The Michael Eric Dyson Reader

by Michael Eric Dyson

  Thus the premodern black biblical universe accommodates black modernist pursuits in postmodern conditions. “Making it in on broken pieces” has long been a rhetorical staple in the grassroots theodicies—in both the Weberian, sociological sense and in theological terms—that shape the preaching of figures from C. L. Franklin, Aretha Franklin’s father, to Jesse Jackson. Add to that the fragments of European cultural influences and African cultural retentions that shape black life, and the unavoidability of black folk negotiating between disparate vocabularies, indeed, different worlds, should be dramatically apparent. I think that Levis-Strauss’s notion of bricolage, of taking what’s at hand, what’s left over, so to speak, in the construction of culture to shape one’s survival and identity, is a crucial concept as well in coming to terms with this black gift to move in and through a variety of rhetorics and discourses. In that sense, then, our identities have always been fabricated out of the content of our surroundings. Forced migration and permanent exile will make one into a sophisticated cultural polyglot and sometimes into a cosmopolitan citizen. Home was often a compromise of contexts: wherever we found ourselves, we made that home or at least we transported our home there. Home was not something we could leave and come to again, so home often had to travel with us, across turbulent waters, into hostile countries, and within resistive communities.

  That’s not to deny the reality of fixed points of domestic reference in time and space, and in body and memory. But the reality is that black people had to have multiple notions of home, and often multiple homes, which is why there’s a thin line between coerced migration and homelessness. You’ve got to remember that home is a noun, verb, adjective, and adverb, and it is both a means and an end. So the lack of a sense of rupture grows from the seamless interweaving of multiple meanings articulated through a variety of rhetorical situations, whether it’s preaching, teaching, writing, and so on. In my case, I can’t deny that at some points all the communities I’m involved in may experience tension and conflict because I don’t feel a radical rupture in moving from one vocabulary to another. But as Gerald Graff argues, we’ve got to teach the conflicts, and by extension we’ve got to illustrate the tensions. For me, that means we’ve got to mix rhetorical styles in edifying fashion. So when I get up in the classroom, for instance, and I really get going, talking about Foucault and Derrida, perhaps, and about Judith Butler, and about Stuart Hall and his distinction between preferred meanings versus negotiated meanings and oppositional meanings, my intellectual excitement translates to my verbal style and energizes my peculiar semantic trace. And my Baptist roots begin to nourish my oratorical engagement, and before I know it, I’m preaching postmodernism.

  So here you have a professor with a staccato rhythm and a tuneful cadence who’s invested in the articulation of postmodern conceptualizations of identity and power. I’m baptizing my lecture in the rhetorical waters of my religious tradition. There is no rupture, no discontinuity, nothing but seamless negotiations between diverse styles of intellectual and rhetorical engagement. There may be problems for interlocutors who believe that an etiquette of articulation should prevail, one that polices style and dictates proprietary usage. But I ain’t with that, so there’s no problem for me. The irony is that even in this so-called postmodernist moment, which ostensibly celebrates pastiche, fragmentation, collage, difference, irreverent fusions, and the like, black style remains problematic. When black identity marks postmodernity with its embodied articulation, there’s a rupture going on in the midst of the rupturing context itself. It involves the problem that has confronted us in premodernity, modernity, and postmodernity: race, and more specifically, the issue of blackness and its unwieldy complement of transgressing expressions.

  Yes. There seems always to be this move to delegitimize, to make it . . .

  Literally illegal.

  I remember my first semester as an undergraduate at Princeton. So, to my mind, this white guy says to me, How are you ever going to go home again? Aren’t you afraid that these people won’t understand?

  Yes, would have to unbirth you . . .

  There’s some rupture. I’ve thought about this black Ivy League tradition that we seem to silence. Although we celebrate these people, we silence the fact that they were educated in and present at these institutions at the same time as the Eliots, Stevenses, Santayanas, and Jameses. Inhabiting the same physical space.

