Black Political and Popular Culture: The Legacy of Richard Iton

Abstract

Richard Iton's In Search of the Black Fantastic: Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era (2008) is one of the most important texts to examine post–Civil Rights black political and popular culture. This article uses Iton's paradigm for examining the enduring relationship between black political and popular culture and extends it in order to analyze the continuities through the political economy and cultural production of marriage in the United States. With In Search of the Black Fantastic as a foundational text, I reveal how African American political identity is increasingly defined by marriage.

Keywords:

• black political identity
• black popular culture
• Defense of Marriage Act
• family
• marriage
• meritocracy
• pathology
• patriarchy
• Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act
• policy
• Telecommunications Act of 1966
• welfare
• Welfare Reform Act

Acknowledgments

I want to thank Lester Spence, Mark Anthony Neal, and Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society for inviting me to write about Richard Iton's intellectual legacy. A debt of gratitude goes out to early readers of this article, including Amrita Basu, C. Rhonda Cobham-Sander, Joo Ok Kim, Stella Temitayo Oyalabu, and Kevin Jeffries.

Notes

Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 139–140.

Ibid., 102.

Ibid., 6.

For a broader discussion about the conflicted relationship between post-Emancipatory ideals about freedom and marriage within African American communities, see Amy Dru Stanley's From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Nancy F. Cott's Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).

Ann duCille's The Coupling Convention (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Candice M. Jenkins' Private Lives, Proper Relations: Regulating Black Intimacy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2007); Claudia Tate's Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine's Text at the Turn of the Century (New York: Oxford University Press,1996); Frances Smith Foster's ‘Till Death or Distance Do Us Part: Love & Marriage in Africa America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010) and Love & Marriage in Early Africa America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007) all offer varied and insightful analysis of this relationship.

Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWOA) of 1996, H.R. 3734, 104th Cong. (1996).

Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic, 142.

PRWOA, Title 1 § 101, Subsection 1.

Ibid., Title 1 § 101, Subsection 8.

Defense of Marriage Act, H.R. 3396, 104th Cong. (1996).

Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic, 194.

See Nikol Alexander-Floyd's Gender, Race, and Nationalism in Contemporary Black Politics (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007); “Black Popular Culture and the Transcendence of Patriarchal Illusions” by Barbara Ransby and Tracye Matthews in Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought (New York: The New Press, 1995), 526–535; “Black Nationalism and Black Common Sense: Policing Ourselves” by Wahneema Lubiano in The House that Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain (New York: Pantheon, 1997), 232–252; and E. Frances White's Dark Continent of Our Bodies: Black Feminism and the Politics of Respectability (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001).

Ibid., 9.

D'vera Cohn, Jeffrey S. Passel, Wendy Wang, and Gretchen Livingston, “Barely Half of U.S. Adults are Married—A Record Low,” Pew Research Social & Demographic Trends, December 14, 2011, accessed February 11, 2013, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2011/12/14/barely-half-of-u-s-adults-are-married-a-record-low/

Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic, 108.

Jeanne Amber, “Is Reality TV Hurting Our Girls?,” Essence, January 2013, 84.

Senator Patrick Moynihan's specious claims about black matriarchal families in his 1965 report, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” is one important example of the way the black family has been pathologized. See Daniel Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Office of Policy Planning and Research: United States Department of Labor, 1965).

Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic, 19.

Stacy Straczynski, “Is ‘The Bachelor Racist’? ABC is Sued for Discrimination,” DiversityInc.com, accessed March 23, 2013, http://www.diversityinc.com/diversity-and-inclusion/is-the-bachelor-racist-abc-sued-for-discrimination/

Claybrooks v. American Broadcasting Companies, 898 F.Supp.2d 986 (2012).

Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic, 8.

My forthcoming book project, Love and Marriage: The Politics of Family in African American Romance, reveals how the so-called private sphere of African American family formation is increasingly politicized and made public in the late 20th- and early 21st century by three social dynamics: the collapse of black radical organizations in the late 1970s and early '80s, the growing tension between the politics of black respectability and an alleged sexual pathology, and 1990s government policies such as the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (PRWOA) or Welfare Reform Act and the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

Scott B. Kaufman, “Black Women Are Not (Rated) Less Attractive! Our Independent Analysis of the Add Health Dataset,” Psychology Today, May 21, 2011, accessed April 4, 2013, http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/beautiful-minds/201105/black-women-are-not-rated-less-attractive-our-independent-analysis-the-a

Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic, 104.