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS) to support CRT to aid in deconstructing the dimensions of white imaginations. Our findings describe how the white imagination operates inside the minds of white teacher candidates, namely through their (a) emotional disinvestment, (b) lack of critical understanding of race, (c) resurgence of white guilt, and (d) recycling of hegemonic whiteness, all of which negatively impact their role in anti-racist teaching in urban schools.

Narratives of violence: the white imagination, and the making of black masculinity in 'City of God'

The article explores the representation of young–black men in the 2002 film City of God. The film deploys 'pathological scripts' of Black masculinity in Brazil as criminal and deviant. The controlling image of Black men's bodies as a source of danger and impurity sustains Brazilian regime of racial domination, and the narratives of violence make explicit the ways in which the Brazilian nation is imagined though a racial underpinning. Blackness is consumed as an exotic commodity, yet is also understood as a threat to national harmony. The nation is, then, written and re–imagined as a racial paradise, but mostly by inscribing death on the black body.

From Jay-Z to Dead Prez

The evolution of hip-hop music and culture has impacted the visibility of Black men and the Black male body. As hip-hop continues to become commercially viable, performances of Black masculinities can be easily found on magazine covers, television shows, and popular websites. How do these representations affect the collective consciousness of Black men, while helping to construct a particular brand of masculinity that plays into the White imagination? This theoretical article explores how representations of Black masculinity vary in underground versus mainstream hip-hop, stemming directly from White patriarchal ideals of manhood. Conceptual and theoretical analyses of songs from the likes of Jay-Z and Dead Prez and Imani Perry’s Prophets of the Hood help provide an understanding of the parallels between hip-hop performances/identities and Black masculinities.

Advertising Chocolate, Consuming Race? On the Peculiar Relationship of Chocolate Advertising, German Colonialism, and Blackness

This article looks at the history of chocolate as a colonial commodity tainted by slave labor and pays special attention to the ways in which colonial fantasies were played out in the German advertising of chocolate. Exemplary advertising strategies that appropriated and enforced circulating notions of blackness in the white imagination, foremost of black subjects as servants, are analyzed. The article examines chocolate as a racial and floating signifier, i.e., as a (sometimes exoticized, sometimes derogatory) reference to black Germans in popular discourse.

A Sound “Almost Human”: Trauma, Anthropocentric Authority, and Nonhuman Otherness in Go Down, Moses

