On a personal note, this article speaks to one of my fears/concerns in producing literature/art/scholarship/anything...who am I writing for? Who will be interested, and who has access?
In class this past Thursday, we talked about the potentially conflicting values of modernity and authentic blackness? As a black writer, can your work embody authentic blackness in a lexicon that has not been made available to a significant majority of black people? Surely, the disparity is even greater between expatriate African writers and their non-industrialized African nations where economic conditions dictate incidents of literacy and the availability of leisure items such as books. But similar dynamics exist within the African-American community in regards to the literature and art we produce as well. In sum, the last time I went to an Alvin Ailey performance, two-thirds of the audience was white.
It's not the white patronage that is troubling to me, but the reasons why more black people were not there. This is one of those areas topics of conversation that can get dangerous: some educated black people use this as a soapbox platform for those talented tenth-esque conversations that McKay (and even Hughes) would probably mock...Yes, you know the ones I mean, where every contemporary rapper is dragged through the mud, and their wayward pathologies and sagging pants become the scapegoat for high incarceration rates. I'm not going to go there. And plenty of black people support popular forms of black art/literature/performance. Tyler Perry movies (I'm being serious), hip hip concerts, pop fiction books by black authors. These things are still us, and though they are riddled with some of our more damaging issues as a people, I think they have an important place in our community as well.
I think what is so difficult for black intellectuals is that the class divide is always so present and so divisive. And its not just material class, but intellectual, ideological, political, and everytime you create something that straddles it, you are also helping to define it. You write something deeply important and reflective of your heritage, and essentially your heart, and among the first people willing to gobble it up are not who you'd hope. You've prepared a family dinner, and only strangers come. Gracious strangers, but still...
I agree with Senghor about appropriating the intellectual tradition and using it to tear down the master's house. Anyone can learn a foreign language. Maybe the bigger conversation is how we measure what authentically black really is.
Wait, only 2/3 of the audience was white when you saw Alvin Ailey?
Just kidding. But seriously, the concerns you're expressing here strike me as at once urgent yet irresolvable. I say this as a white person, obviously, and therefore without first-hand knowledge of how that feels, but I know that the same questions have been dogging African American writers for generations. If you look back historically you have Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston debating what meaningful "Negro" writing looks like; fast forward to the present and the contemporary novelists Toni Morrison and Percival Everett are having a similar pitched exchange. Authenticity is a tricky thing: it can be a construct that celebrates and affirms people who otherwise feel disparaged by the dominant culture, but it can also be a stick that's used to beat people back or corral them into someplace artificial. In terms of post-colonial African literature, the famous debate on this went down between N'Gugi wa Thiongo and Chinua Achebe (does the Times article say this?). In terms of *class* and African American culture in the U.S., the smartest and most dynamic writer I know of is Robin D. G. Kelley (whom I mentioned Thursday night), and I understand that Michelle Alexander's new book _The New Jim Crow_ is incredible.
On a personal note, this article speaks to one of my fears/concerns in producing literature/art/scholarship/anything...who am I writing for? Who will be interested, and who has access?
ReplyDeleteIn class this past Thursday, we talked about the potentially conflicting values of modernity and authentic blackness? As a black writer, can your work embody authentic blackness in a lexicon that has not been made available to a significant majority of black people? Surely, the disparity is even greater between expatriate African writers and their non-industrialized African nations where economic conditions dictate incidents of literacy and the availability of leisure items such as books. But similar dynamics exist within the African-American community in regards to the literature and art we produce as well. In sum, the last time I went to an Alvin Ailey performance, two-thirds of the audience was white.
It's not the white patronage that is troubling to me, but the reasons why more black people were not there. This is one of those areas topics of conversation that can get dangerous: some educated black people use this as a soapbox platform for those talented tenth-esque conversations that McKay (and even Hughes) would probably mock...Yes, you know the ones I mean, where every contemporary rapper is dragged through the mud, and their wayward pathologies and sagging pants become the scapegoat for high incarceration rates. I'm not going to go there. And plenty of black people support popular forms of black art/literature/performance. Tyler Perry movies (I'm being serious), hip hip concerts, pop fiction books by black authors. These things are still us, and though they are riddled with some of our more damaging issues as a people, I think they have an important place in our community as well.
I think what is so difficult for black intellectuals is that the class divide is always so present and so divisive. And its not just material class, but intellectual, ideological, political, and everytime you create something that straddles it, you are also helping to define it. You write something deeply important and reflective of your heritage, and essentially your heart, and among the first people willing to gobble it up are not who you'd hope. You've prepared a family dinner, and only strangers come. Gracious strangers, but still...
I agree with Senghor about appropriating the intellectual tradition and using it to tear down the master's house. Anyone can learn a foreign language. Maybe the bigger conversation is how we measure what authentically black really is.
Can you tell this something I think about?
Wait, only 2/3 of the audience was white when you saw Alvin Ailey?
ReplyDeleteJust kidding. But seriously, the concerns you're expressing here strike me as at once urgent yet irresolvable. I say this as a white person, obviously, and therefore without first-hand knowledge of how that feels, but I know that the same questions have been dogging African American writers for generations. If you look back historically you have Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston debating what meaningful "Negro" writing looks like; fast forward to the present and the contemporary novelists Toni Morrison and Percival Everett are having a similar pitched exchange. Authenticity is a tricky thing: it can be a construct that celebrates and affirms people who otherwise feel disparaged by the dominant culture, but it can also be a stick that's used to beat people back or corral them into someplace artificial. In terms of post-colonial African literature, the famous debate on this went down between N'Gugi wa Thiongo and Chinua Achebe (does the Times article say this?). In terms of *class* and African American culture in the U.S., the smartest and most dynamic writer I know of is Robin D. G. Kelley (whom I mentioned Thursday night), and I understand that Michelle Alexander's new book _The New Jim Crow_ is incredible.