How to Write about Africa

I just re-read Binyavanga Wainaina’s satirical essay, “How to Write about Africa” for the second time. It was published in the journal Granta in 2005. Since then, Wainaina has been profiled in the special issue of Vanity Fair magazine about Africa (edited by Bono!) two years ago and appeared as a guest on Krista Tippet’s show Speaking of Faith last December, where he shocked the poor, idealistic Tippet by pointing out that he’d often rather westerners do nothing to help Africa than all the stupid, misguided somethings that they do. He is almost as fearful of guilty white liberals as he is of avaricious neoliberals from London and militant neocons from Washington D.C. (and that’s saying something, because those mo-fo’s are scary-ass… you know what I’m saying?)

Anyway, Wainaina’s essay wonderfully exposes the way white westerners have represented Africa (or mis-represented… or in Lacanian terms, misrecognized, meconnaissance, because of their own psychological issues), and I’ve decided to use it in my class tomorrow (and wish I had used it in my class last week) on “representation.” So, I don’t have much to say in my blog today except “You got the link; now read it!!!”

And moreover, I now want to assert that every teacher of classes about race, history, African studies, Asian studies, Latin American studies, geography, international relations, peace studies, postcolonial literature, intercultural competency (whatever that is), etc., etc., should begin their classes with it… not only as a means of fostering a healthy skepticism among the students, but also and even more importantly to remind themselves not to be stupid teachers. (I often need this reminder myself.)

1980s MTV, the meaning of style, and feminism

In my theory class we have just begun the unit on the relationship between representation and agency, and in my other class we just finished reading John Updike’s novel Roger’s Version, a novel that adapts the plot of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter to the postmodern condition of the 1980s. (See my blog post a couple weeks ago here for more about postmodern Scarlet Letters.) In it, one of the main characters — a teenage single mother named Verna – is a huge fan of Cyndi Lauper at the beginning of the novel, but by the novel’s end has switched her allegience to Madonna. Updike’s novel is set in the autumn of 1984 and spring of 1985 — the year Ronald Reagan was reelected on a platform of traditional family values and an end to government-run social programs… and also the year that Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” and Madonna’s  “Like a Virgin” dominated the MTV and pop music charts. Music historians often consider both of these songs as together occupying the same moment of sexual liberation for women in popular culture, though arguably that moment of liberation began long before in the 1960s. At the very end of the novel by Updike, Verna decides she prefers Madonna over Lauper at the same time she decides to leave her child with her uncle Roger and find her own pathway to material success, like Madonna in “Material Girl,” which was released in January, 1985.

I’d like to compare and contrast these two music videos, because in contrast to Updike’s characterization of them in his novel, I think they have very divergent visions for sexual liberation. One seems to me to be an example of post-punk feminism and the other a co-optation of post-punk feminism. However, the fact that both appear in Updike’s novel as co-equals and that MTV and radio might very likely play them back-to-back illustrates how complicated the concepts “representation”  “ideology” “hegemony” and “feminism” actually are.

First, Cyndi Lauper’s ”Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” which was first released at the end of the year 1983.

What is most blatant in this video is Lauper’s emphasis on her multicultural group of friends. In a sense, her song is similar to the mildly feminist lyrics in The Spice Girls 1996 hit “Wanna Be” that go, “If you want to be my lover, you have to get with my friends.” In my opinion, these lyrics are good advice for anyone, no matter what gender identity they claim to have. And likewise, in her video, Cyndi Lauper represents the ways personal agency comes from a positive community of friends. In addition, her post-punk  style of dress deconstructs traditional gender roles by mixing a ridiculously out-of-date prom dress with goofy sunglasses. For literary critics, this postmodern stylistic device of mixing and mashing is called pastiche, and theorist Dick Hebdige has famously analyzed the “meaning of style” in his book on punk rock, Subculture, to show how – through such pastiche — young people culturally subverted and resisted mainstream ideas about how they should behave.

