Jacquelyn Y McLendon. The Women’s Review of Books. Volume 11, Number 8, May 1994.

Black popular culture presents papers from a 1991 conference held jointly at the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Dia Center for the Arts in SoHo, in New York City. This combination of sites seems emblamatic of the problem of defining what is “black,” what is “popular” and even what is “culture.” While the Studio Museum has been claimed as a space for black cultural expression, the Dia Center in SoHo is culturally heterogeneous. In one essay in the book, “About Face: The Evolution of a Black Producer,” Thomas Allen Harris puts it another way: “The politics of location: Black popular culture at the Dia Center for the Arts—Is it an accident? Does it matter?” Further complicating the situation, few if any of the conference participants would be generally considered “popular” artists. Were rappers Latifah. Ice Cube, or Ice-T, and filmmakers such as John Singleton or Spike Lee invited? I’d like to know.

While Black Popular Culture is broadly titled, it finally engage a narrowly specified agenda. The essays focus heavily on film, especially commercially successful black films such as Boyz N the Hood, Do the Right Thing, Jungle Fever and New Jack City. Some attention is also given to “art” films like To Sleep with Anger and Tongues Untied, and an entire essay is devoted to Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston. Other cultural forms—music (with the exception of rap), dance, literature and painting—are examined minimally or not at all. Surprisingly, there is no discussion of the kind of music and performative services of the traditional black church, which have had and still have a profound impact on black people and black culture. The topics that do get covered are approached in a variety of ways, indicated to some extent by the titles of the book’s major sections: “Popular Culture: Theory and Criticism,” “Gender, Sexuality, and Black Images in Popular Culture,” “The Urban Context,” “The Production of Black Popular Culture” and “Do the Right Thing: Post-nationalism and Essentialism.” Intriguing photographs, to be read along with some of the essays, are interspersed throughout the collection.

The Village Voice recently named Black Popular Culture one of its 25 “favorite books” of 1993. In a local confirmation of the book’s appeal, a number of my colleagues here at the College of William and Mary formed a reading group to discuss it during this academic year. The reading group is multicultural and interdisciplinary, representing the humanities, the sciences and the social sciences. Rarely does one get to write even part of a review from a kind of collective perspective, but the responses of the group in the two sessions we’ve had thus far were so in tune with many of my own initial reactions that I feel I can do justice to something of a brief collective account.

We were uneasy about the “intellectual” character of the voices that addressed “everyday” culture, and about the self-reflexiveness of the book, which makes reading it as a self-contained entity virtually impossible. The essays kept referring us to the conference—both an advantage and a drawback; we wondered what speaker X must have been like to listen to, or what must have been said at session Y. We were always aware of the enthusiasm and excitement of the participants; yet, simultaneously, as readers we sometimes felt like outsiders.

This criticism also reflects our feeling that the participants might not have seen themselves as people who just happen to be intellectuals discussing cultural products that are out there for general consumption, but that they might see themselves as defines of black popular culture. Were they taking on the role of a kind of “talented tenth,” figures who have become recognized authorities on black social, political and cultural thought, but who are in fact at a distinct distance from the masses, not at all “down with the program”? Or, worse, do they see themselves as “teachers of an audience”? These roles seem strikingly similar to the role of critic as bell hooks defines it in her essay in the book, “Dialectically Down with the Critical Program.” She reports that when her sister commented to her that general consumers of popular culture “don’t see the same things” the critics see, that the consumers “feel threatened” by critics, she herself responded by telling her sister that “she had named the function of the critic, to see things that other folks don’t and to call them out.”

Most of our reading group agreed that the book forces us usefully to question both the ideas about culture contained in the essays and our own conceptions of culture. At the same time, however, the open-ended conference reflections, marked “Discussion,” that appear at the end of each of the five sections we found frustrating. The same was true for the concept “Black Pleasure, Black Joy,” which became a theme for the conference and also gives editor Gina Dent a title for her introduction. According to Dent, this expression names one of the “points of profound collective understanding” for the participants at the conference. However, as she admits, these points can “never…be fully grasped except in the elusive phrases with which we attempt to reconstruct them”; therefore, as readers who had not shared in the moments of collective understanding, we were left asking questions about the meaning and implication not only of “pleasure” and “joy” in the abstract, but also of their racialized or culturally specific versions.

