“Privileging the Popular at What Price:
Identity Politics, Black Popular Culture,
and Joan Morgan’s When
Chickenheads Come Home to Roost
Compare the rethinking of movement goals by black women after the 1960s to the rethinking of pop culture influences by black intellectuals: lessons from the 60s/70s.
No magic bullet to kill the enemy: racism
It is necessary to rethink the major critical paradigms that underline our work as African American public intellectuals
Need a longer intro to describe my take on all issues
This essay uses Joan Morgan’s 1999 text of cultural criticism, When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost, as a starting point for a discussion of how references to popular culture have informed recent texts of cultural criticism by African American activist intellectuals. My response is rooted in an admiration of Morgan’s text rather fundamental disagreements with its major premises; however, I hope my comments will be useful for reconsidering how activist intellectuals might approach the subjects of hip hop and black popular culture. Morgan’s introduction, in fact, describes the genesis of her essay collection in a way that I would like to follow in my scholarly work, in that she does not attempt to speak for the generations of African Americans who have come of age in the 1980s and 1990s. Instead, she seeks to “to tell my truth as best I could from my vantage point on the spectrum” (26).
It is another matter, however, to identify the extent to which Morgan’s truth is conflated with the representations of African Americana within popular culture – and in fact, I will argue in this paper that the diverse everyday experience of African Americans as well as the salient history of critically engaged and progressive intellectual work by African Americans is obscured by the privileging of popular culture in recent cultural criticism. With these assumptions in mind, this paper will respond to essays in Joan Morgan's recent collection that consistently use the iconography of popular culture to establish authenticity within her critical discourse. By authenticity, I am referring to the intentional use of pop culture references to show that one is "down" with the ways that young and predominantly African Americans speak and practice black culture. Rhetorics of authenticity are also used in cultural criticism by Michael Dyson and Nelson George. Dyson, in fact, uses the term "hip hop intellectual" to describe his critical standpoint, while George ...
Include more
specific references to Dyson and George.
Cultural critic bell hooks was also a pioneer in the use of pop culture references in her scholarly work, and she argues that these references make critical language more accessible. I will argue here that the number of references to popular culture in recent African American cultural criticism have generated a race for accessibility and authenticity among cultural critics, with critics perhaps gaining greater accessibility at the risk of losing critical acuity and radical sensibilities that are essential for challenging racism and other injustices in American political and cultural life. Far from being superficially situated within larger critical practices, references to popular culture in African American cultural criticism have become pervasive. While it has been argued that such references are useful for the sake of audience appeal and to free pop culture from its disparagement within a high culture/low culture binary, I will argue that to allow popular culture to occupy such a high profile within critical discourse offers too much legitimacy to a social force that has produced many objectionable representations of African American life and culture: the reifications of a black/white binary and related race and gender stereotypes, fundamentally crass commercialism, ahistoricism, and the privileging of youth over other cultural perspectives. In addition, the emphasis on popular culture in recent critical work may well have deflected attention from other accessible and probably more incisive critical standpoints, including the critical analysis of economic and political structures that Marxism and more radical African American cultural critics have produced.
In the interests of full disclosure, as Morgan provides in her essay collection, I will describe several influences over my vantage point in relation to black popular culture. I am essentially a contemporary of Morgan’s in terms of age and generation (find the facts on this). Both of us have benefited from the social changes set in motion by civil rights and Black Power activism, though we were both too young to participate in the mass social movements that produced these changes. In my scholarly work, I have written often about patterns of representing masculinity and femininity in post-World War II African American literature and culture. Thus, I appreciate Morgan’s focus on gender relations and feminism as objects of analysis, since she sees as I do that conflicts within African American families, representations of African Americans in popular culture, and everyday intraracial interactions have both highlighted and reinforced divisions between African American men and women.
An Overview of Morgan’s Approach
To make this argument, I’ll begin with the introductory essay in Morgan’s text, subtitled “dress up,” an essay that starts with an assessment of fashion trends in relation to the author’s social identity. Given that the author has worked as an editor for Essence magazine, a master text in the discourse of black popular culture, it seems fitting to begin with this focus:
It started with a dress. A hot little thing. A spaghetti-strapped Armani number,
with a skintight bodice and a long flowing skirt, in that shade of orange that black
girls do the most justice. I bought it in La-La Land precisely because it reminded
me of New York in the seventies, with its sexy sistas (girls with names like Pokie,
Nay-Nay, Angela, and Robin) and those leotard and dance skirt sets they used
to rock back in the day (17).