Less than a year after Cyndi Lauper’s hit, in November of 1984, Madonna released “Like a Virgin,” which in my view co-opts a lot of the liberatory potential of Lauper’s hit in a way that rearticulates women’s identities as objects of sexual desire. For a YouTube clip of her MTV Awards performance in 1984 click here, and for the original music video, click here.

Many have argued that Madonna was one of the early pop stars to create an enduring and mainstream image of women enjoying sex. Indeed, during the MTV awards, she rolls on the floor, apparently with sexual abandon and pleasure. However, in my view, both her MTV performance and her original video are not feminist in the way that Lauper’s is. When compared to “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” noticeably isolates the woman from any community. Her entire feeling of self worth is derived from being the object of male desire – a rather creepy sensibility that is totally contrary to every brand of feminism I’ve ever encountered.  In addition, Madonna’s postpunk style of dress also performs a postmodern pastiche that scandalously blends Catholic and sexual iconography, but in contrast to Lauper’s deconstruction of what it means to be sexy, Madonna’s transgressive style of dress agressively asserts and intensifies her sex appeal.

Ultimately, it would be an oversimplication to call one of these songs progressively feminist and the other reactionary. Clearly, both artists consciously and deliberately represented sexuality in a way that had political implications for how men and women relate to each other – encouraging both men and women to be open about sexuality rather than repressed. And therefore one could argue that both songs had an effect on women’s agency. Both offer transgressive and subversive representations of women, but both also emphasize pleasure-seeking over any substantial community building. Therefore, some feminists would react negatively to both videos, but in my view, it would be a mistake for feminists to eschew the importance of fun and pleasure in our daily lives, and so at the end of the day, I think both Lauper and Madonna’s representations have something to offer to the on-going, open-ended project of feminism. And that is why Updike’s character Roger is simultaneously disturbed, threatened, and sexually aroused by them.

In conclusion, I’d like to end this post with a more recent clip of what seems to me to be a strongly feminist song by singer Christina Aguilara and rapper Lil’ Kim — their 2003 hit, “Can’t Hold Us Down.”

Even More Globalization Cinema: Duplicity

So…uh… yah, my addiction to globalization cinema continues — this time with Duplicity, starring Clive Owen and Julia Roberts. That makes three globalization thrillers for Clive, first Children of Men back in 2005, and now two more, practically within a month of each other. As you may recall, I blogged on The International exactly five weeks ago [here]. And a couple years ago, our theory pal  Slavoj Žižek talked about Children of Men in the context of global capitalism, and you can watch the YouTube of the clip which appeared on the DVD special features [here]. And, by the way, if you haven’t seen it yet, Children of Men is pretty damn good. And by the way, can you believe that there is already a journal dedicated to this guy? Žižek Studies. Very tacky, in my opinion, to create a journal about someone still alive, but nobody asked me… and maybe nobody asked Žižek. 

So, apparently, with three movies in rapid succession, Clive Owen has somehow become something like the spokesperson for this new genre that I am calling the globalization thriller, beating out the prettier but less articulate Daniel Craig, who only has the two Bond films to his globo-thriller credit, unless you count his not-so-memorable role in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. Perhaps it’s Clive’s clever-sounding British accent, or maybe it’s his permanent, five-o’clock-shadow scruffiness that seems to vaguely symbolize the shadowy ”new world order” of globalization, as if globalization must be represented by a character who is simultaneously civilized (in that imperialistic British way) and scruffy (also in that imperialistic British way — since empire building is never actually that civilized and is always actually brutally chaotic and… ruggedly unshaven.)

