Like many other British blacks, it must be said, he has a slightly romantic view of black America. “The idea that my children could grow up in a place where all kinds of rich people, the people who call the shots, who feel comfortable in their skins, are black—that’s the greatest advantage I could give them,” he says. It’s a seductive image, this land where blacks call the shots, and one I often hear yearningly invoked by black Brits. They’d disavow it, of course, but I detect an implicit fantasy of black America as a Cotswolds village populated by Oprah Winfrey, Bill Cosby, Michael Jordan, Terry McMillan, Spike Lee, Michael Jackson, Quincy Jones, Vernon Jordan, and dozens more of their ilk. (“Yo, Trev—sorry this is kind of last minute, but Oprah, Cos, and Colin were thinking about snagging a bite at Georgia Brown’s and then maybe popping over to the Senate to try and talk some sense into them about the new education bill. Care to join us?”) That’s their American fantasy, and it seems unsporting to demur.
What’s curious is that, while black Londoners look yearningly across the Atlantic, their American counterparts in the arts increasingly turn to them for inspiration. Thelma Golden, a curator of contemporary art at the Whitney Museum, in New York, is voluble on the subject of how much more vibrant—how much more advanced—the new black arts scene in London is compared with its New York equivalent. “In a way, I’d much rather be a black curator in London than in New York, because the excitement and sophistication there is extraordinary, way ahead of what’s happening here in New York,” she told me.
“Most thinking people don’t know that there is a huge creative upsurge going on in the young black generation,” Stuart Hall says. Hall was born and educated in Jamaica, came to England in 1951, as a Rhodes Scholar, and has watched three successive generations learn what it means to be black and British. But clearly the word is getting out, in part because of people like Hall himself. A soft-spoken man in his early sixties, with warm light-brown skin, a close-cropped gray beard, and gentle manner, he is a tutelary figure for dozens of artists who constitute, in a free-form way, a postmodern black arts scene. He himself has played a central role in this development; indeed, for some he has nearly guru-like status. The black photographer David A. Bailey says of him, “People will say, ‘Tell us your stories, Obi Wan Kenobi.’” But Hall’s characteristic tone is far from oracular. What he brings to London’s black arts scene is really a set of emphases; for him, identities are things we make up, but not just out of any old thing. As he puts it, “identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves in, the narratives of the past.”
Today, Hall and his wife, Catherine, live on Mowbray Road, in Kilburn, in a three-story yellow brick Victorian house. Hall has a high-ceilinged, book-lined study on the second floor; on the way to it you pass by a patrician-looking portrait of his nearly white grandfather. Amid the Jane Austen and Henry James are books with titles like “The Photographs of Rotimi Fani-Kayode” and “Race and the Education of Desire.” There’s a poster for Isaac Julien’s 1986 film “Looking for Langston,” and another for the fiftieth-anniversary staging of a C. L. R. James play, produced by Yvonne Brewster. Hall’s movements are cautious, and he uses a cane to get around—he’s in chronic pain—yet he grows animated when he talks about the coalescence of the new artistic vanguard in black London, one that’s devoted to reinventing the very idea of British identity.