The essay moves on to discuss Ntzoke Shange’s choreopoem, for colored girls who have attempted suicide when the rainbow is enuf, a text that provided Morgan with an understanding of black femininity and black feminism among women of her mother’s generation. However, Morgan also asserts that generations of black women born after her mother’s time cannot and should not try to follow the “old school” bandwagon – as Morgan herself could not do after seeing for colored girls produced for the first time in 1995. Instead, she argues, changes in context following the periods of civil rights, black power, and soul mean that younger African Americans must re-establish their commitments to social change by reflecting on more recent collective experiences and pressing social issues. To illustrate this need for self-examination and action, Morgan described advice she gave to a 16-year old aspiring actress she was working with at a high school. Revealing the influence of Shange’s characterizations of black women, the young actress was attempting to convey a black female voice on stage by imitating the “eye-rollin’, smart-talkin’, finger-snappin’ Miss Thang, but she wasn’t believable” (25):
In a society of ever-shifting identity politics, I was asking this sixteen-year-old
to sift through so many conflicting interpretations of femaleness and blackness and
free her voice. In order to do this she was going to have to liberate it from the
stranglehold of media stereotypes – the pathetic SheNayNay impersonations of
black male comedians, the talk-to-the-hand Superwomen, the video-hos,
crackheads, and lazy welfare queens – that obscure so much of who we are.
And she was going to have to push her foremothers’ voices far enough away
to discover her own (26).
Morgan suggests that stereotypical representations of African Americans have persisted into the 21st century, despite any claims one might make about progress in race relations, and further in the collection, Morgan argues that these stereotypes continue to inform African American self-images, the reception of African American texts, and the treatment that African Americans receive in everyday life. However, Morgan hesitates to take the next step in reasoning that many of her observations imply – to assert that popular culture has too much influence over the socialization of all American youth, African American youth included, and further that African Americans who aim to be activists ought to resist some of these influences. As I proceed here, I will challenge and revise Morgan’s thesis – I will argue that resisting many of the influences of popular culture is absolutely necessary to achieve a greater unity of purpose among African American activists and to build coalitions across race and gender lines. In direct dialogue with Morgan’s characterization of hip-hop feminism, I will argue that continuous or extensive engagement with contemporary black popular culture may not be necessary, and indeed may be detrimental to the efforts of African American intellectuals to reach greater self-understanding and to become more active and effective politically.
References to popular culture deploy an African American rhetoric of authenticity, but do not tap deeply enough into the larger bodies of historical and critical knowledge. (use examples from Morgan – show how her text appeals to authenticity and explain what historical knowledge it misses) Rhetorics of cultural authenticity are inherently problematic in that no narrowly cast set of ideas and behaviors can claim to represent African American life and culture, but the ways that critics have discussed both mass culture among African Americans and popular culture have tempted critics to reify certain behaviors as images as essentially black. Arguments about the essential character of certain linguistic traits among African Americans are common in literary theory:
In cultural studies, a similar argument is raised by a range of critics that have named their work after hip hop music. I share the interest expressed by many of these critics in examining and producing texts within the discourse of popular culture, particularly popular music. I am a practicing professional musician working often within the expressive form of blues, a form that at times has appeared anachronistic within contemporary black popular culture, but retains a vitality as a form of musical expression within the wider American popular culture. However, despite my interest in this historically significant form of black popular music, one distinction between Morgan’s standpoint and my own is her claim to the title “hip-hop feminist” as a way of identifying herself. A similar identity has been claimed by other contemporary African American urban intellectuals: Michael Dyson, Nelson George, and Tricia Rose are other prominent figures who have aligned themselves stylistically and ideologically with hip-hop culture. To claim hip-hop in this way highlights several assumptions implicit in recent African American intellectual work: first, claiming hip hop in this way suggests that African American intellectual work should be relevant to contemporaneous struggles for full citizenship and personhood, and, arguably, that hip-hop provides a public voice for at least disenfranchised and perhaps all African Americans. In the past, other musical and cultural practices – gospel and work songs, ragtime, be-bop jazz, blues, and soul have similarly energized mass audiences and have inspired wider participation in movements for social change while celebrating black cultural production. Secondly, claims to the label hip-hop or feminist intellectual suggests that the musical form of hip-hop is sufficiently expansive to function as a metaphor for the contemporary issues that are most relevant to the lives of African Americans today.