My question is this: how to analyze this movie? (And I guess I ask this question because apparently I’m obsessed with globalization thrillers and maybe should write a book on the subject… if only I had the time… or were even more obsessed than I pretend to be.) On the one hand, we can analyze it the way we were taught to analyze poems in high school — to find the meaning. So…

… even though the story is told in a disjointed, deliberately confusing way, the plot is actually straightforward. An American CIA agent (Julia Roberts) and a British MI6 agent (Clive Owen) decide to leave their government jobs and become spies for rival cosmetics corporations. The metaphorical/allegorical concept of the movie is obvious but nevertheless well conceived and artfully done. Like an earlier movie starring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the spy world is a metaphor for their romantic relationship… or, maybe their romantic relationship is a metaphor for the spy world. It’s hard to tell which is the metaphor and which is the meaning, but in any case, the directors take considerable effort to make one express the other — to make the standard conventional plot structures of the romantic comedy parallel the standard conventional plot structures of the spy thriller.

So, the two lovers/spies find it hard to trust each other, because… uh… you know…  they are spies/lovers, and everyone knows what lovers/spies/spies/lovers are like, especially when one is a metaphor for the other….

Hold on, I’m confusing myself.

Uh… did I mention that they don’t trust each other?… And did I mention that, despite their lack of trust, or perhaps precisely because of it, they have secretly teamed up (because they are secret agents, after all… and secret lovers) to steal the new secret cosmetic formula and sell it on the global market and become rich, rich, rich, to live out their days in secret-lover-agent bliss in one of those gorgeous global locations…. Where exactly? The particular location hardly matters, as over the course of the movie, they are doing their secret-agent-lover business in posh-picture-postcard locations such as Rome, Miami, The Bajamas, New York, and Zurich. And any one cosmetically beautiful (pun intended) location could be substituted for any other cosmetically beautiful location in the genre of the global thriller, so long as there is something cosmetically classic like Italian architecture and/or something decadent and unshaven (metaphorically speaking) like endless white beaches, cosmopolitan martinis, and high stakes gambling.

Spoiler Alert: as it turns out, in the end, they learn to trust each other because they discover they really are in love (awwww), and AND AND, they learn that love is all they need, just as the Beatles promised us, which they learn when they find themselves suddenly poor… duped by they very same corporation they sought to dupe. And we learn that there never was any secret cosmetic formula for curing baldness, because apparently that symbol for male virility (a lion’s mane of Sampsonite hair) isn’t necessary when what you really value is at home, waiting for you (awwww.)

So, the moral of the story is that the Beatles were right, all we need is love… lesson learned. This is the allegory… yawn.

But, on the other hand, isn’t it more interesting to read this movie metonymically (instead of metaphorically) — to chase the chain of signifiers across the cultural landscape of the postmodern twenty-first century? Isn’t the more interesting question, why now? Why at this precise moment in the spring of 2009 is Hollywood giving us this movie about spies for multinational corporations? Okay, admittedly, the answer to this may be all too obvious, given that we’re all experiencing the economic recession and given that we’re all hearing global corporate scandal after global corporate scandal on the news. Why else would the script writers include a lengthy monologue by the CEO explaining how human nature may have gone into genetic recession (pun intended), but the multinational corporation has taken mankind’s place in the evolutionary order… no longer are individual genius and moral fortitude the seats of invention; rather groups of human beings incorporating themselves are…?… Gag, OK, I admit it, maybe the metonymic reading isn’t so muy interesante either. 

Perhaps the really interesting thing to do here is put the metaphorical reading in conversation with the metonymic reading… a conversation we might call a dialectic if we want to sound real fancy-pantys. After all, according to Jacques Lacan, we create metaphors to explain our existence, and we chase metonymies to fill in our lack, our feeling of void.

Damn, I’m confusing myself again…. No, wait… here it goes, I can do this.

