Souls has published a number of theme-driven issues recently. This issue was intended to be our general issue, but alas, a theme, albeit a general one, has emerged. All of the six articles in this issue touch on the theme of Black culture in one way or another. All of the authors here are wrestling with the ways in which visual culture, literary culture, intellectual traditions, music, and even the politics of “touch,” reveal new insights about the evolving dynamics of race and power, past, present, and trans-nationally.
Lisa B. Y. Calvente’s lead article, “From the Rotten Apple to the State of Empire: Neoliberalism, Hip Hop, and New York City’s Crisis,” reflects upon the economic backdrop of neoliberalism in New York City in the 1970s, its impact on emerging hip hop culture, and vice versa. Calvente’s work reminds us of the need to contextualize cultural production in the larger historical moment out of which any given movement emerges.
Felice Blake and Justin Gomer offer fresh analyses of the works of acclaimed writer Gayl Jones and award-winning Black filmmaker Charles Burnett, respectively. Blake offers a reassessment of Jones’s 1975 neoslave novel, Corregidora, whose blues singing protagonist wrestles with her family’s slave roots, as a way to explore “how intraracial conflicts impact Black political consciousness.” Deploying the framework of “intimate antagonisms,” a term that could be readily applied to Jones’s own troubled personal life, Blake maps the ways in which tensions and struggles within Black communities and relationships cannot be understood outside of the larger paradigm of white supremacy and anti-black racism. On a different front, and looking at a different moment in time, Justin Gomer analyzes Charles Burnett’s very short, and lesser known 2007 film, Quiet as Kept. Set in the wake of Hurricane Katrina a family grapples with dislocation, disillusionment, and immobility. In this snapshot view of a day in the lives of three lone characters, Gomer argues that Burnett, like Gayl Jones, offers scenes from Black life, not as insular and subjective narratives, but as a way to understand the structural forces that shape, color, and confine the confine the spaces of their lives. One of those structures is the culture industry itself, Black cinema. Like Calvente, Gomer grounds his cultural interpretation in his understanding of the politics of the neoliberal capitalism. Gender and class are powerful undercurrents in both analytical articles. andré m. carrington creatively engages the issue of “black hair,” in his article, “Spectacular Intimacies: Texture, Ethnicity, and a Touch of Black Cultural Politics.” Given the recent, although now subsided, flurry of interest in so-called post-racialism, carrington explores the ever-relevant question of how “race” as a social category is constructed. We think of certain phenotypic traits, notably skin color, as anchoring the turbulent category of blackness. But carrington suggests hair texture, with its own intra- and interracial politics, may be the new frontier in defining the boundaries of blackness. carrington argues that even with our eyes closed hair texture still imposes a racialized worldview.
The final two articles in this issue take us outside of the United States to address the dynamics of race and blackness in the African Diaspora. Tamara J. Walker’s piece focuses on the not so subtle, but doggedly persistent politics of racism and colorism in South America, namely Colombia. Walker offers a deep textual and contextual analysis of a single photograph featured in Hola! magazine in 2011. The powerful visual almost speaks for itself, but as Walker argues, the culture of denial is so deeply entrenched in the white elite circles of Colombia that many still refuse to even acknowledge the racism so blatant all around them. The photograph features several white wealthy Colombia women on the terrace of their family’s Andean estate with two Black maids standing in solemn attention holding silver serving trays in the background. This is not just an arrogant 21st century visual that uses Black bodies as props to advertise white success but rather evokes scenes of slavery as Walker writes: “The image adhered to and called forth a visual tradition that dated back to the region’s slaveholding past, when masters and slaves appeared in various genres of portraiture as status symbols.” The powerful race, gender, and class politics offer a clear example of intersectionality. It is not simply that the two groups of women are in striking visual contrast but the photograph unapologetically, and accurately, suggests the privilege of the one group is predicated on the subservience of the other. There is no sisterly solidarity imagineable across the gaping divide of race and class in the context of that photographic image.
In “Cold War Culturism and African Diaspora Theory: Some Theoretical Sketches,” Charisse Burden-Stelly interrogates the limits of “African Diaspora Theory,” its impact on Cold War era thinking and implications for the new politics and alliances of the Global South. Her provocative conclusion is that “the Black radical tradition has been subsumed in African Diaspora Theory, rendering the latter insufficient for critical engagement with the material conditions of the Black subaltern.” For Burden-Stelly, the cultural emphasis in African Diaspora thinking de-radicalized its potential.
The collection of articles in this issue are in conversation with one another across disciplinary, geographic, and temporal boundaries. Together they explore “scenes” from Black life past and present, including an engagement with theories that attempt to explain both the intimate lives and the very public and political lives of Black people on at least three continents. At a time when the hyper-commodified and profit-driven Black culture industry is gesturing toward Black politics, and when the disciplines of Black literary theory and Black Diaspora Studies are both in transition and under assault, rigorous analyses, like those offered by Calvente, Walker, Carrington, Blake, Gomer, and Burden-Stelly, are desperately needed.