He shows me some photographs of the late Rotimi Fani-Kayode, who belonged to a prominent Yoruba family in Nigeria and settled in London, and, Hall says, managed “to use all the elements of his cultural heritage with a kind of equal weight and yet at the same time to transform each by the presence of the other.” Still, it isn’t insignificant that Fani-Kayode’s principal subject was the black body. “What’s happened with the new generation is that they’ve begun to acknowledge their own blackness,” Hall argues. “They’ve begun to paint and photograph their own bodies. They can live with their own bodies—this is a very important turning point.” This inward turn has meant leaving behind a “progressive” convention of the eighties: using “black” to refer indifferently to all nonwhites, including South Asians. “People don’t use ‘black’ in quite that way any longer, because they want to identify more precisely where they come from, culturally,” Hall says. That moment of self-reflexivity plays out in all sorts of ways: Sonia Boyce’s four-panel drawing “Lay Back, Keep Quiet, and Think of What Made Britain So Great” (1986) positions her own brown visage in a wallpaper pattern that was designed to mark the fiftieth year of Victoria’s reign; filmmakers like Isaac Julien and John Akomfrah produce visual meditations on memory and migration; multimedia artists like Keith Piper use computer-abetted installations to reflect on the politics of image. All these artists acknowledge their indebtedness to Hall, and yet for him the real significance of the new black arts scene is that it isn’t, any longer, a black arts scene. “It’s reached the point where a lot of artists who began by identifying themselves with ethnic minority groups have fought off the ‘burden of representation’—the idea that they have to speak on behalf of their entire race. They’re moving outward into engaging in a more culturally diverse mainstream. They’re questioning and diversifying that mainstream.”
The challenge of questioning and diversifying the mainstream is something that Lord Taylor of Warwick knows intimately, and, as we sat in the Peers’ Guest Room of the House of Lords, he told me about the contrast between his own career and that of his father, Derief Taylor. His father was a champion cricket player from Jamaica who went on to play for Warwick; he was also a qualified accountant. When he retired from the playing field, however, he could only find work doing menial labor. “He was always striving to improve himself,” Lord Taylor says, “and then he reached a kind of ceiling and began to sort of see his ambitions through me.” Taylor, for his part, went on to become the first black to be head pupil at Moseley Grammar School, in Birmingham, and the first black to win the Gray’s Inn Advocacy Prize, and—when the Criminal Evidence (Amendment) Bill is enacted—he will be the first black to create British law.
“Some tea, milord?” a florid faced servant murmurs. Lord Taylor—England’s only, though not its first, black Lord—graciously murmurs assent.
And yet the story of his ennoblement—he has enjoyed this salutation for less than six months—isn’t an altogether edifying one. It seems that when the Tory Party put him up for a vacant seat in Cheltenham, vociferous protests came from the Party locals—retired colonels and other stalwarts, who had a hard time seeing themselves represented by the son of a Jamaican cricketer and laborer. He was forced to stand aside. That episode embarrassed the national Party, and Prime Minister John Major sought to make the best of things by arranging for him to receive a peerage. “None of the parties have a good record on race, one has to be honest about that,” Lord Taylor admits.
Ultimately, though, he believes that black Britain’s destiny belongs to black Britain—something that does give him pause. “Trevor’s right—I think the aspirational thing is part of Asian culture, but it certainly is not part of the Afro-Caribbean culture here,” he says. “If you read the Afro-Caribbean newspapers, week by week it tends to be gloom and doom—deaths in police custody, unemployment, some black person taking her company to the industrial tribunal because of being sacked or not getting the right job, and all that sort of thing. And we all identify with it. Just because we’re professionals, we all identify with it.”
As is true of so many of black London’s illuminati, Lord Taylor has a corresponding fascination with the global preeminence of America’s black superstars. “We have media and show-biz people who have made it, but they’re few in number—no more than ten or eleven—and they don’t have the global standing of their American counterparts,” Lord Taylor says. He goes on to tell me that as a child in England he took inspiration from a magazine for American blacks. “Many of my positive black role models came from Ebony—people like Muhammad Ali, Martin Luther King, Jesse Ja
ckson, Quincy Jones. You know, it was always the elitism, but that encouraged me, because I could see that there were and are successful black people. That was the sweet part of it. The sad part of it was they were all American. They were untouchable in that sense.” Having long cherished a fantasy of appearing in Ebony himself, Lord Taylor says he was jubilant to learn recently that Ebony would be featuring him and his family in its May edition.