What does the lover/spy metaphor have to do with the metonymic context of global capitalism and its void? What indeed? The very lesson that the romantic story distracts us from is that at the end of the day, the cosmetic company actually had no real product. (It is a cosmetic company, after all, get it?) And apparently, even though real corporations are supposed to be built on “trust” (both in the moral sense and in the banking sense of the word), this one is built on “duplicity.” It spent millions of dollars spinning the simulation (or simulacrum, if we want to sound fancy-pantsy in a postmodernist sort of way) of its economic potential, all the while trying to outwit the other company. And at the end of the day, what they actually had… and what we in the audience are left with is… nothing… nothing but the love between Julia Roberts and Clive Owens… and really, not even that, because all we really have is the image of that love, and a group of capitalist conspirators chuckling voyeristically (like the movie’s audience itself) at a clandestine videotape of Roberts and Owen lovingly play-acting their duplicity on their cheap futon mattress on the floor of a decrepit apartment.

Jon Stewart Demystifies CNBC and Wall Street

Here is a wonderful clip of Jon Stewart from The Daily Show using a combination of satire and research to demystify the fundamentalist, free market, “neoliberal” ideology of CNBC and Wall Street. I couldn’t figure out how to insert a Daily Show clip into my blog like Seven Red did, so here is the link to it.

“Nigger” / “Nigga”: Tribe vs. Mos Def

What does hip hop have to teach us about deconstruction? Quite a lot, in my opinion.

Way back in 1993 (when I was a junior in college, gasp), Tribe Called Quest released their Midnight Maurader album, considered by some to be one of the top hip hop albums of all time. On it, the controversial hit “Sucka Nigga” [lyrics] observed that black youth had taken the racial slur “nigger” and transformed it into a “term of endearment… nigga.” (Is this at all similar to how Hester Prynne transforms the meaning of the scarlet “A” on her chest from adultery to able in The Scarlet Letter?) Tribe’s song provocatively raises many questions about the use and meaning of words, and as the song explains, the black community in the United States was (and still is) deeply conflicted over the use of the word “nigga” by black musicians and comedians.

Then, six years later in 1999, Mos Def released his highly acclaimed album, Black on Both Sides, which included an explicit and direct response to Tribe entitled “Mr. Nigga” [lyrics]. Mos Def’s song suggests that the original, racist meaning continues to subject black people to unfair prejudice. And furthermore, one might go so far as to say that the clownish antics of some hip hop artists and their lyrics may even be perpetuating it, despite whatever intentions or claims to the contrary they may assert.

So, against Tribe’s playful deconstruction of the word “nigga” that attempted to ”flip the script” on American racism, Mos Def presents a hard cautionary tale about how the meaning of the word continues to insist in the cultural practices of people not just in America but also around world. In a sense, Tribe seems to exemplify Derrida’s concept of “play,” and against Derrida, Mos Def seems to exemplify Lacan by reminding us of how the symbolic order continues to structure how we imagine ourselves in the world and how we experience the contradictions of reality (a contradictory experience that Lacan calls the Real, with a capital “R”.) Both songs, in my view, are doing deconstruction — contextualizing the cultural production and transformation of meaning and deconstructing the many binary oppositions invoked by the word “nigga.”

So, to put these songs in their historical context, back in the early 1990s, many people and organizations were concerned with “hate speech” — speech acts that give rise to violence and/or prejudicial action against minorities. The political debate concerned itself with two political rights, free speech and universal, personal integrity (since hate speech sometimes led to horrible acts of violence, called “hate crimes,” not to mention systemic discrimination.) Theorist Judith Butler eventually published Excitable Speech about this issue in 1997. Rather than engage directly in these legal debates, hip hop artists waged an artistic, performative battle against American racism.

In a sense, what we have now are two words. One word is the derogatory “nigger,” originally articulated by the “white man,” whose mouth, in Tribe’s splendidly poetic imagery, reminds us of the dome of a capital building — the very political structure that legitimated racism for so many years. The other word is “nigga” whose meaning is not so much positive as it is a historical reminder of the “adversity” that black Americans overcame as a community. In other words, as everyone knows, white people can not use this word (and any white person who does deserves to get his or her ass kicked) because they did not experience that adversity, but black people can because it reflects a commonly shared, historical identity.