.Tony M. Vinci A Sound “Almost Human”: Trauma, Anthropocentric Authority, and Nonhuman Otherness in Go Down, Moses F aulkners Go Down, Moses (1942) is a novel haunted by more than the ghosts of the dead. Not only do the enduring traumas of slavery, the exploitative violence of the American Indian Wars, and the threat of WWII frame the intersecting chronicles of the McCaslins and Beau­ champs, but animal spirits stalk the deep woods, and human and nonhuman machines disturb the entire county ofYoknapatawpha. Contesting Judith Bry­ ant Wittenberg’s claim that Go Down, Moses is “a distinctly anthropocentric novel” (51), in this article I argue that Faulkners concentration on the im­ brications between human and nonhuman subjectivities in Go Down, Mo­ ses provides reason to read the novel as a nonanthropocentric, and possibly even an antianthropocentric, work. Aligning “the human” with male white­ ness, Faulkner challenges anthropocentric values by situating the recognizable tropes of the ghost, the animal, and the android as ethical categories that blur the boundaries ofhuman subjectivity and make possible an intimate proximity between human and nonhuman otherness via trauma. Faulkners ghosts har­ ness elusive traumatic energies and express them as dislocated images or voices from the past, allowing for an unsettling engagement with cultural atrocities, typically those experienced by marginalized figures not considered “human” enough to be traumatized. Marked by their conspicuous lack of human lan­ guage, the animals in Go Down, Moses become powerful mediating figures, enabling interaction between personal loss, cultural atrocity, and metaphysi­ cal possibilities. Perhaps most provocatively, Faulkner delineates economically and sexually exploited slaves and ex-slaves as android figures who exist only in the white imagination as unaffected beings capable ofperforming rudimentary work but incapable of experiencing trauma or understanding the socio-politi­ cal dramas in which they perform. These animal-machines carry burdens that not only lack expressive outlets but are linked semiotically with the technologi­ cal forces of trains and automobiles in the novel that threaten to eradicate the natural and the spiritual, enabling the dominant culture to displace the anxiety caused by their own atrocities onto those whom they victimize and oppress. These nonhuman categories fall into a semiotic system in which they blur and intertwine, becoming “a field ofdistinctions, differences, proximities, voids, 23 24 Tony M. Vinci A Sound “Almost Human”: In Go Down, Moses enigmas, wonderments, uncanny twists, and possibilities that” expand the defi­ nition ofthe human subject in Go Down, Moses from a discrete individual into a complicated network ofbeings in the continual process of becoming-with oth­ erness (La Capra 174). Through this experimentation with other-than-human characterizations and relations, Faulkner disrupts traditional geographies of the center and the margins and, in doing so, accesses traumatic energies that have been subsumed and oversimplified under the rubric of anthropocentric humanism. As Minrose C. Gwin argues, Faulkner recognizes the inability to heal trauma; thus, his negotiation of the traumatic in Go Down, Moses seeks to sustain engagement with the “open wound”—personal and cultural experi­ ences ofabsence and loss that cannot be closed but must be addressed perpetu­ ally through the “witnessing to and a listening for the incomprehensible” (32, 21). As the complex psychological and cultural after-effects of the traumatic are deeply idiosyncratic and can never be traced directly to a singular moment or cause, these wounds—their symptoms and sources—are difficult to locate. However, according to Gwin, unruly traumatic articulations can be navigat­ ed indirectly: “trauma necessitates articulation, but that articulation may be obliquely directed through sites displaced from the wounded one” (22). While Gwin does not address specifically how Faulkner’s text performs this maneuver of displaced articulation, I suggest that he employs the ghost, animal, and an­ droid as relays to the incomprehensible elements of the traumatic. In this way, trauma is not suppressed or rejected in the narrative; rather, by never situating it solely within the framework of the known and accepted, Faulkner fosters an ethic of radical openness that is free to resonate in both the interstices and imbrications between human and nonhuman subjectivities and, consequently, engages the traces of trauma that reside there. To clarify Faulkners treatment of the nonhuman as a means to cross cul...

What the Folk Printed: Verse Culture and the Black Press in 1865 New Orleans

This article examines the abolitionist ballads reprinted in the Black Republican , a newspaper that circulated in New Orleans immediately after Emancipation. Through these reprintings of performative verse genres, the Black Republican offered its readers opportunities to collectively revise white cultural productions of sentimentalized versions of themselves to foster membership in a counterpublic. Characterized in the white literary imagination as a preliterate oral folk, the black press responded by using print to destabilize verse that reinforced this fantasy. One consequence of this counterpublic revision is a changing notion of the ballad genre, as antebellum ballad gave way to Reconstruction minstrelsy.

‘No less a foe than Satan himself’: The Devil, Transition and Moral Panic in White South Africa, 1989–1993

There are moments in history where the imagined threat of satanism and the devil have been engendered by, and exacerbated, widespread social anxiety. This article looks at particular moments in which the ‘satanic peril’ emerged in the white South African imagination as moments of moral panic during which social boundaries were sharpened, patrolled, disputed, and renegotiated through public debate. Between 1989 and 1993, white politicians warned against the unholy trinity of ‘drugs, satanism and communism’, while white newspapers reported rumours of midnight orgies and the ritual consumption of baby flesh by secret satanic covens. From the bizarre to the macabre, the message became one of societal decay and a vulnerable youth. Moral panics betray a host of anxieties in the society, or segment of a society, in which they erupt. This article argues that the moral panic between 1989 and 1993, and the emergence of the ‘satanic peril’, betrays contextually specific anxieties surrounding the loss of power and shifts in class and cultural solidarity as white South Africa's social and geographic borders were transformed. We seek to elucidate the cultural changes in white South Africa during this period by illuminating the social, temporal and geographic boundaries that were disputed and renegotiated through the heightened and shifting discourse on satanism. With context provided by the satanic panics of the late 1970s in South Africa, and the transnational satanism scare of the 1980s, this article concentrates on South Africa's most virulent satanic panic, which occurred between 1989 and 1993. As this article shows, while the decade of the 1980s was marked by successive states of emergency and the deterioration of the edifice of apartheid, it began and ended with widespread alarm that Satan was making a bid for the control of white South Africa.

