Colored Pictures: Race and Visual Representation.

Michael D. Harris.

Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. 296 pp., 48 color and 58 b/w illustrations, notes, index. $34.95 hardcover:

The title of this book invites extended semiotic meditation, for the word "colored" has a wide spectrum of meanings: colorization, phenotypic chromatism, the fracturing color line, the absence of color in the binary figuration of its opposite, black-and-white, and a racial pejoration, so common a feature of the American mentality. As the Introduction states, "Race is pandemic in the history, structure, institutions, assumptions, values, politics, language, and thinking of the United States" (p. 1).

In spite of whatever one may encounter in the body of the text, it is important to bear in mind that (ignoring the six grotesqueries on the title page) the book is framed, on the one hand, by a picture of delicate white ladies seated at the table being served by a frocked standing black man, while an imposing figure of a stern white male stands threateningly behind him as if to ensure the safety of the ladies; and on the other hand, by a black female deity whose nakedness and enlarged genital and pubic areas direct the gaze away from her beauty of face and form, and emphasize blackness or that which makes the deity black. And we are all aware that in "racial discourse, Black is the discredited signifier" (p. 3).

While one does not want to focus on the Foreword, one must still acknowledge its framing and authenticating importance. And in this Professor Okediji excels herself in elegantly compressing, within five pages, the major saliences of the book. Of particular interest are those "controversial images that are bred in the interstices of the color line" (p. xi). For being neither black nor white, neither good nor bad, but comprehending both, this kind of art pulsates with sincere energy and "plots an equation that reveals the biases on both sides, using a cultural scale that demonstrates a symmetrically balanced concept of humanity," transcending the "bold black lines and the bleached white lies of Western representation and postmodern reconstruction" (ibid.). But this transcendence may appear utopian, for deliberate misrepresentations continue, even when everyone recognizes the "madness" of "the illogic of racism" that is at its roots, in spite of the attempted "appropriation" and deconstruction by blacks of the stereotypes of racial identity.

This book turns on seven powerful chapters--I find that "powerful" is the mildest term I can use to describe the chapters as well as the whole project by Michael D. Harris. In "Constructing and Visualizing Race," Harris raises and attempts to answer such pivotal but troubling questions, not easily answered, as: What conditions motivated W.E.B. Du Bois's progressivist analysis of the entity "African Americans"? What did it mean to be black? Why and how was black identity distinct from American identity (which did not have dark skin anywhere in its definition)? And what did blackness look like?

On the whole, black racial identity is a mere construct, "an invention," which remains insidious in the face of persistent attempts by blacks to resist the "dehumanization and caricature" inherent in such "images produced by the few" (pp. 14-15). While, before slavery proper, whites and blacks had existed in a climate of cooemptive understanding of their common humanity, the entrenchment of slavery as an institution as well as the need to keep (white) menial workers in check necessitated racially segregating laws, which told the wretched whites that they were superior to the wretched blacks. This binarization based on chromatistic principles has no basis in fact or science, but has persisted, subtly as well as overtly, so that even black children, when confronted with the choice, preferred white to black dolls, identifying good with white and bad with black.

This normalization is institutionalized by different public and private US agencies. For instance, the artwork on stamps issued by the US Postal Service legitimize "blond hair and Northern European features" as the "standardized American visage" (p. 19). This construction of racist, racialized, and ethnic ideology gets translated into the actual, practical, and political arena as it bestows real-world privilege on those who accept the "ethnic/racial definition" of whiteness. Racist ideology, aided by the schools and churches, seeks to naturalize the outrageous and atrocious, as we can see in science and arts textbooks. In the latter, the dehumanizing depiction of black facial features as apelike has its social-science corollary in Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's notorious and widely cited and disseminated The Bell Curve (1994). We have not really made progress, only refined our tools and become less crude in our presentations and misrepresentations. Even that otherwise admirable painting of Joseph Cinque, which ends the first chapter, has been used by phrenologists to prove an exception to the norm: His positive attributes come from his possession of clearly European characteristics, physical and cranial, while his bare features surely link him to a long line of primitivity and meniality.

The second chapter, "The 19th Century: Imaged Ideology," can be summarized by the quote from Eugene Metcalf at its beginning, which partly reads: "Art represents and sacrifices what is valued in a society....Definitions of art are therefore highly political" (p. 39). The presence of people of African descent in pre-twentieth century Western art and literature is rare; and even rarer is self-representation by blacks. And when such representations by whites occurred, they were generally derogatory, emphasizing the blacks' "social and political inferiority" (p. 40). Such demeaning representations, gross distortions, and grotesque stereotypes helped define blacks' self-perception as worthless, and must have contributed to the development of Du Bois's theory of double consciousness--"that preeminent awareness of how we are perceived by others" (p. 81) as Sambo, Black Face, grinning Minstrel, and Jim Crow.

Chapter 3, "Aunt Jemima, the Fantasy Black Mammy/Servant," turns to the continuing derogation in the fantastications of Aunt Jemima and Black Mammy. The exaggerated grins and gestures of these and other caricaturizations were not totally mitigated by the knowledge that they might indeed have been intentional "signifyin'" or "spoofing white folk ways" (p. 86). For the "mammy," in discourse and in life, remained the inferior and menial cook, servant, and wet-nurse in spite of her veneration in the South, where at one time there was an attempt to memorialize her in monuments and in a projected school for the training of new versions: "In Athens, GA, a Black Mammy Memorial Association was formed in 1910 to charter a Black Mammy Memorial Institute, which would train young blacks in domestic skills and moral attitudes that were generally associated with 'old black mammy' in the South" (p. 92). These images are indeed a grotesquerie, even though their associations with Esu Elegba or the Trickster can show them intentionally working to destabilize and undermine power.