There are moments—for me, this was one—when an American visitor to black London feels caught in a time warp. Their number are small, their achievements still, somehow, measurable. “Just a few weeks ago,” Lord Taylor recalls, “an editor at Ebony calls me and says, ‘Lord Taylor, could you fax me a list of the fifty top black chairmen of companies in England?’ I just fell about laughing, and he couldn’t understand what the joke was, and I said, ‘I can try to get you five,’ because they just don’t exist. The big companies do not have black directors. That’s the whole point.” Ekow Eshun says, “The frustrating thing about Britain is that the black presence in this country is decades behind America, especially in terms of high culture.” I see what he means, and yet that isn’t my reaction. So I’m left struggling to understand why black Britain seems to me at once twenty years behind the times and twenty years ahead, somehow both pre- and post-nationalist. No doubt both temporal impressions are illusory. Yet perhaps what is most heartening about black London is cultural rather than racial—that has the capacity to acknowledge difference without fetishizing it, the freedom to represent without having to be representative. In the unending Kulturkampf between irony and solidarity, irony seems to be ahead in black London, at least on points.
As Lord Taylor of Warwick could attest, many things have changed since the nineteen-sixties, when a Tory parliamentary candidate could triumph with the slogan “If you want a nigger neighbor, vote Labour.” And many things haven’t. “I’m also going into business,” Lord Taylor had told me when we spoke. “I’m going to be a sort of corporate headhunter, joining one of the top firms in the world.” He was girding himself for the challenge, which he discussed with Dale Carnegie gumption: “A lot of it will be networking—meeting the right people.” Even after being raised to the peerage, he’d had more than his share of meeting the wrong people. He recalled an encounter with a woman at a formal cocktail party a few months ago. “So you’re Lord Taylor,” she said, studying him coolly. “I’ll bet you do a good limbo.” Today, Taylor’s entry in the latest edition of Dod’s parliamentary guide appears directly above that of another life baron, one Norman Beresford Tebbit. Make of that what you will.
SOURCE: The New Yorker, April 28, 1997.
HARLEM ON OUR MINDS
The real fever of love for the place will begin to take hold upon him. The subtle, insidious wine of New York will begin to intoxicate him. Then, if he is wise, he will go away, any place—yes, he will even go over to Jersey. But if he be a fool, he will stay and stay on until the town becomes all in all to him; until the very streets are his chums and certain buildings and corners his best friends. Then he is hopeless, and to live elsewhere would be death. The Bowery will be his romance, Broadway his lyric, and the Park his pastoral, the river and the glory of it all his epic, and he will look down pityingly on all the rest of humanity.
—PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR
It was loving the City that distracted me and gave me ideas. Made me think I could speak its loud voice and make the sound human. I missed the people altogether.
—TONI MORRISON
THE IDEA OF a black renaissance has a long and curious history in American culture.
Writing in Lippincott’s Magazine in 1889, an anonymous reviewer, lamenting the absence of the Great American Novel, predicted that a truly sublime American literature would be created not by a man but by a woman, and an African American woman at that:
Fate keeps revenge in store. It was a woman who, taking the wrongs of the African as her theme, wrote the novel that awakened the world to their reality, and why should not the coming novelist be a woman as well as an African? She—the woman of that race—has some claims on Fate which are not yet paid up.
This artist, the reviewer went on to predict, would emerge at the forefront of a bold new movement in the arts, a veritable renaissance in blackface. With Toni Morrison’s receipt of the 1993 Nobel Prize in literature and the unprecedented number of black artists at work in so many genres today, it is difficult not to recognize the signs that African Americans are in the midst of a cultural renaissance.
Today’s African American renaissance is the fourth such movement in the arts in this century. It is also the most successful and the most sustained. The first occurred at the turn of the century. In 1901, the black Bostonian William Stanley Braithwaite, a distinguished critic and poet, argued that “we are at the commencement of a ‘negroid’ renaissance . . . that will have as much importance in literary history as the much spoken of and much praised Celtic and Canadian renaissance.” At the end of a full decade of unprecedented literary productions by black women—who published a dozen novels and edited their own literary journal between 1890 and 1900—and precisely when the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, the novelists Pauline Hopkins and Charles Chesnutt, and the essayists W. E. B. Du Bois and Anna Julia Cooper were at the height of their creative powers, a critic in The A. M. E. Church Review in 1904 declared the birth of “The New Negro Literary Movement,” likening it, as had Braithwaite, to the Celtic renaissance.
