African American Review 

About: African American Review is an academic journal published by Saint Louis University. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): White (horse) & Politics. It has an ISSN identifier of 1062-4783. Over the lifetime, 1042 publications have been published receiving 7193 citations. The journal is also known as: AAR.

"Black Skins" and White Masks: Comic Books and the Secret of Race

Abstract: The stereotypes through which American popular culture often interprets and represents racial identity operate not only as tools of defamation but also as vehicles for far more subtle manipulations of race. In his 1946 essay "Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity," Ralph Ellis on observes that stereotypes of African Americans, whatever other purposes they might serve, become a means "by which the white American seeks to resolve the dilemma arising... between his acceptance of the sacred democratic belief that all men are created equal and his treatment of every tenth man as though he were not" (28)--a means, in other words, of reconciling the contradictions between an ideology of democracy and a history and practice of prejudice. Whether these stereotypes assume the form of unrealistic portrayals of racial minorities or an equally unrealistic invisibility, they often fulfill this double function of oppression and reaffirmation. Comic books, and particularly the dominant genre of superhero comic books, have proven fertile ground for stereotyped depictions of race. Comics rely upon visually codified representations in which characters are continually reduced to their appearances, and this reductionism is especially prevalent in superhero comics, whose characters are wholly externalized into their heroic costumes and aliases. This system of visual typology combines with the superhero genre's long history of excluding, trivializing, or "tokenizing" minorities to create numeorus minority superheroes who are marked purely for their race: "Black Lightning," "Black Panther," and so forth. The potential for superficiality and stereotyping here is dangerously high. Yet in recent years, some comics creators have demonstrated that the superhero genre's own conventions can invite a more nuanced depiction of minority identity. Race in contemporary comics proves to be anything but simplistic. If some titles reveal deceptively soothing stereotypes lurking behind their veneers of diversity, then others show complex considerations of identity. This article begins by addressing previous critical debates over the function of race in comics. I then investigate the portrayals of race in several mainstream superhero comic books of the 1990s. The series Legion of Super-Heroes serves as an example of a comic which espouses platitudes of diversity while actually obscuring any signs of racial difference. This attitude, however, is offset by other series such as Black Lightning and Xero, both of which use the convention of the secret identity--a genre staple as old as superheroes themselves--to represent issues of racial and sexual identity. Both comics also indirectly draw upon the concept of double-consciousness to construct their models of racial identity. But before turning to more widely-known critical race theory, I need to offer a brief overview of the criticism on comics and race. Historically, critics have long associated comics with the perpetuation of racial stereotypes. Frantz Fanon forges this connection in passing in Black Skins, White Masks (1967), writing, "Look at the children's picture magazines: Out of every Negro mouth comes the ritual 'Yassuh, boss'" (34). Fredric Wertham had offered far more extensive criticisms in Seduction of the Innocent (1954), in which he argues that comics "expose children's minds to an endless stream of prejudice-producing images" (100) in which whites are always handsome and heroic whereas non-whites are inferior and subhuman. Wertham believes these representations not only motivate individual readers toward prejudice, but affect society as a whole by normalizing racist standards through repetition. This process of normalization and indoctrination is, Wertham writes, "where a psychiatric question becomes a social one" (105). Yet the writings of Wertham, Fanon, and other early critics of comics stereotypes tend to apply this formulation only in rev erse: Beginning with the social problems of racism in society, they arrive at a condemnation of the internal oppressions comics construct within readers' minds. …