  That’s exactly right. And that’s why postmodernity is so crucial, at least in theory: it helps us uncover and claim the useful legacies of modernism that were submerged in its racial silences. Of course, it could be that postmodernism is really modernism in drag. As you said, when you think of modernism, you think of Eliot and Stevens. And as you noted, you think of Santayana and James too, and we could add Royce, just to keep the Harvard modernists in line. And we could add Joyce, Pound, Frost, Crane, and a host of others. Gender got a strong foothold in the modernist canon in a way that race was never quite able to do, with figures like Marianne Moore, Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, and Djuna Barnes. But at the same time, W.E.B. Du Bois is right in the middle of modernism, along with Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy West, Richard Wright, Chester Himes, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and many, many more. They were all thinking, writing, imagining, and populating black universes, even as many of them insisted that it was impossible to limn the American experience without viewing the nation through the eyes of blacks who were more American than African, as Ellison contended, or as they emphasized the universal moral impulse that echoes through black demands for dignity and humanity, as Baldwin argued.

  The black modernists were attempting to breathe freely beyond the claustrophobic boundaries of race, trying to refigure black identity and, by extension, American identity. Yet they’re always seen in these boxed, fixed, localized categories, when indeed they’re trying to help us reimagine the project of America: “I, too, sing America,” as Hughes sang, ringing a change, varying a theme, signifying upon and harkening metaphorically back to Walt Whitman’s “I sing the body electric.” Hughes and the great black modernists inserted black America into the mainstream flow and thereby proved that America must bend itself to our tune, song, riff, beat, meter, prose, rhythm, and the like in order to be truly, fully, wholly itself. For instance, Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong swung in the mainstream and then swung the mainstream to a black rhythm, and through their music, helped America grasp the self-enlarging principle of subordinating color to culture and craft. Hughes was aggressively insinuating himself, and black folk, into the American stream of consciousness, into the American song—much like King would later do with the American dream—and thus proving that our meters hypnotically swayed the nation to our virtuosic, vernacular voices. Hughes locates the context of the development of his identity in those physical spaces in his American “home” where he is expelled to feed his growing self-awareness on the leftovers of racial exclusion.

  But he flips the script. He grows strong on the negative diet of marginality that he turns into a wholesome meal of aesthetic and moral combat against white supremacy, especially its failure to recognize black beauty of every sort. So Hughes in his poem talks about being sent to the kitchen to eat, “When company comes.” But he eats well, grows strong, and pledges that when company comes again, he’ll be at the table and that no one will dare scold him for his presence and send him to the kitchen, because, “They’ll see how beautiful I am / And be ashamed—.” And then he ends by declaring, “I, too, am America.” So there’s a significant shift from singing America to being America, from performance to enactment. And the company, to extend my reading of modernism through Hughes’s poem, is Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, Hart Crane, James Joyce, Marianne Moore, and so on, grand figures whose large egos dominate the psychic rooms and intellectual tables of American modernism. At the same time, the black subject, the black ego, the black self, is shunted to the kitchen.

  So what Langston Hughes does is articulate the
fixed space of his own modernist identity—the kitchen, metaphorically speaking—as the locus classicus of American identity, because when you’re in the kitchen, the smell of the food wafts beyond its borders. When you’re in the kitchen cooking—and Hughes was cooking, really he was smoking, burning, or whatever term one might conjure from the culinary arts as a symbol of black vernacular for achieving broad excellence—the smells will pull people in to ask, “Hmm, where’s that smell coming from? What’s cooking in the kitchen?” If you had to be somewhere away from the dining room or living room, it was crucial to be exiled to the kitchen. This is what black folk knew, especially as they served as domestics, butlers, and cooks. Black moderns turned their limited, localized spaces into rhetorical, musical, aesthetic, political, or spiritual kitchens that emitted pleasing smells and seductive scents, so that people who picked up on them were immediately, irresistibly drawn to them. That’s the language . . .

