Invisibility Blues - From Pop to Theory.

One of the blurbs on the cover of Michele Wallace's Black Popular Culture claims that this gathering of voices "comes smoking straight" from today's "best black minds." And so it does (from some of them, anyway), convening about thirty culture workers from the African diaspora in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain, addressing the issues at hand. The book's title is the first one I've seen in a very long time without a handle on it. In other words, there is no colon here with a line of explanation behind it. Ably edited by Gina Dent, a graduate student at Columbia University, this book serves up "black popular culture" in the generic, unmodified by time, place, and circumstance. One relishes the superb self-confidence of this gesture and indeed discovers to her endless delight that this absorbing concoction has some of everything in it, from words on "Afro-kitsch" and the black nude in painting, to meditations on black film, to multiculturalism and the ubiquitous culture of "hip-hop." For those of us who have missed the wonders of "rap," for instance, Black Popular Culture proffers an entree.

Handsomely packaged by Seattle's Bay Press, under the auspices of New York's Dia Center for the Arts, the paperback version of this 1992 miscellany provides liberal margins to scribble in, is smooth and sensuous to the feel in its good-looking black-and-yellow-on-orange semigloss binding, and offers an impressive array of graphics - beautiful black-and-white prints of Detroit's now-dismantled "Heidelberg Project," mixed-media work on urban themes, stills from video and movie footage (including Marlon Riggs's 1991 Tongues Untied, a televisual study of black gay sexuality), and other inscriptions of the moving image.

At least two of these juxtapositions are striking by virtue of their political weightiness: One of them involves a well-known photographic capture of the Hill-Thomas Senate Hearings. Situated on either side of the fold of what would be pages 336-337, in the midst of Wallace's "Afterword," it is searing in its dramatic intensity, its gesture toward the confrontational, and its power to effect a collective recoil. Then there is an exquisite study by Jason Miccolo Johnson, covering the top half of page 90, that is so incredibly telling of Manning Marable's "race" - "ethnicity" distinction in this volume that words cannot describe it . . . but one must try: The occasion takes us back to the early days of the previous administration, and we presume that it might be Bush's inaugural week in the "memory" of the photograph. Depicting a reception for black appointees to the new administration, there are happy faces in the background so sharply etched that I can make out one female figure's frosted hairdo on the right side of the frame and a male figure's mustache curling over a toothy grin on the left. But there in the foreground, as though lit by an adroit cinematographer (who understood perfectly well the erotic history of the key light, but was insistent on its subtly subversive potential in the moment), are the "stars" of this mise en scene: The Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell himself, is holding First Lady Barbara Bush in his arms in a turn on the dance floor. The latter's left hand, with the fingers splayed against the General's epaulet on the right shoulder, fractures the image across officialdom and something else. Because that hand bears her wedding ring and the nails are shapely, beautifully manicured, we seem all of a sudden to be voyeurs of an illicit moment of sincere flirtation, the sweet secret cheat, except that somebody saw. And now we all might. There's more: The body of the handsome general is gallantly bent and rounded slightly inward, toward Mrs. Bush, whose fine silver coif is thrown back, tilting up toward his face, neck straining to greet . . . a word? a lip-match? At any rate the joke's on us, since, rather like the imagined lovers on Keats' urn, the moment is frozen in eternal interrogation. Then, too, it occurs to me that it could all be a wonderful put-on, a funny man's sight gag.

I belabor the point for two reasons: First of all, the photograph not only signals the new and ambiguous status of the black professional classes, but goes far to illuminate my own curiosity concerning General Powell's seemingly absolute commitment to a man and a political regime that carried disdain for a civil rights agenda to a new high (or low, depending on your viewing angle). This marks the unbearable irony and the political danger, perhaps, of today's highly visible black Republican. Second, this graphic parked in a text devoted to work on "black popular culture" apparently ill fits the vocation of the "popular" (of the "black"? of which "culture"?) and raises a central question that this volume does not address and ought to have: What is the relationship between popular culture and, I suppose, now, "other" culture? One leaves the volume thinking that, at a minimum, "black popular culture" is black folks' contemporaneity and its involvements in the "current event." If that is so, then ought it be "black (popular) culture," or popular "black culture"? Either way, all blacks - like it or not - are situated in it, so what does the modification specify? Then, too, how can one think "black popular culture" without eventually thinking "style" in its near-infinite variety - food ways, the fashion statement, the old arts and crafts of household adornment, from the beloved quilt to the family Bible? And what about those small, "handmade," Southern black Baptist churches that some of us grew up in, the ones with the pews that splintered a too-quick knee? In its narrow focus on East coast (if not so strictly New York) intellectuals and its sometimes tedious concentration on certain products of the electronic high-tech media, Black Popular Culture effects few gestures toward the material surround - where the "people" make it happen - and the concrete ways in which diasporic communities have always demonstrated a synthesis of transformative means. African Americans, as we know, didn't start making "popular culture" yesterday with MTV and Kris Kross.

But whatever we might miss here, Michele Wallace and Gina Dent have done a splendid job even an exciting one - of choreographing some of the most important spokespersons (from both sides of the Atlantic) and their words on matters of some urgency now. In her role of public intellectual, one of few African American women so positioned, Wallace straddles the academy and the print media, with their conduits into a wider world, as a highly informed interventionist and "translator."

Currently an associate professor of English and Women's Studies at CUNY, Wallace entered the scene powerfully in 1978 with the Dial Press publication of Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. Visiting a close friend in DC one weekend one season that year, I purchased Black Macho at one of the high-gloss, high-rent bookstores in the Capital. Not knowing exactly who Michele Wallace was then, but having heard that she had done something controversial, I read her book with some anxiety because it addressed black sexual politics of the nationalist sixties with a dash of assurance that older black women scholars and writers had simply not gotten around to yet. What had we been waiting for?