The Black Arts Movement and Hip-Hop

Abstract: The past decade and a half has witnessed the emergence of the most recent "seed" in the continuum of Afrikan-American culture,(1) rap music. Hip-hop music and culture have caused volumes of controversy and forged their way into a marginal position alongside that of popular culture. Through rhythm and poetry, hip-hop has endeavored to address racism, education, sexism, drug use, and spiritual uplift. Hip-hop criticism, however, has primarily focused on the music's negative and antisocial characteristics, and has rarely yielded information about hip-hop's relationship to its artistic precursors. It is important that observers understand hip-hop in a context that reflects its aesthetic goals and the tradition from which hip-hop has emerged. Black Arts literary critic Addison Gayle, Jr., notes that Black art has always been rooted in the anger felt by Afrikan-Americans, and hip-hop culture has remained true to many of the convictions and aesthetic criteria that evolved out of the Black Arts Movement of the '60s, including calls for social relevance, originality, and a focused dedication to produce art that challenges American mainstream artistic expression. Conservative attitudes concerning hip-hop's irreverence for middle-class values - evident in slang, clothing, etc. - have impeded the process of critically analyzing an art form that, at its core, has proved to be a considerable force for social change through campaigns such as Boogie Down Production's "Stop the Violence." At the very least, hip-hop has brought much needed dialogue to issues affecting America's Black community in a manner that no popular art form has, prompting Public Enemy's Chuck D to refer to hip-hop as the "CNN" of the Black community. In this essay, I point to three areas that show the ideological progression from the Black Arts Movement to hip-hop: (1) the elements of anger and rage in the cultural production of Afrikan-American art in the two movements being studied, (2) the ideological need for the establishment of independent Black institutions and business outlets such as schools and publishing and recording companies, and (3) the development of a "Black Aesthetic" as a yardstick to measure the value of Black art. Black Rage, Anger, and Cultural Expression The element of black anger is neither new nor, as Herbert Hill would have us believe, passe. The black artist in the American society who creates without interjecting a note of anger is creating not as a black man, but as an American. For anger in black art is as old as the first utterances by black men on American soil. . . . (Gayle xv) Addison Gayle, Jr., directs our attention to the prevalence of anger in the experience of Black Americans and makes it clear that Black art cannot be divorced from this reality. Historical events in both the Black Arts and hip-hop eras include extreme examples of Black frustration and rage: Consider, for example, the Los Angeles riots of 1992 and the riots that followed the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King in 1968. ". . . anger - raw and unhollywoodish - is what we are talking about," writes Haki Madhubuti. "Anger for unfulfilled promises, anger toward legislators who back stepped on policies decided, passed and not implemented, anger pouring undiluted toward a rulership that feeds on greed and exploitation and views Black people as enemies or as necessary burdens to be thrown crumbs like animals in their latest theme park" (Why xiv). Black Arts and hip-hop texts created amid the anger that is easily perceived in major historical events such as the L.A. rebellion and the riots of the late '60s reflect the rage the Black community feels. Amiri Baraka's "Black Art," for instance, illustrates the extent to which anger would dictate this poet's creative path: . . . We want "poems that kill." Assassin poems, Poems that shoot guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys and take their weapons leaving them dead with tongues pulled out and sent to Ireland. …

Comic Book Masculinity and the New Black Superhero.