  To pick up on that, even if they don’t come to the kitchen, the kitchen has to come to them. They are sitting at the table waiting for the kitchen to come to them. The kitchen produces that which they consume for nourishment.

  There you go, man. Metaphor is power.

  I’d like to push a little away from that now and turn to something that seemed to resonate in an earlier comment you made about black rhetoricians and the premodernist Christian tradition as it relates to black resistance. The notion of speaking things that are not as though they were . . . this is not a space of acquiescence, but of resistance.

  Oh, exactly right. That’s very important and I’ll just say something briefly about it. Too often, we read the history of black resistance, and the speech or action that supported it, through a distorted lens. Either black folk were for or against oppression, either they cooperated or resisted, and we can tell all of this in dramatically demonstrable fashion. Well, it’s not quite that simple. Life has put black folk in complex, often compromising positions, especially during slavery, post-Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. Many folk were not able to outwardly resist, not simply for fear of reprisal but because to do so would have undermined their long-term plans of survival and liberation. Black folk en masse had to survive, even under conditions of harsh oppression, so that they could produce black folk who could liberate us. Their survival tactics had to be hidden, concealed to the larger white world, masked to the oppressor. These networks of hidden meanings and concealed articulations were the predicate of black survival through a signifying, symbolic culture. For instance, many of the sorrow songs of the slaves contained dual meanings. While the white masses found the songs entertaining, the slaves simultaneously signaled each other about plans for emancipation. In effect, they were, as the title of the book aptly summarizes it, Puttin’ on ol Massa. The patterned quilts that slaves made contained crucial directions to black slaves seeking to ride the Underground Railroad to freedom. In a sense, they evoked the principle that later underlay Edgar Allen Poe’s famous short story, “Purloined Letter,” since the stolen missive was hidden in plain sight.

  The very act of imagination was critical to strategies of resistance and proved dangerous to the hegemonic white world order. That’s why the white world was so intent on controlling the black imagination, as far as such a thing was possible, by restricting its enabling mechanisms, particularly those rooted in literacy. Reading and writing were outlawed, and even earlier in slavery, blacks were divided from other blacks from the same tribe during the “seasoning” process so they couldn’t effectively communicate. If blacks learned to read and write, they might grow restless with their degraded status, gaining a false and subversive sense of equality with whites. Of course, Frederick Douglass perhaps confirmed the worst fears of the white overclass when he reported in his autobiography that knowledge “unfits a child” for slavery. And if slaves spoke to each other without strict supervision, they might hatch plans to escape, so their speech and social organization were regularly policed.

  But black slaves were able to carve out free spaces of intimate contact and communication that promoted racial solidarity and forms of resistance that eluded the master’s ear and eye. Still, dominant whites rightly viewed the black imagination as a wedge between slaves and their oppression. The act of imagining a world of liberty was threatening. I think in this regard of a humorous statement that Muhammad Ali made about an opponent when he said, “If Sonny Liston dreams he can beat me, he better wake up and apologize.” That’s a brilliant gloss on the function of imagination and dreaming in black combat, and in the struggle for self-assertion and mastery of one’s opponent. The attempt to regulate the black imagination is the attempt to restrict acts of black self-reinvention through dreaming of a different world where justice and freedom prevailed. That’s why black folk were full of dangerous dreaming, insurrectionist imagining, and resistive revisions. The act of conceiving of an alternative world, a racial utopia, was a gesture of radical resistance that interrupted the totalizing force of white supremacy.

  And a question of values, which we’ll return to later. I want to push you in the direction here of talking about black bodies. Black male bodies, black women’s bodies. One of the things that enters my mind here is the notion of the black masculine journey. To my mind, Morrison’s Song of Solomon ranks right up there with Ellison’s Invisible Man as a benchmark text for black masculinity. It’s the condition our condition is in . . .

  Right, it’s rough all over.

  To me, this statement has to do with black male bodies in everything from the Million Man March to Dennis Rodman.