Narratives of violence: the white imagiNation and the making of black masculinity in City of God

The article explores the regimes of representation of young Black men in the film City of God . The main argument is that the movie deploys pathological scripts of Black men as criminal and deviant to disseminate meanings over black masculinity in Brazil. The author suggests that the controlling image of Black men bodies as a source of danger and impurity sustains Brazilian racial hegemony; ultimately, the narratives of violence makes explicit the ways the Brazilian nation is imagined through racial underpinning. The dual bind through which the nation is ambiguously imagined is made explicit also in the consumption of Blackness as exotic at the same time that it represents a threat to the national harmony. The nation is then written and re-imagined as a racial paradise even/and mostly by inscribing death to the black body.

Jim Crow on Fraternity Row

Blackface minstrelsy firmly entrenched Blacks, black entertainment, and black performers as buffoons in the white imagination. The entertainment industry (film, radio, and television) is the most common place to witness the persistence of blackface performativity; a less commonly known but equally important site of contemporary blackface performance is the southern white fraternity. Through the use of raced artifacts, racial terrorism is enacted, and the performativity of this racist act is reduced through the guise of humor. Using bell hook's “eating the other” coupled with visual rhetoric, this article examines the continued popularity of racial marginalization and racial terrorism through blackface performances at southern white fraternities.

Colorquest: A museum pedagogy on ethnic self-identity, representation and cultural histories at the Boston MFA

Museums, especially the larger urban visual arts institutions established in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries serve as repositories of global history, Empire and cultural memory, even as they shape identity. When students of colour come to museums, they frequently only see their ancestors depicted in classic portrayals of pre-twentieth century figuration framed by the white imagination and often without any mediated interpretation that confronts racialized visual texts and unpleasant histories. How should scholars and teachers interpret and mediate this space for all students one that confronts our deepest fears about cultural authenticity, hegemony, self-representation, narratives and story telling, prejudice and the passage of time? This article shares excerpts from an educational game the author has used at secondary and college level for over a decade. In Colorquest students explore the cultural and intellectual space that museum collections and accessioning practices provide for interpreting how people of colour are represented in their artefacts; and the xenophobic gaze shaping their representation. The pedagogical site for Colorquest is the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Gender and Racial Others in Postwar Britain

Caryl Phillips, the respected black British Caribbean novelist and political essayist, argued in 2004 that most white British writers of fiction and drama of the 1950s and early 1960s ignored questions of race and the growing presence in the UK of new migrants from the colonies and the Commonwealth. Even where the newcomers were acknowledged, it was difficult, according to Phillips, for a white English writer to engage imaginatively with a black character, particularly male, without 'thinking sexually'. This article suggests that black people were not as absent from the white cultural landscape as Phillips claimed, nor as narrowly depicted. It investigates the different ways men and women as authors represented racial alterity in the literary and cinematic texts of the period and argues that sexual thinking tended to be more a product of the male imagination than the white imagination during those years.