Abstract: Following in the footsteps of feminist scholarship there have, in recent years, been a number of studies which have begun to consider masculinity, particularly heterosexual masculinity, as a social construction. Masculinity, always regarded as a natural, stable gender identity, is in the process of being deconstructed on a variety of levels from social politics to pop psychology. Moreover, the masculinity of our media-generated heroes is increasingly recognized in much the same way that femininity has been understood, not as a real and unified subject position, but as a carefully orchestrated performance - or, in other words, as a masquerade. But if the heterosexual male is the site of gender and sexual privilege in North American culture, as he is perceived to be, then we might ask just what the masculine masquerade disguises? And how might black masculinity fit into the equation? It is feasible that a clue to these questions lies in the very notion of the masquerade and the implication of an underlying, unstable level of gender identity. Indeed, the split personality implied by the concept of a masquerade seems to be one of the most archetypal metaphors for the masculine condition in Western culture. Whether in Jungian psychology or low-budget horror films, great literary works or modern comic books, masculinity has often explored its own duality. The male identity in the twentieth century is perceived in extremes: man or mouse, He-man or 98-pound weakling. At the one end is the hyper-masculine ideal with muscles, sex appeal, and social competence; at the other is the skinny, socially inept failure. But these two male extremes are not so far removed as they might seem. Warrior and wimp exist side by side, each defining the other in mutual opposition. On the following pages I want to explore this concept of duality in masculinity - and more specifically black masculinity - as it is currently presented in one of Western culture's most rudimentary and instructional forms, the superhero comic book. At its most obvious and symbolic level, comic book masculinity characterizes for young readers a model of gender behavior that has traditionally struggled to incorporate both sides of the masquerade, yet has recently slipped into the domain of the almost exclusively hypermasculine. My particular interest in the comic book depiction of masculinity has developed in relation to an ongoing ethnographic project dealing with the emergence of Milestone Media Inc., a black-owned and controlled comic book publishing company launched in 1993, and the readers of its comics. An innovative twist on the almost uniformly white-bread universe of comic book characters, the Milestone line of comics offers a small variety of well-defined African American superheroes. Milestone is the brainchild and the legal property of three young black men who are experienced comic book and publishing veterans: Dwayne McDuffie, Denys Cowan, and Derek T. Dingle. As a creator-owned publishing company with a multicultural approach to comic book characters, Milestone occupies a unique position within the comic book industry. Other African American comics publishers exist, but as true independents the quality and distribution of their books are often limited by financial restrictions. Milestone, on the other hand, was able to strike a groundbreaking deal with industry giant DC Comics whereby DC would print and distribute the Milestone titles without interfering with content or ownership rights. This unique relationship allows Milestone to reach a much larger audience than any other African American comic book publisher has ever been able to(1). Currently Milestone publishes three core series: Icon [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED], featuring a super-powered "brother from another planet" who is also a staunch republican and fights injustice alongside his partner Rocket, a single, teenaged mother and Toni Morrison fan from the projects; Hardware, starring the character of Curtis Metcalf, a scientific super-genius who builds an incredible suit of armor to confront his racist employer and to fight crime; and Static, which tells the story of the slightly geeky but fun-loving teenager Virgil Hawkins, who battles supervillains and school yard bullies after he accidentally gains the power to control electricity. …

Post-Black, Old Black

Abstract: In recent years, students of American and African American thought, politics, and culture have sought to understand what we used to call race relations as currently unfolding in the aftermath. In the aftermath of what depends on whom you ask. For people specifically interested in politics, the breaking point is the end of the civil rights era, marked at least in part by the apparent successes of the mid-20th-century black freedom struggle. For people interested in broader cultural dynamics the breaking point is the decline of soul culture, reflected in popular music and film, again in part, by the rise of an urban-inflected, hyper-materialistic nihilism and the fall of a rural-inflected, gospel-tinged optimism (George Post-Soul 1). And for inhabitants of the art world, the breaking point is the consolidation of the gains of multiculturalism and the consequent lifting of the burdens of racial reductionism. We see this development manifested in the emergence of artists for whom black identity is something to be interrogated, scrutinized, and variously enacted, if enacted at all, and in the way that some of these artists, as curator Thelma Golden puts it, "moved to the forefront of ... contemporary art practice in ways that didn't have to be explained through a Black History Month label" (qtd. in Tate 50). The sense of being in the wake of an important historical shift encourages the people I have in mind to borrow the "post" from postmodernism and use it to specify their simultaneous debt to and distance from their favored historical dynamic. So Tommie Shelby searches for forms of political solidarity that are appropriate to what he calls the post-civil rights condition. Nelson George and Mark Anthony Neal explore, among other things, the personalities and expressive practices that define what they refer to as post-soul culture. And Thelma Golden heralds the inventiveness and assertiveness of those she identifies as post-black artists (Tate 50). However one understands the ideas of post-soul culture, post-civil rights politics, and post-black identity and aesthetics, there is considerable overlap between them. We might take these expressions as synonyms, as different names for the same complex reality. (1) It seems more productive, though, and a more efficient use of the linguistic resources that we happen to have available, to insist on the differences of emphasis that have produced these terms. Each then becomes a partial window onto some relatively distinct aspect of the far-reaching and multifaceted reorganization of black life that has occurred over the last couple of decades. It may be especially productive to identify and clarify the specific contribution that a distinct notion of post-blackness can make. As it happens, the notion tends to figure in rhetorical gestures more than in fully formed arguments. It seems, in fact, to be a placeholder, an abbreviated, perhaps elliptical invocation of unexcavated theoretical resources. My sense is that if we seek out these resources and flesh out the idea, we will find that it offers more than a way of talking about black art. It may well capture something of the peculiar situation of race theory at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The most obvious place to turn for resources is to postmodern theory, which has directly or indirectly cultivated in so many of us the impulse to speak of the post-this or the post-that--the impulse, I will eventually call it, to posterize. But theorists of post-blackness themselves tend to go no further in this direction than the casual understanding of postmodernism, or of postmodernity, that has made its way into public intellectual culture. (2) This casual postmodernism captures some of what one might mean in speaking of post-blackness, but it also obscures some meanings, and squanders a fascinating opportunity to put the posterizing impulse in the service of a comprehensive understanding of contemporary racial conditions. …