The book's title straightforwardly asserts its mission, as Wallace takes on the high jinks, the posturing, the failings of a heroic moment of black political culture in the United States. For anyone interested in tracking commentary on those years of struggle, with views on Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., and other figures along that route, Black Macho is imperative reading. Not biting its tongue, it is bravely articulate about the misogynistic strain coursing through black male/female sexual politics. The waters are still troubled here, but one of the tasks Black Macho sets for itself is to confront the topic, as an antidote to its seductive poisons.

Some years after Black Macho, Wallace's essays, which had appeared in several popular sources - among them, The Village Voice, The Women's Review of Books, and Heresies - were collected in the 1990 Verso publication Invisibility Blues - From Pop to Theory. Having matured in her own outlook on the black culture critique, and African American women's relationship to it, Wallace poses one key question throughout the pieces published between 1975-1989: What is the situation of African American women as writers of non-fiction - specifically, of "criticism" and "theory"? Again, a Wallace title tells us much: The basic thesis here is that black women academics, critics, and theorists (some people don't easily believe that any of the last group exist) are fundamentally "invisible" to the politics of discourse, of canon formation, and of the consolidation of the "enterprise" of African American literary/culture "theory."

My anxiety, again, is that Wallace is not only absolutely right about what she has seen, but lucid to the point that one cries "Uncle!" in the middle of the night! In all fairness to that community of women, however, Wallace wants to make clear that this functional social and political "inferiority" is partly induced by the systematic exclusion of black women intellectuals from the strategies and rooms of decisiveness that shape and define what and who are valuable, whose words count, and so on. Concretely, black women as intellectual producers and consumers do not have open access to organs of public opinion, so that their "muteness" or "silence," or whatever one wants to call being "gagged," quite literally springs from a well of contempt and loathing so pure and so deep in the national psyche that, if one could gauge its full and vicious strength, she would never write another line. Wallace must know that too.

Near the close of Invisibility Blues, Wallace draws our attention to the workings of access in a concrete example. Referring to an interview that she conducted with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., for the magazine Emerge, she alleges (and she is totally right) that the black press would normally have little or no interest in literary criticism, but that Gates marks an exception for two reasons: first, the high visibility he gains by writing, often, for the New York Times and, second, his premier status as the consolidating figure of an African American literary "tradition." What she goes on to suggest, in passing, is that these functions are, in fact, related. One can accede to headmanship, if the right engines endorse him/her. This is certainly not to say that Professor Gates himself is not a most fit cultural interpreter and spokesperson; the point, rather, is that we have to deal here with systematicity and symptomaticity, since individuals, wherever they are mapped onto axes of significance, are akin to pawns in the hands of a genuine "invisibility" that wishes to remain so. Wallace well knows this and has had the insight and the courage to say it all. A "black feminist" standpoint is thus far "untheorized" - and she gets that right, too, except that there are small pieces of it coming out of and/or into the computer at the moment.

But what, in addition, must not have escaped her own keen notice, really, is that the strategic staging of the Fall 1991 Conference on Black Popular Culture that stands behind the new volume tends to reinforce those very power dynamics that worry the content of Invisibility Blues. This is curious: Wallace claims in the "Afterword" to the new volume that one of the two central purposes that the Conference served "was to move the center of African-American cultural discourse beyond literary criticism into other politically significant precincts such as popular culture" - and in a bound, one might ask? While purporting to move the "center," neither the volume nor the conference did a good deal, as far as I can see, to shift the orbit of the heavens and this earth. The "deans" of the African American literary/cultural enterprise am here - all two of them - as male "stars" privileged in the invocatory position: Stuart Hall opens, ably followed by Cornel West. One has no quarrel with these arrangements, really, and one would most certainly not want to insist that a woman, for the sake of our deepest political impulses, ought to have begun. But the volume assumes for me, at least, an overwhelming maleness of tone and appeal, which exactly apes the "center" of African American cultural discourse by way of the literary. Further, the presentation is occasionally vexed by the "overheard" fly-buzz of male ego-investment and the sort of panicked vulgar bullying that silenced quite a few of us black intellectuals, especially the women, as Angela Davis correctly observes in her remarks, during the late '60s and early '70s.

Ironically enough, shifting the "center" - if we can imagine for the moment that any one of us and our individual projects can successfully do that over a weekend, or in a single published volume, or by fiat - would likely "write out" of the cultural enterprise clearly one-half of those "best-known black feminist critics" whom Wallace litanizes in Invisibility Blues and whose work arises, in part, against the center's grain. While we are certainly fortunate to have the important volume of writings on aspects of popular culture in African diasporic life-worlds, we must wonder - and this is precisely the kind of deconstructive inquiry that Wallace is matchless in engaging - to what extent the work of black intellectuals, just like Pop, is increasingly shaped and driven by market imperatives. This unrelenting "invisible" mechanism bears down on all, and there is little use resisting. Besides, "resistance" is no longer a fashionable idea, if it ever were.

Still, we ought to eye, with some concern, it seems to me, the tightening press on the intellectuals to produce the "tastings" - work that is ephemeral, underinformed, and that moves, accordingly, away from the syntheses that perspective and patience might breed. As we ponder the ins and outs of this latest "black popular culture," we might well want to watch out for whose means of cultural production we are hand-maiding, and be even hipper, since every school girl knows the answer to that one, what difference it makes, in fact, and who cares.