The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects

Although spectral Indians appear with startling frequency in US literary works, until now the implications of describing them as ghosts have not been thoroughly investigated. In the first years of nationhood, Philip Freneau and Sarah Wentworth Morton peopled their works with Indian phantoms, as did Charles Brocken Brown, Washington Irving, Samuel Woodworth, Lydia Maria Child, James Fenimore Cooper, William Apess, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others who followed. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Native American ghosts figured prominently in speeches attributed to Chief Seattle, Black Elk, and Kicking Bear. Today, Stephen King and Leslie Marmon Silko plot best-selling novels around ghostly Indians and haunted Indian burial grounds. Renee L. Bergland argues that representing Indians as ghosts internalizes them as ghostly figures within the white imagination. Spectralization allows white Americans to construct a concept of American nationhood haunted by Native Americans, in which Indians become sharers in an idealized national imagination. However, the problems of spectralization are clear, since the discourse questions the very nationalism it constructs. Indians who are transformed into ghosts cannot be buried or evaded, and the specter of their forced disappearance haunts the American imagination. Indian ghosts personify national guilt and horror, as well as national pride and pleasure. Bergland tells the story of a terrifying and triumphant American aesthetic that repeatedly transforms horror into glory, national dishonor into national pride.

Biblical Mythology in Andre Brink's Anti-Apartheid Crusade

Biblical Mythology in André Brink’s Anti-Apartheid Crusade Isidore Diala (bio) Abdul R. JanMohamed has argued that the transformation of racial difference into moral and even metaphysical difference is at the heart of the economy of the central trope of imperialist practice, the manichean allegory. Tracing the phenomenologial origins of this metonymic transformation ultimately to the “neutral” perception of physical difference, he amply demonstrates how the allegorical extensions of this transformation dominate every facet of imperialist mentality (61). With reference to South Africa, Susan VanZanten Gallagher has methodically indicated how the writing of Ralph Standish (1612), which represents the black as a subhuman and mythical other, is representative of a long tradition of colonial writing, spanning the works of John Jordain (1608), Hondius (1652), Kolb (1719), Mentzel (1785), Barrow (1801), and Philip (1828), all aimed at the justification of European colonization. In a recent inquiry into the white’s reflexive perception of the black migrant worker, Michael Wade reveals its culmination in a “distressing arrest in the development of White perception” (21) and explains this as the result of the impossibility of the white South African to see the black objectively. Wade’s historical focus is mainly the years spanning the industrialization of South Africa, after the discovery of diamonds in the northwestern Cape in 1860. But his findings are typical: the roots of the whites’ perception of the black are fully in economics. In the documents of the white imagination, the novel, poetry, drama, the newspaper, and other forms in which whites engage themselves effectively in a dialogue (speaking only less effectively to others), Wade notes: The giant image of the migrant worker looms inscrutable, impenetrable; shafts of perception, energised by the urgency of the Whites’ deepest insecurities and fears, bounce off the matte black of his skin. Little can be learned about the migrant worker himself from these accounts; but much may be garnered towards an understanding of the group that has dominated the private sector of the South African economy since the discovery of diamonds more than a century and a quarter ago. (1) This essay proposes to consider André Brink’s frequent depiction of characteristic Afrikaner reduction of the Bible to a white mythology that complements the materiality of apartheid. Read in the self-regarding gaze of Afrikaner consciousness severely hampered and narrowed by its morbid obsession with its tribulations and even threats of extinction in a heathen land, the Bible is distorted to a justification of a racist ideology. Like historiography and cartography, theology too has become a species of mythmaking, annexed into the formidable machinery specifically created to empower the Afrikaner Establishment through the presentation of an authorized version of reality. [End Page 80] Brink has noted that in its anxiety and desperation to create for itself a self-validating image, apartheid had to annex realms of human value other than the overtly political: For apartheid to be sanctioned as the definitive characteristic of the Afrikaner Establishment, it had to reach far beyond the domain of politics: it was not simply a political policy ‘adopted’ as a response to the racial situation in the country but had to be accepted as an extension of an entire value system, embracing all the territories of social experience, economics, philosophy, morality and above all religion. The Church itself had to provide the ultimate justification for the ideology. (Mapmakers 18–19) If the “Christianization” of apartheid and the appropriation of religion was to the Afrikaner Establishment the ultimate temptation, the reason is quite obvious: the projection of Afrikaner imperialism onto the revealed word of God as divine ordinance, in Afrikaner consciousness, gave apartheid the final legitimacy. Thus, the Dutch Reformed Church was transformed to the abettor of the National Party, providing it with theological support for the segregation of the races. In his representative awareness of the politics of reading the Bible, Archbishop Desmond Tutu refutes the claims to universality that Western theology for long arrogated to itself, and endorses the validity of rival theologies arising from the specific terms and conditions of life in Third World countries. Among these, he recognizes Liberation Theology developed in Latin America, and Black Theology developed in the USA and Southern...