What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Popular Culture

Abstract: Mark Anthony Neal. What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 1999. 214 pp. $19.99. Mark Anthony Neal's What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Popular Culture interprets the volatile political and cultural issues that arise from the clash between black music's two separate but overlapping lives. The first is black music's single life, lived in "organic connection" to "formal and informal institutions of the Black Public Sphere." Symbolized by backwoods social clubs, or "jook joints," and the "Chitlin' Circuit," venues which served largely "segregated" audiences in the North and South, the music of this "sphere" provided (provides?) an autonomous soundtrack to black social life. For Neal, the second life of black music has been a "tumultuous marriage between black cultural production and mass consumerism-one in which black agency is largely subsumed by market interests." In many ways, What the Music Said is a "torch song" for black music's tragic entanglement in a bad marriage. What the Music Said chronicles another bad marriage even more compellingly--if apparently unwittingly. That is the wedding of African American culture to the jargon of late-twentieth-century professional academic cultural critique. As it bears witness to this marriage, What the Music Said consistently distances, simplifies, even silences the musical voices whose complexity and struggle for "agency" is the point. While Neal opens the work with an invocation of the cultural critiques that happened in Jesse Hodges's barbershop in the Bronx and consistently invokes the "organic" call-and-response dynamics of "vibrant counterpublic(s)" in the Black Public Sphere, he devotes far more space to the problems of intra-racial class antagonism, inter-racial entanglement, and "mass-mediated" cultural events. For instance, Neal's attention to the most thoroughly commodified kinds of contemporary black music--hip-hop and hip-hop-influenced R&B--to the total exclusion of other forms--House, Techo, Go-Go-- which have "resist ed" mainstream market saturation and remained more "covert" signals the analytical preferences of the work. In Literary Theory and the Claims of History Satya Mohanty suggests that one of the limitations of postmodern literary and cultural criticism has been how "anti-foundationalist epistemological" claims have eroded the perceived existence of facts. This philosophical issue has led to a methodological turn away from evidence. At times, the "evidence" supporting points of analysis is the mere "fact" that a present theorist's claim mirrors another theorist's previous theoretical claim. What the Music Said suffers from its reliance on circular references to the discourse of cultural critique where evidence apropos to the music itself might appear. As a result, in What the Music Said, the beauty and subtle complexity of the music, even that which occurs within the Black Public Sphere, is often ensconced in complex--long--sentences and simplified by conceptual abstraction. Among the abstractions which supplant historical evidence and primary accounts are the uniformly stifling effects of "liberal bourgeois models of black public life," "middle-class sensibilities," and "mass-consumer markets" on the "mass-mediated counternarratives" of the artists. The strongest aspect of What the Music Said is Neal's meditation on the convergence of consumer economics, hip-hop, and the would-be legacy of oppositional Black Power rhetoric as score and soundtrack of contemporary inner-city black life. His work counters uncritical approaches to hip-hop which construe the music as the "authentic" voice of inner-city black youth and reveals the extent to which the integrity of the art is threatened by the "For the Love of Money" ethics which permeate much of American culture. Neal's portrayal of hip-hop artists' attachment to "the real" and their efforts to create the present through a reconstituted past presents a valuable portrait of artists' struggle for sovereignty in post-industrial America. …