Still, trickster or no, in the chapter on "Jezebel, Olympia, and the Sexualized Woman," the image persists of the black female's body as a terrain for "public negotiation and private loss" (p. 144). The black female body was the repository for the private pleasure of power. Often equated in colonial discourse with land and the natural resources of the colonies, these oversexualized female representations were "associated with nature, uncontrolled passion, and promiscuity" (p. 126). In America, as elsewhere where there was a theoretical proscription of intimacy and interracial intercourse, there was abundant evidence to the contrary, as was evident in the proliferation of mixed race children. Curiously, the blame for these proscribed relations was never placed on the aggressive, lustful, and rapacious white males who engaged in "violent abuses of power," but on the "wanton Jezebel" and "lascivious black women" tempting white men into "dangerous liaisons" (p. 135). It is salutary to note the effective deconstruction of these images by contemporary black female artists, who have successfully turned the tables on whites and, hopefully, restored agency to the black female subject. Or have they?

At the beginning of the chapter on "Color Lines: Mapping Color Consciousness in the Art of Archibald J. Motley, Jr.," Harris talks about his indignation at being classified in Nigeria as oyinbo (white, foreigner). But this was misguided, if not false, indignation, because clearly, in spite of his politics as black and his being African American, he enjoyed all the benefits accruing to "white or near-white" persons, especially in a place like Nigeria where people worship the white or near-white, or foreign, or exotic. And his being classified as "white" had nothing to do with "Pan-African thought and organization" (p. 150), which was elitist from its inception and barely touched the lives of the people. In the US, the near-white population became the foundation of the black bourgeoisie and clear tension developed between them and the truly black segments of society. Matters were exacerbated by near-whites' cultural identification with whites, the extreme example of this identification being the rampant phenomenon of "passing."

It is this conflict that the author discerns in the early works of Archibald Motley, Jr. (1891-1980), from Chicago, himself of mixed heritage, who enjoyed most of the privileges of whiteness, including marriage to a white woman of German descent. It is not surprising that most of his works treat the theme of hybridity and reveal nothing of his African ancestry. Instead, fascinated by the "one drop rule," which he "investigated," Motley revealed in his works a "fascination with fair-skinned women" (pp. 167ff.) especially octoroons, quadroons, and mulattos. In his own view and words, "a very light octoroon could be compared favorably with a Swedish or Norwegian person" (p. 157); there would be no way of knowing that she had "one drop" of black blood in her (what stupid and illogical coinage and concept!). Still, Motley is an important black artist, even though "his focus on urban dynamism was similar to the work of white American artists of the time" (p. 162). When he painted black folk, he generally painted those who were "living a modernist, urban life while grooming and dressing themselves in a modernist fashion" (p. 163). Yet one of his achievements is said to be his use of African Americans as subjects of his paintings, which enabled him to "examine the outer edges of black identity" (ibid.). But his depiction of black identity can at best be described as dubious and ambiguous, if not outwardly disdainful. To Motley, "white" (including its categories of dilution) was synonymous with beauty and goodness, while black was equivalent to ugly. Hence, he believed that the Negro was a "lazy, happy go lucky, shiftless person" (p. 169) and did not bother to remember the names of his "real black, very black, very ugly" subjects (ibid.), whereas the names of his beautiful, light-skinned subjects flowed easily and mellifluously from his tongue. A fair judgement of Motley would simply see him as complicated and conflicted and leave it at that!

In a way, what black artists did was to appropriate the prevailing concept of black identity, "inverting it and using it as a means of organizing a racial solidarity" (p. 187). But Harris's experience of being considered oyinbo in Nigeria convinced him that shared experiences, "culture and consciousness, not race" (ibid.) were what brought and held a people together. The important thing about a people thus held

together is not that they are called "nigger"; the important thing is that they be able to appropriate the racist language in a countermove that defuses its pejorative effectivity. According to the African proverb quoted at the beginning of chapter 6, "It's not what you call me. It's what I answer to" (p. 189, 191) that matters. Thus black folk are able to call themselves "nigger" and collect self-deprecating images and memorabilia in postmodernist strategies of "appropriation, reappropriation, or deconstruction," in order to "neutralize and undermine the harmful representation" (pp. 190ff.). This is signifyin'.

It is the same strategy that informs the whole notion of playing a role, donning a mask, or grinning in a way that shows all thirty-two teeth. The important thing is the "sentiments behind the mask" (p. 233). Time may well come, in a "post-black" era, when the need for donning such a mask or playing such clownish roles or grinning has been transcended by "ancestral rootedness," which "circumvents false identities" (p. 237ff.).

   That transcendence would be one that
   does not seek to avoid identity but, instead,
   embraces the complex histories
   that make up contemporary African
   American identity. It is in cultural, familial,
   and experiential foundations
   that include the vernacular and the elite,
   blues and jazz, the multicultural, and the
   African that we find the freedom foundation
   for visual representation unburdened
   by double consciousness or double
   binds (p. 257).