Biblical Mythology in Andr� Brink's Anti-Apartheid Crusade

cated how the writing of Ralph Standish (1612), which represents the black as a subhuman and mythical other, is representative of a long tradition of colonial writing, spanning the works of John Jordain (1608), Hondius (1652), Kolb (1719), Mentzel (1785), Barrow (1801), and Philip (1828), all aimed at the justification of European colonization. In a recent inquiry into the white's reflexive of the black migrant worker, Michael Wade reveals its culmination in a distressing arrest in the development of White perception (21) and explains this as the result of the impossibility of the white South African to see the black objectively. Wade's historical focus is mainly the years spanning the industrialization of South Africa, after the discovery of diamonds in the northwestern Cape in 1860. But his findings are typical: the roots ofthe whites' of the black are fully in economics. In the documents of the white imagination, the novel, poetry, drama, the newspaper, and other forms in which whites engage themselves effectively in a dialogue (speaking only less effectively to others), Wade notes: The giant image of the migrant worker looms inscrutable, impenetrable; shafts of perception, energised by the urgency of the Whites' deepest insecurities and fears, bounce off the matte black of his skin. Little can be learned about the migrant worker himself from these accounts; but much may be garnered towards an under? standing of the group that has dominated the private sector of the South African economy since the discovery of diamonds more than a century and a quarter ago. (1) This essay proposes to consider Andre Brink's frequent depiction of characteristic Afrikaner reduction of the Bible to a white mythology that complements the materiality of apartheid. Read in the self-regarding gaze of Afrikaner consciousness severely hampered and narrowed by its morbid obsession with its tribulations and even threats of extinction in a heathen land, the Bible is distorted to a justification ofa racist ideology. Like historiography and cartography, theology too has become a species of mythmaking, annexed into the formidable machinery specifically created to empower the Afrikaner Establishment through the presentation of an authorized version of reality.