(Blues is now
excluded from black “popular” music – R & B is the related
but distinctive
term)
(List some
examples of how African American intellectuals – Nelson
George, Michael
Dyson, Tricia Rose, and bell hooks – have used references to
pop culture in
their work)
(Define popular
culture and black popular culture)
I agree that the critical work of African American intellectuals should be relevant, whenever possible, to the everyday struggles against racism and economic injustice that African Americans face, and I do use references to African American popular music in my courses to provide context and to illustrate ideas. However, to define oneself as a “hip-hop intellectual,” as Dyson and Morgan do, conflates the general practice of writing critically and engaging in conversation with African American political and cultural traditions with the narrower range of practices and ideologies that hip-hop represents in both popular culture and intellectual discourse. For that reason, I would not describe myself as a “blues intellectual,” despite my professional work in blues performance and my critical attention to blues traditions and ideologies in my scholarly writing and teaching. Conceiving an ethnic or racial community or a historical period in terms of musical metaphors – as Amiri Baraka did with Blues People or Tricia Rose with Black Noise – always understates the diversity of identity politics, economic class and regional differences, and religious and social values among African Americans. I will go further, in fact, to argue that recognizing diversity within the narratizing frameworks we use for cultural criticism will make public intellectual work more relevant, not less relevant, to a larger audience of African Americans.
In relation to Morgan’s text, then, my argument is that both the label “hip hop feminist” and the privileging of popular culture are theoretical moves that call for closer examination, in preparation for future activist work seeking progressive social change. Let me introduce now the concept of cultural authenticity as it applies to this discussion. By cultural authenticity, I am referring to uses of rhetorical tropes, anecdotes, and other vernacular references to assure audiences that the rhetor is familiar with the collective cultural experience of African Americans. For example, at the beginning of Race Matters, Cornel West describes his difficulty in securing a cab in New York City, which suggests that despite his status as a tenured professor at one of the world’s elite universities, some of his everyday encounters with racism are similar to those problems experienced by African Americans who lack West’s material means or status. In Joan Morgan’s essays, references to a range of common texts – lyrics by Erykah Badu, comedy by Chris Rock, visual images of Toni Braxton , Foxy Brown, and Li’l Kim – all assure readers that Morgan is engaged with familiar trends and personalities in recent black popular culture. Morgan’s carefully crafted narration weaves between urban dialect and the self-reflective word play of 1990s cultural criticism, conveying once again to her audience that the writer’s perspective is both authentic in terms of her familiarity with contemporary black urban culture and sophisticated in terms of its critical responses to other black activist discourses.
This brings us once again to a larger point: that uses of pop culture references in recent texts by Joan Morgan, Nelson George, bell hooks, Michael Dyson, Tricia Rose, and others have been widespread enough to suggest that such references are a necessary component of a critical rhetoric that effectively engages African American audiences – particularly younger audiences. Such a view is implied by Morgan’s excellent essay on the gender politics of hip hop and other matters, “from fly-girls to bitches and hos.” The essay acknowledges sexism and misogyny as significant elements of the ideology that emerges from hip hop as a whole, but Morgan still argues that it’s important and necessary to listen to the voices that emerge from a music form that is:
not only the dominion of the young, black, and male, it is also the world in which young black women live and survive. A functional game plan for us, one that is going to be as helpful to Shequanna on 142nd as it is to Samantha at Sara Lawrence, has to recognize hip-hop’s ability to articulate the pain our community is in and use that knowledge to create a redemptive, healing space (76).
There are two fallacies that I see here in Morgan’s reasoning that reveal the larger problems stemming from a general reliance on pop culture in intellectual work even, as in the case of hip hop, when pop cultural texts appear to be an authentic reflection of the lived reality of African American youth in urban America. The first fallacy is that, while one might convincingly argue that the images described in hip hop music (insert your artist and CD here) accurately reflect the everyday experiences of urban African Americans, these images represent African American experiences anecdotally rather than these systematically, episodically rather than comprehensively. Speaking directly to Morgan’s metaphorical naming of young African American women in the passage above – the fact is that not all Shequannas or Samanthas would assess hip hop music in similar ways, nor can it be taken for granted that any single musical style – no matter how carefully crafted – can represent fairly the diverse range of human experience at any given historical or cultural moment. A second fallacy within the passage is implied by Morgan’s suggestion that is a single “game plan,” or ideology, might be fashioned that will result in meaningful and positive social change for large numbers of African American simultaneously. This argument seems familiar within African American critical traditions as a continuing search for a single, unitary strategy for social change, or perhaps even the search for charismatic leadership and messiah figures: Harriet Tubman, Booker T. Washington, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, for example. While the life work of such individuals has been highly instrumental in achieving legal and political landmarks as well as transformations in the everyday lives of African Americans, I remain suspicious of the suggestion that any single “game plan” will be the magic bullet solution to persistent problems of racism. economic injustice, and unfavorable representations of African Americans in mass culture.
