On Post-Blackness and the Black Fantastic

Abstract

This article explores the affinities and tensions between two ideas: scholar Richard Iton's “black fantastic” and “post-blackness.” Ideally, the black fantastic is the source of “minor-key sensibilities” that provide a basis for a substantive post-colonial imaginary and politics. Post-blackness, on the other hand, has been used to describe both artistic and popular identity movements that aim to lift the “burden of representation” from black artists or black people generally. I argue that although those who fashion post-blackness as a popular identity movement divest it of much of its subversive force, at least one type of artistic post-blackness enables the black fantastic.

Keywords:

• black fantastic
• modernity
• post-blackness
• postcoloniality

Notes

Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

Mark Anthony Neal, Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 2001); Nelson George, Buppies, B-boys, Baps, And Bohos: Notes On Post-Soul Black Culture (Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2001).

Paul C. Taylor, “Post-Black, Old Black,” African American Review 41, no. 4 (2007), 625.

Touré, Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness? What It Means to Be Black Now (New York, NY: Free Press, 2011).

As of now, Who's Afraid is in its 2nd printing. It has been widely reviewed in top publications like The Wall Street Journal, been deemed a New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book, and won the 2011 Books for a Better Life Award in the category of “Motivational.” It has been praised in glowing terms by prominent black public intellectuals, artists, and politicians, including Michael Eric Dyson (who writes the forward) Gwen Ifill, Questlove, and Jesse Jackson, Sr.

Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic, 197.

Ibid., 28.

David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).

Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic, 176.

Ibid., 201.

Ibid., 198, 201.

Ibid., 287.

Ibid., 19.

Ibid., 28.

Ibid., 259.

Ibid., 257.

Ibid., 16.

Ibid., 28.

Ibid., 16.

Ibid.

Ibid., 289–290.

Ibid., 16.

Ibid, 287.

Note: this is not the first time the term post-black appears. Art historian Robert Farris Thompson uses this term in a 1991 article on Afro-modernism. But his use is not in the same vein. For him, post-blackness was synonymous with the end of race consciousness—something that is not the case for either Golden or Touré. Nana Adusei-Poku, “The Multiplicity of Multiplicities—Post-Black Art and its Intricacies,” Darkmatter 9, no. 2 (November 2012), accessed June 15, 2014, http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2012/11/29/the-multiplicity-of-multiplicities-%E2%80%93-post-black-art-and-its-intricacies/

Cathy Byrd, “Is there a ‘Post-Black’ Art?” Art Papers Magazine 26, no. 6 (November/December 2002), 35.

Mary Schmidt Campbell, “African American Art in a Post-Black Era,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 17, no. 3 (2007), 317–330.

Taylor, “Post-Black, Old Black,” 638.

Ibid.

Touré, Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness, 156–157.

Law professor Randall Kennedy argues that Touré's “libertarian absolutism” on the question of the policing of racial identity—his stance that it is always wrong for one black person to question another black person's fidelity to black America—would necessarily hinder collective action in the pursuit of racial justice. “It bears repeating,” Kennedy says, “that under some circumstances, people behaving in certain ways—which includes the expression of certain ideas—ought to be ostracized. Randall Kennedy, “The Fallacy of Touré's Post-Blackness Theory,” The Root, August 11, 2011, http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2011/08/whos_afraid_of_postblackness_tours_postblackness_theory.html, (accessed February 2, 2014).

Ibid. There exists a tension in the text between Touré's desire to maintain the “black community” and his argument that there should be no boundaries to this community: “to the extent that Touré wants to perpetuate Black communities but eschew policing, he seeks a sociological impossibility,” Kennedy says. Thomas Chatterton Williams agrees, asking: “if blacks are just 40 million gloriously individualized personages, then what ‘we’ is he referring to?” Thomas Chatterton Williams, “The State of Race,” review of Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness?: What It Means to Be Black Now, by Touré, Wall Street Journal, September 19, 2011, accessed June 15, 2014, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424053111904265504576565493762005946.

I put “was” here because Touré suggests that black identity has already been thoroughly transformed by the idea of post-blackness. The post-black movement, in other words, has won out over modern ideas of blackness.

Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic, 193.

Ibid., 176.

Ibid., 149.

Ibid.

Adusei-Poku, “The Multiplicity of Multiplicities.”