If the concept of “Black Pleasure, Black Joy” is too abstract, the essays do clearly articulate the more traditional concept of black “collective struggle.” In “The Black Man’s Burden,” Henry Louis Gates, Jr., addresses issues of black representation—specifically representations of black male sexuality. He examines Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston (1988), an impressionistic film about gay black male life that also speculates on aspects of Langston Hughes’ life that remain unknown, and in so doing offers a critique of sexual identity politics. Gates argues that if Looking for Langston is “a meditation on the Harlem Renaissance, it is equally an impassioned rebutal to the virulent homophobia associated with the Black Power and black aesthetic movements.” He stresses the film’s redefinition of the black male body, one that, by emphasizing its potential for tenderness, subverts “a hardened convention of [black male] representation” (pun intended). In repudiating homophobia, Gates’ essay, like the film, implicitly affirms the value of collective struggle.

The bitter but poignant essay by Marlon T. Riggs, “Unleash the Queen,” strikes at the very core of issues of identification and representation. Riggs directed a 1989 film, Tongues United, about gay black males in contemporary American culture. As with the film, a function of his essay is to reassess black stereotypes, especially those surrounding the image of gay black males, which might explain why his own characterizations of both gays (Loud Snap-Happy Signifying Butch-Girl) and heterosexuals (hets, Miss Thing and Black Macho Recapitulated) gesture toward caricature. Riggs uses hyperbole to create “dis-ease” among those who “persist in the illusion of safe, sage detachment” in an attempt to relegate him to the status of Other.

In sections of his essay marked “Digressions,” Riggs raises a series of questions about identity, representation and exclusion: “What is the marker of blackness in our pop culture?” “Is |pop’ a misnomer?” “Who ultimately are we writing for, talking to?” He uses these questions to open dialogue about the ways in which “multiple black cultural narratives compete, intersect, complement [and] collide,” reversing the tendency of “traditional cultural reviews” that favor certain individual voices while marginalizing others.

Although she focuses on economics in her essay, “Popular Culture and the Economics of Alienation,” Julianne Malveaux also argues, like Riggs, for the importance of recognizing different cultural perspectives. She presents the perspective of a social scientist, by treating popular culture as a “creative manifestation” of economic conditions. Describing how a kind of economic determinism gets played out in the opposition between “high” ar and “low” (or “our”) art, she conveys her own understanding of the underlying causes of black popular cultural expression: “the riveting rhythm of the raps is a reflection…of the awful economic oscillations we are experiencing today. High unemployment rates lead to alienation, to people who are angry and hostile and who express that in their art.” For Malveaux, high unemployment means poverty for whites and blacks (“a skinhead is nothing but a white boy without a job”), and poverty leads to “in-your-face” popular culture like gangsta rap.

The difference in malveaux’s perspective from that of the “artist” becomes clear if one reads her briefs discussion of rap music against novelist Sherley Ann Williams’ discussion of rap in “Two Words on Music: Black Community.” Williams’ essay focuses on the potential effects of rap rather than its causes. She calls for a critique of rap’s content to determine why much of it is “vehemently misogynistic, violent, and sexually explicit, so soaked in black self-hatred.” While she is not oblivious to causal explanations, she finally concludes that “theories of popular culture ain’t doing my neighborhood no good.” Williams’ approach calls into question Malveaux’s sociological correlation of poverty and black artistic expression as, perhaps, an oversimplification.

Unquestionably the highlight of Black Popular Culture, Angela Davis’ essay “Black Nationalism: The Sixties and the Nineties” pulls the book together in a way the introduction and afterwood do not. Davis speaks directly to many of the concerns addressed in other essays: identity and difference, alienation, modes of collective expression, to name only a few. Davis recalls her childhood in the segregated South, her experience at Brandies University as one of “five or six” black students, and her first stirrings of nationalism, in order to give her own involvement in collective struggle a historical context. Her essay brings the volume full circle by stressing the importance of memory and a sense of history both for “reconfiguring the field of representation and providing a basis for “intergenerational dialogue.” She also invokes the concept of “black joy,” recalling the time when, still a student at Brandies, she was invited to join a group with nationalist aspirations like her own. In joining this group, she writes, she felt “nurtured and caressed by Black people who … seemed to have no particular identity other than that they were Black.”

Our reading group agreed that the strength of essays such as Davis’ and Riggs’ lies not in the conclusions they draw but in the specificity of the question they raise about culture. It is with essays like theirs that the book also demonstrates one of the conference goals articulated by Michele Wallace: “a gender balance in which the black feminist voice [is] at least as strong as the male voice.” The brief discussions presented here, however, cannot hope to cover the range and diversity of a book like Black Popular Culture.