Methods of production as well as aesthetic qualities within the discourse of popular culture – uses of pastiche, the privileging of novelty – genuine and constructed, the importance of mass audience appeal – work against more democratizing practices that should be equally or more prominent in a radically transformative expressive practice: textual complexity, representing multiple subjectivites, and decentralizing the production of expressive texts. This argument is supported by the work of Frederic Jameson, who argues as follows in Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism: “…aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods (from clothing to airplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation” (4-5). Jameson also responds to the pervasive use of pastiche in contemporary expressive arts, which he describes as “the random cannibalization of all the styles of the past, the play of random stylistic allusion” (18).
Jameson’s texts focuses a great deal on the institutional influences over production of expressive texts, reminding us that such production always takes place within a capitalist economic context, a context that is characterized by unequal distribution of wealth and access to the means by which culture is mass produced and distributed (to use Marxist terms), but readers of popular culture often do not acknowledge these contextual and structural influences. The extent varies to which the cultural critics I have mentioned routinely theorize on the extent to which structural and institutional influences over production show up within the text or influence audiences reading these texts, including African American audiences. bell hooks acknowledges this function often with her term, “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy,” but she, like Morgan, has not reached the conclusion that meaningful radical resistance ought to include a repudiation of most texts of popular culture produced under current pyramidical economic and cultural structures. Jameson is more willing than Morgan or hooks to suggest that popular culture as a whole is an agent by which forces hostile to the ideals of human justice exert control over the production of culture:
…I must remind the reader of the obvious; namely, that this whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout class history; the underside of culture is blood, torture, death, and terror (5).
Among the products of postmodern American culture, popular culture, then, helps to normalize our relations with the individuals and institutions that produce military, cultural, and economic domination of the world by a disproportionately small number of agents, and, more specifically, help convince audiences that certain texts, images, and ideas are legitimate or authentic elements of African American culture, and other texts, images, and ideas are not. I would take issue with Jameson’s assertion that activist intellectuals would find his conclusion to be obvious; instead, African American cultural critics – beyond the Marxist-influenced perspectives offered by Manning Marable, Angela Davis, or the late June Jordan – younger critics in particular, are less likely to weigh and consider arguments about structural inequalities in the economic and political systems we live under in their assessments of black popular culture. Barbara Ransby and Tracye Matthews do make such an argument in “Black Popular Culture and the Transcendence of Patriarchal Illusions”:
…a significant amount of the gender imagery in rap…simultaneously celebrates and condemns the kind of black women who is presumably undeserving of either respect or protection, the bad girl, Jezebel, whore, bitch…The imagery is graphically reinforced in the music videos and on stage, where back-up dancers gyrate, almost naked, and in some cases simulate sex acts. At the same time, they are taunted with insults and derogatory names by the male rappers. The women are usually smiling with welcoming approval at this abusive and degrading treatment. This is certainly not a liberatory vision, but one, sadly, quite consistent with the racist and sexist stereotypes we have endured for centuries…The cultural and ideological assault upon black women not only helps to justify reactionary public policies that compromise the lives of poor black women and their children, it also helps to justify direct acts of physical violence (531).
Ransby and Matthews recognize that the mass production of images of African Americans in the context of white supremacist institutions will lead to the continued inscription of damaging stereotypes and will usually not call attention to structural inequalities in the economic and political systems. While many in recent cultural studies will argue, as Morgan does, that images produced under these conditions can still liberate audiences from the tyrannies of internalized and institutionalized racism, patterns of resegregation in schools as well as persistent problems of economic inequality, domestic violence, and other social ills would suggest otherwise.
(If audiences
do not recognize historical references – how should a critical
intellectual
respond? Use bell hooks as an example)
A more productive future direction for African American critical intellectual work would be to re-imagine and re-articulate a set of goals and aims – based on the multiple perspectives on race, ideology, divisions of power, and popular culture that contemporary African Americans bring to cultural criticism. For example – and while in this essay I have been critical of the privileging of hip hop in activist intellectual work – one direction that might help matters would be to evaluate the successes and problems of hip hop as an activist political and cultural movement, in anticipation of future movements justice-seeking and cultural movements. Many would argue – including Morgan – that hip hop integrates the political and the cultural into its musical practice, and thus hip hop has been and still is positioned to produce progressive social change in both of these broad spheres. However, I would argue that in relation to hip hop, we have reached a point similar to the cultural moment in the 1970s which witnessed the waning of the Black Arts and Black Power movements, a point at which the co-optation and commercialization of many of the movements symbols had occurred (ranging from Black Power salutes to Africanesque clothing to the de-politicizing and mass production of soul music through disco), and a sufficiently large body of criticism had been articulated by participants in the movements as well as its opponents to call into question the movements’ potential to effect further positive social change.