  Oh, no question. It’s almost a cliché to say by now, but black masculinity is one of the most insightful and complex texts of American identity. For instance, millions want to, as the commercial slogan says, “Be like Mike.” They’re in awe of Michael Jordan, asking themselves what it is like to inhabit that pigment, that physiology, that 6'6" body whose ligaments, whose alignment of muscles determine the semblance of flight that folk around the globe vicariously identity with. Michael Jordan’s head, clean shaven with those two ears poking out, at once conjures E.T.—the extraterrestrial—a sports spectacle, an incredible genius that we can scarcely imagine while also signifying the globe—round and smooth. And what can be written on its surfaces is always something that can be erased and rewritten. At the same time, that black masculine head is a signifier of the power of the black phallus. In an interesting, perhaps even subversive fashion, Michael Jordan’s physical and aesthetic genius can be symbolized as a massive phallus whose seminal meanings explode on American culture, fertilizing a range of barren cultural landscapes with creative expression.

  His body is a contradictory text of black masculinity. Jordan is at once embraced and fed upon as a Michael Jordan burger at McDonald’s. He’s being eaten by the masses, consumed, symbolically speaking. So the closest they may be able to get to Mike, besides watching him and emulating his moves on the court in their neighborhood playgrounds, sports gyms, or health clubs, is to purchase a symbolic portion of his body and consume it in market culture. It’s a kind of secular Eucharist, where, at least in Protestant theology, the sacramental elements of Christ’s body and blood are substituted by wafer and wine, or in Catholic theology, these elements are transubstantiated into the actual body and blood of Christ. Jordan’s body is symbolically transmuted, through the material conditions of the political economy of consumption, into an edible commodity.

  Or think of the symbolic and contested body of another prominent and complicated black man, the late rapper Tupac Shakur. Tupac’s dead but still signifying body has the potential to become one of the first black candidates for cultural survival. I don’t mean survival in the sense that he remains a vital cultural influence, like Martin Luther King Jr. I mean cultural presence beyond death through the articulation of a mythological body that defies mortality through urban legend, such as what has happened with James Dean, John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, and Elvis Presley. Particularly in the case of Elvis, there’s a literal qual
ity to his mythological persistence, since tabloid magazines claim to spot him, or JFK, on an island somewhere avoiding their fans, the media, and especially their “past” lives. I’ve often wondered why no one ever saw Sam Cooke, for instance, or Otis Redding, Dinah Washington, or Donny Hathaway. Tupac may be the first black figure to ascend to such heights—or depending on how one views this cultural phenomenon, to the depths—of pop memorialization.

  I must confess I’m an addict, although I hope a critical one, of tabloids like the National Enquirer and Star Magazine, although since the same company that owns the Enquirer purchased Star, they often recycle the same information. Without overinterpreting or rationalizing their appeal, I think, at their best—and I place best in scare quotes—these tabloids offer counterhegemonic narratives to prevailing cultural truths. Besides that, they allow ordinary people to sound as if they’re speaking the King’s English to the Queen’s taste. Instead of presenting an “informant” as saying, “I got afraid when I thought about that stuff later on,” they sound more formal, more literate, and might be quoted as saying, “It startled me as I pondered it later.”

  But in the tabloids, Elvis is spotted in California somewhere, Elvis is in some secluded villa in Italy, Marilyn has joined JFK in what only appears to be a posthumous romp on the Riviera, while black icons remain sequestered in their unsexy, earthbound mortality. I think that Tupac may be the first black icon to join the pantheon of the posthumously alive, people who symbolically defeat their own death through episodic appearances in the mythological landscape. Folk are now saying that Tupac is not dead, but alive somewhere in Cuba, perhaps enjoying a stogie with Fidel. There are Web sites and chat rooms all over the Internet dedicated to debating whether Tupac is dead or is hanging out on some Caribbean retreat to escape the cruel demands of fame. His cultural survival says a great deal about how black masculinity can come to signify contested social and political meanings that erupt in popular culture.