Touré, Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness, 154. It is interesting to note that even as Touré argues that there is no right or wrong way to “do blackness,” he suggests that a certain kind of performance is necessary to establish one's “black credentials.” In this passage, it seems as if the businesspeople he is talking about would not be black unless they could “switch codes.” This tension—there is no right way to do blackness/certain performances do verify one's blackness—runs throughout Touré's tract.

Cathy Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Break-down of Black Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

Touré, Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness, 158.

Ibid., 150.

The meanings forged for blackness by the black lower class should be distinguished from the meanings associated with the black lower class. White elites especially have perpetuated one-dimensional negative representations of the black lower class, and these representations have particular purchase because such elites can disseminate them widely with relative ease.

In fact, one of the criticisms raised of Touré is that he is not explicit enough on this point, though his analysis seems to point to it. In his review, Thomas Chatterton Williams says: “there is an entire chapter on what the book calls ‘the prison of keeping it real.’ … But we're offered scarcely any exploration of the ways that the cultural behemoth called hip-hop glamorizes, with devastating consequences, some of the narrowest ideas of black identity imaginable. None of them is more toxic than the notion that the ghetto is the center of authentic black reality.” Williams, “The State of Race.” In all fairness, Touré actually does explicitly confront this idea, saying, “I reject the idea that the ‘hood is the center of blackness, and that Blackness is lost the farther you go up the class ladder. … To suggest that under-class Blackness is authentic and middle-class is not is self-destructive thinking.” Touré, Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness, 153. Whether “hip-hop” actually does glamorize this kind of thinking is another question. Iton offers a nuanced discussion of the class politics of hip-hop.

Ibid., 201.

Ibid.

Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic, 258.

Ibid., 204.

Touré, Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness, 173.

Ibid., 189.

Ibid., 201.

Ibid., 195.

Ibid., 193.

Ibid., 173.

Ibid., 4.

Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic, 149.

Ibid.

Adusei-Poku, “The Multiplicity of Multiplicities.”

Touré, Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness, 8.

Adusei-Poku, “The Multiplicity of Multiplicities.”

Taylor, “Post-Black, Old Black,” 632.

Ibid.

Adusei-Poku, “The Multiplicity of Multiplicities.”

Visual disobedience entails artists deconstructing the categories of race and blackness even as they are employing them.

Play with notions of history, art history, and cultural memories.

To clarify: I do not see these types as either/or options, as in, either a work of art belongs to one stream or another. In fact, it is surely often the case that individual works of art that one could identify as post-black accomplish many things at once: for instance, it complicates blackness though symbolic play.

Felicia R. Lee, “To Blacks, Precious Is ‘Demeaned’ or ‘Angelic,’” The New York Times, November 20, 2009, accessed June 20, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/21/movies/21precious.html?_r=0

Ibid.

Michelle Prettyman Beverly, “Phenomenal Bodies: The Metaphysical Possibilities of Post-Black Film and Visual Culture” (PhD diss., Georgia State University, 2012), 2.

I realize my example selection may suggest this. But “complicating blackness” is not about featuring characters of a particular class, but instead giving all black characters a complexity that they have been denied, whatever their social location. That being said, as Nathan McCall, a novelist and former newspaper reporter who teaches a course on the history of African American images at Emory University, said, “Precious” puts “a much-needed spotlight on the underclass.” Lee, “To Blacks, Precious Is ‘Demeaned’ or ‘Angelic.’”.

Beverly, “Phenomenal Bodies,” 31.

By “black symbolic play,” I mean play with those images or symbols that have been signified as black by Afro-modern artists and activists. Such works of art can be irreverent or ironic—like some of Hank Willis Thomas’ work—though they need not be—like Glen Lignon's 1988 “Untitled (I Am a Man)” piece. Such works point to the distance traveled since these symbols were initially introduced and the new relationship audiences have with these symbols as they forge new directions for art and our understanding of what art is.

Such post-black art, while depicting raced subjects, does not make race the most significant feature. This implies that racial identity does not wholly define a black person. So for artist Charles Nelson, the term post-black signifies “a move toward the larger issue of the humanity of African Americans. When a black figure can stand in as a universal symbol of humanity instead of a loaded symbol of political idealism,” he says, “then that goal will have been accomplished.” Byrd, “Is there a ‘Post-Black’ Art,” 39.