It was Booker T. Washington who first hoped to institutionalize the cultural and political force of this New Negro. In 1900 Washington enlisted several of his fellows (including his nemesis, Du Bois) to construct an image unfettered by the racist burdens of the past, a past characterized by two-and-a-half centuries of slavery and nearly half a century of disenfranchisement, peonage, black codes, and legalized Jim Crow—not to mention the vicious assault on negro freedom and political rights enacted in literature, in theater and on the vaudeville stage, and throughout the popular visual arts, in the form of a blanket of demeaning stereotypes of deracinated, ugly, treacherous, hauntingly evil Sambo images. At the beginning of the century, families could encounter these images throughout their homes from the time they turned off their alarm clocks in the morning and sat down to their egg cups or tea cosies, napkin rings or place mats at breakfast, to the time they spent in the evenings playing parlor games, reading advertisements in magazines, or addressing U.S. government postcards. Such an onslaught of stereotypes, reinforced subliminally in advertisements and on trading cards, in pulpits on Sundays, and even in the law, demanded resistance and an organized response. “We must turn away from the memories of the slave past,” Washington demanded, no doubt with this proliferation of negations of black humanity in mind. “A New Negro for a New Century,” he argued, would be the answer.
This New Negro movement, which took at least three forms before Alain Locke enshrined it in the Harlem Renaissance in 1925, drew its artistic inspiration from across the Atlantic in Europe. First, Anton Dvorak in the early 1890s declared spirituals America’s first authentic contribution to world culture and urged classical composers to draw upon them to create sui generis symphonies. A decade later, Pablo Picasso stumbled onto “dusky Manikins” at an ethnographic museum and forever transformed European art, as well as Europe’s official appreciation of the art from the African continent. Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1906–7) the signature event in the creation of cubism—stands as a testament to the shaping influence of African sculpture and to the central role that African art played in the creation of modernism. The cubist mask of modernism covers a black Bantu face. African art—ugly, primitive, debased in 1900; sublime, complex, valorized by 1910—was transformed so dramatically in the cultural imagination of the West, in such an astonishingly short period, that the potential for the political uses of black art and literature in America could not escape the notice of African American intellectuals, especially Du Bois, himself educated in Europe and cosmopolitan to the core, a
nd Locke, the Harvard-trained philosopher, who went to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar in 1907, the year after Picasso stumbled uncannily onto the African sublime, and who studied aesthetics in Germany in the heady years of the modernist explosion. If European modernism was truly mulatto, the argument went, then African Americans could save themselves politically through the creation of the arts. This renaissance, the second and most famous in black history, would fully liberate the Negro—at least its advanced guard.
The Harlem or New Negro Renaissance was born through the midwifery of Locke, who edited a special issue of Survey Graphic magazine entitled “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro” in March of 1925, which was followed by the 446-page anthology The New Negro: An Interpretation, replete with illustrations by the German expressionist Winold Reiss and the African American Aaron Douglas. Writers such as Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, Jessie Fauset, and Zora Neale Hurston—the fundaments of the black canon today—came of age at this time, leading the New York Herald Tribune to announce that America was “on the edge, if not already in the midst, of what might not improperly be called a Negro renaissance.” Locke liked the term, too: part 1 of his anthology is called “The Negro Renaissance.” Locke even urged young black visual artists to imitate the European modernist, so heavily influenced by sub-Saharan African art. “By being modern,” Locke declared, with no hint of irony, “we are being African.”
The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader Page 61