Computers with Color Monitors: Disembodied Black Screen Images 1988-96

Computers with Color Monitors: Disembodied Black Screen Images 1988–1996 Martin Kevorkian* (bio) In the farewell panels of Outland, a particular facet of white imagination achieves a realized eschatology. Oliver Wendell Jones, the black child famous for his precocious use of his personal computer, makes his final exit from the Sunday newspapers (2/19/95; see fig. 1) with a “microprocessor in ear” and a “color monitor in face.” Indeed, [End Page 283] as a review of depictions of digitality in recent popular films will reveal, images of computer operators are carefully monitored for facial color. In the bizarre drawing of Jones, a piece of cultural logic simply reaches its conclusion: the black body itself becomes a personal computer. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Opus appears to be somewhat alarmed at the cyborgian transformation of Oliver Wendell Jones, who explains his microprocessed state in the farewell panels of the comic strip Outland. © Berkeley Breathed The impulse that places black faces in front of flickering, black computer screens is nowhere more visible than at the movies. For the last decade, black techno-wizards (usually male) have consistently populated the most profitable Hollywood action blockbusters. All-time heavyweight box-office champs like Die Hard (1988), The Hunt for Red October (1990), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), Jurassic Park (1993) and Mission: Impossible (1996) all furnish prime examples of this black screen phenomenon. 1 A reading of key characters and scenes from these and other popular films—written, produced, and directed by whites—will attempt to unpack what is at stake in this highly selective depiction of the human/digital interface. Outland’s Opus provides a hint: his reaction to Oliver’s cyborgian transformation is one of obvious discomfort and a nostalgia for physical presence. In later panels, he gradually edges away almost out of the frame, and while Oliver attempts to reassure him about the virtues of Internet access, Opus mutters “I’m not feeling too connected” and “you can’t hug in cyberspace.” Opus does not wish to participate in the virtual interaction Oliver proffers; when Oliver extends a diskette and instructs Opus that “you have to load me,” Opus demurs in cowering horror. Such encounters with new technology have been clearly diagnosed in Vivian Sobchack’s phenomenological analysis: “All surface, electronic space cannot be inhabited. It denies or prosthetically transforms the spectator’s physical body.” 2 Katherine Hayles similarly notes how certain “materialities of informatics” can “create the bodily impression of immateriality.” 3 Sobchack concludes her essay with a poignant description of the threat of the digital embrace: “Devaluing the physically lived body and the concrete materiality of the world, electronic presence suggests that we are all in imminent danger of becoming merely ghosts in the machine.” 4 We may all be in danger, but some whites might wish to displace that fear, at least in their escapist fictions, onto an available other. Or to particularize the compulsion further, whites who fear the devaluation of their own physically lived bodies might especially wish such immaterialization upon those others whose bodies they most fear. The manifest testimony [End Page 284] of recent movies, brought into conjunction with observations of cyberphobia, suggests a first axiom: If digital small screen technology tends to disembody the subject, then in whites’ big screen narratives, the black male becomes the preferred object of this disembodiment. In Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison notes the strongly nurtured prejudice against analyzing the racial marking of cultural roles: “To notice is to recognize an already discredited difference . . . every well-bred instinct argues against noticing.” 5 Perhaps those instincts argue even louder when there are no doubt some good intentions behind the portrayals at hand. Yet it is worth a second look to test the reach of Morrison’s suspicions regarding the “sometimes allegorical, sometimes metaphorical, but always choked representation of an Africanist presence.” 6 In his preface to James Snead’s posthumously published White Screens/Black Images, Cornel West calls for an analysis of film beyond a “narrow political seeking out of positive or negative black images.” 7 He particularly wishes Snead were around to make sense of “the contemporary preoccupation with black images—as...

