tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11122973.post113946082778368055..comments2024-02-08T05:04:18.484-08:00Comments on J'S THEATER: African-American Lives on PBS Part IIJohn Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08073378940347627766noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11122973.post-68857026729991317772010-11-25T14:13:45.409-08:002010-11-25T14:13:45.409-08:00HeyHeyMichaelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07301447352029711393noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11122973.post-1139807969185809812006-02-12T21:19:00.000-08:002006-02-12T21:19:00.000-08:00Keguro, I wasn't sure what you meant by "aesthetic...Keguro, I wasn't sure what you meant by "aesthetics" in this context, but I've got you. Yes, the biology not only allows the appending of roots and routes to identity, but creates new identities, it seems, out of whole cloth ("I'm Mende"! What does that *mean*?), or should I say, whole (DNA) strands. But then the pan-Africanist movement went beyond aesthetics, or rather was more complexly situated, wasn't it? It was about color, ancestry, and real historical and mythic connections, and in DuBois's formulation, eventually came to include a much broader understanding of third world peoples. Right? I also think of the Negritude poets and their formulation of diasporic links--aesthetics as you frame them played a role for them too. But DuBois never fully gave it all up--remember he went in exile to and died in Ghana. Praxis. Of a sort.<BR/><BR/>Features do tell histories, but sometimes they tell us nothing we don't want to see. I'm thinking of Adrian Piper's conceptual and visual work to start off with. Just think of how she's been (mis-)read, and how she's read right back.<BR/><BR/>I agree with you about Obama, and in part with your concurrence with Rushing. I'm not sure if one has to cancel out the other--again, you see I'm not an either/or type--but racism profoundly <I>inflects</I> and <I>informs</I> politics and culture; they don't exist outside of it or white supremacy, do they? Very good points though, which I want to think about a lot more.<BR/><BR/>You should go for that conference, after you've explained hagriography to the rest of us!John Khttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08073378940347627766noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11122973.post-1139507969822162022006-02-09T09:59:00.000-08:002006-02-09T09:59:00.000-08:00Keguro,I actually was surprised at how engaging th...Keguro,<BR/><BR/>I actually was surprised at how engaging the show was, but history is one of my great interests, and the fact that Gates was constantly contextualizing his discussions drew me in.<BR/><BR/>I wish I could have gotten a shot of Chris Tucker's face as he sat with Gates and the village elder in that small clearing in the Angolan interior--it was truly worth a thousand words.<BR/><BR/>I hear you on the aestheticization tip--can you point out some examples, though? (The romanticization of an "Indian" past, especially Whites, long precedes genetic testing, though.) I keep coming across pieces in the mainstream media in which hold fast to very fixed, essentialist notions of race, and then there's the fetishization of "biracialism," which presupposes racial purity from both sides, when the truth is that someone like Mae Jemison, who considers herself unambiguously "Black," is closer to Tiger Woods than his "Cablinasian" self-identification suggests. (She even noted that when in Southeast Asia, people noted how close she looked to some women there.) <BR/><BR/>I also found this idea of being able to "read" faces, which you mentioned on your Blog last month (was it?) very interesting. What does it mean to still possess the capacity to see the "Sudanese" and not something else in Gates's face, when it turns out that his genetic correlation is strongest, in the African sense, with the Mende, whose ancestors came from what's now Sudan? I know Black Americans who say they can look at people and tell that they're from a certain part of the country, or people who say that they can tell people who're from where they themselves are from--people whose families are from Virginia, or North Carolina, or Mississippi, etc. That's fascinated me--but then this transnational ability to read--or to see deeply--is it real? Can one really see the Ibo in Jakes, after 8 generations? Or Tucker, whose ancestry could be dated almost exactly back 8 generations to Angola (and that was amazing, that precision).<BR/><BR/>What to say also about citizenship and belonging? In America, let alone someone else. In Israel, the son of a Jewish mother can always come home; Japanese who've lived five generations in Brazil or Peru are still Japanese (at least theoretically). The same is true for Koreans, etc. So is or can Tucker be an Angolan, and then is Ghana's pitch to recruit African-Americans and other African diasporic people so farfetched? Also, if Tucker's historical rootedness in the US goes back 8 generations, what does that say about his citizenship vis-a-vis Whites of far more recent immigrant vintage? Early Black free people often used the term "African" to describe themselves, and this persisted throughout the 19th century; the sense of connection wasn't broken, or heavily degraded, until the era of cinematic depictions, I'd suggest, but at the same, they held this connection in tension with a sense of being part of the US too. Hell, they'd/we'd built the damn country up. New Orleans, New York, Boston, Washington, Charleston, Providence, St. Louis, Richmond....<BR/><BR/>Oh, finally, yes, your point about the conservative attacks is important. Gates joked about this, but the issue of ontological Blackness remains. It also throws out the critiques (by Whites and Blacks) that Barack Obama is insufficiently "Black"--I'd suggest that the admixture test might show he had less European ancestry than Gates, given that his mother was a White woman from Kansas, and who knows what her family tree in the US looks like. That would make jaws drop--before people's eyes glazed over and returned to their fantasies of "biracialism," which in any case means "Black" and "White." And then there's the newly created "Hispanic" race....John Khttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08073378940347627766noreply@blogger.com