A Ritual Choreography: The Orishas' Steps in Sortilegio

A Ritual Choreography The Orishas’ Steps In Sortilégio Leda Martins (bio) Until the early part of the twentieth century, the black presence in conventional theater projected a limited situation—that of invisibility. This was evident not only in the absence of black characters, but also by the distorted images of blacks that were elaborated by white imagination. The representational models that engendered and elaborated these images had their basis in a Eurocentric vision of the world in which the other, in this case the black, was only recognizable through the narcissistic look of the white “I,” staged as the sole, universal and absolute subject. Thus, in conventional theater, the course of the black persona define their invisibility and the unspeakable. Invisible, as was the hero of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, because they are perceived and elaborated, in spite of themselves, by a look that stigmatizes them in a series of stereotypes that negate and smother their otherness. Unspeakable, because the speech that constitutes them is produced through white discourse and reduces them to an alienating image that is imposed and ideologically conventionalized by Brazilian theatrical tradition. Until the 1940s, with rare exceptions, the figuration of blacks on the Brazilian stage assumed three predominant models: the submissive black, a type of tamed dog who was docile and passive; the pernicious and/or criminal element; and the black caricature, whose ridiculous and grotesque behavior motivated, and still motivates, laughter from the audience. In the theatrical game of mirrors the black appears as an image that is not only inverted, but opposite. The experience of otherness is thus reduced to the very negation of the other, projected as a simulacrum or an antonym of a narcissistic ego that desires itself to be omnipotent. Through these constant marks of the fictionalization of black characters, theatrical conventionality engendered a discourse of “knowledge” that put itself forth as truth. Brazilian theater, similar to cinema and television, mimicked the relations of power and oppression sustained in the society by finding support in an argument of authority that established a priori a pejorative value for the black sign. In the discourse of power that generates the discourse of knowledge, the experience of otherness is reduced to the negation and/or manipulation of the difference, and the scenic creation of the image of the black fits well with the values of a racist and discriminatory mentality. The Teatro Experimental do Negro (TEN)—(Black Experimental Theater)—was founded by Abdias do Nascimento in 1944. TEN was one of the most important achievements in the construction of alternative images and codes that sought to displace the black persona from the situation of object to that of subject, while [End Page 863] simultaneously showing the relations of power and discriminatory social practices that marked the possible “places” for blacks in Brazilian society. Until the mid-1960s, TEN carried out various artistic, cultural, and educational activities, such as literacy classes, acting courses, artistic competitions, conferences, debates, congresses, seminars, publications, etc., that had as a common theme the reflection on blacks in Brazilian society. The group’s numerous theatrical stagings were the most important of these activities. TEN staged dramas by Eugene O’Neill, Augusto Boal and Albert Camus, as well as various plays written especially for the company. Nine of these plays were included in an anthology, Dramas Para Negros e Prólogo Para Branco (Dramas for Blacks and Prologue for Whites) published in 1961. TEN sought to transform the representation of blacks on the Brazilian stage through stagings and productions that created an alternative diction and enunciation that broke with traditional models of fictionalization and presentation of black subjects and culture. The following testimony of Abdias do Nascimento highlights the objectives delineated by TEN: What is TEN? In terms of its aims TEN constitutes a complex organization. It was fundamentally conceived of as an instrument of redemption and revindication of black African values. These values were oppressed and/or relegated to an inferior plane in the context of so-called Brazilian culture where the emphasis is on elements of white European origin. Our theater would be a laboratory of cultural and artistic experimentation whose work, action and production explicitly and...

Jazz, Modernism, and the Black Creative Tradition

In the famous opening to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, the music-loving narrator locates jazz at the site of cultural erasure. In the acutely perceptible clamor of black music-embodied in a recording of Louis Armstrong-he discerns sound beyond white imagination, what he names a poetry out of [the] invisible.' Ellison's positioning of jazz in the realm of the unknown raises a perplexing challenge to the historian, musicologist, and critic alike. How does the academic observer, regardless of racial background, break the codes of an insider culture whose creative formations so often constitute subversive acts, what Zora Neale Hurston has called telling lies?2 Without reducing interpretive authority to cultural provincialism or simple-minded racism (to experience blackness, one must live and look the part), one might conjecture that conventional procedures simply won't do. Not only must scholars develop skills in historical research and musical analysis; they must also be sufficiently grounded in the varied and elusive meanings of cultural expressions that consistently refer to matters of racial difference. Despite the caveats of Ellison and others,3 jazz has only rarely benefited from studies matching its complexity and sophistication. Dominated by hagiographic portraits, patronizing celebrations of performative mastery, and bloodless formal analyses of a canonical repertory, jazz music has been repeatedly cast in terms that tell us more about the writers' own preoccupations than about the expressions they purport to observe. Burton W. Peretti is clearly privy to these many obstacles, and perhaps even inspired by them. For rather than carving out a narrow territory for close examination, he undertakes the formidable task of revising a broad stretch of the music's early history. As its dramatic title suggests, The Creation of Jazz proposes nothing less than to refashion our understanding of the music's emergence. That the study succumbs to many of the same pitfalls that it implicitly critiques makes

Representing Blackness in the White Imagination: Images of ‘Happy Darkeys’ in Popular Culture, 1893–1917

This paper is a study of American postcards which represent African Americans as “happy Darkeys.” 1 suggest that the oppressive visual metaphor of other‐as‐child positioned black subjects in a racist regime of representation which constructed subjectivities for those depicted and identities for their viewers. I then describe the distinguishing characteristics of these images, analyze the meanings they convey, and the social uses that they serve.

The “Inky curse”: Miscegenation in the white American literary imagination

The “Inky curse”: Miscegenation in the white American literary imagination