Mos Def, however, reveals how the author of a text does not control its meaning (just as Roland Barthes showed in his famous essay, “Death of an Author“) because of how the signifier circulates in different social contexts. In fact, just as Michel Foucault argued in ”What is an Author?” so too does Mos Def seem to argue in “Mr. Nigga” — that authors and hip hop artists are products of legal and socio-economic systems. Hip hop has been appropriated by white suburban youth who (as Lacan suggests in his argument about how we construct our identity in relation to spectral others) enjoy the thrill of transgression by imitating gangsta rap culture and by pretentiously disavowing their own white privilege. And in a way, hip hop artists never had full control over their medium, having to respond to a marketplace dominated by white consumer culture and powerful corporations.

What artists, comedians, novelists, and hip hop artists have realized is that it’s not enough to simply demystify racism, because our culture and our language continues to reflect racist biases long after we as a nation realized that racism is a false ideology. And so, their project to deconstruct the language of American culture (which includes its racist language) is a project begun centuries ago, in the memoir of Olaudah Equiano and the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, well before commedian Richard Pryor first made it a central issue in his stand-up routine back in the 1970s.

“Hester’s Song” and postmodern Scarlet Letters

For the past couple of years, one of my side projects has been re-writes of Hawthorne’s  The Scarlet Letter — one of the most classic and often taught novels in American literary history. There are tons of re-writes, both high literary and pop cultural, and wikipedia has listed quite of few of them. Why so many re-writes of this one text? Perhaps the novel continues to have such resonance because young men and women continue to be subject to bizarre, contradictory peer pressures, and single mothers continue to be stigmatized. We don’t have to look far to find examples: the story that dominated the network news a month ago about a single woman having octuplets [here]… and then Anne Coulter’s recent book that accuses single mothers of being the source of all societal problems [here]…  and last year I blogged about recent movies about single mothers [here].

My favorite pop cultural version of The Scarlet Letter is the episode “Caged!” from the TV show Popular. On the more high-brow literary side, John Updike himself wrote not just one, but three novels that re-envision Hawthorne’s classic: Roger’s Version (as in Roger Chillingsworth’s version) is the best, but also S. and A Month of Sundays. And Susan-Lori Parks, the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer prize for drama, wrote two: In the Blood and Fucking A, published together as The Red Letter Plays. Then there are those that incorporate Hawthorne’s novel indirectly: Bharati Mukherjee’s Holder of the World and Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba are both terrific. One could, I suppose, call all of these “postmodern” texts (and Mukherjee and Condé “postcolonial” in addition) because of the way they take up a classic narrative and re-write it from a different perspective. (By the way, I’ve blogged about other postmodern re-writes here.)

Just a couple of days ago I read one such re-write for the first time, and it really hit me emotionally, so I want to talk about it in this blog: it’s called “Hester’s Song” by Toi Derricotte, and it comes from her book Natural Birth (1983) and was republished in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. Toi Derricotte was an unwed mother, and that is one of the main themes of her book. Here is the poem:

Hester’s Song
My seventeen year old son asks me if I’ve read The Scarlet Letter

              i rode you piggyback
          through groundless sky,
          the stars white foam in my face.
          they wanted to drive you
          back to namelessness,
          were jealous of the thought of you
          convulsed wide open
          and made a cave.
          i prayed
          you, miracle,
          to root through my fingers,
          grow in the spot,
          be with me.
          at night i curled over you
          guarding my rage,
          i thought you might escape
          through the crown of my head
          like a chimney.

          i lay without husband
          and drank at the stream of light.
          (how wide god is, my child,
          a pillar, he wrenched me…
          now you are with me
          like prayer.)

               blue
          clot in the night,
          ocean–
          thick swimming,
          hold, i say, hold:
          you are the one gold
          ever to come of alchemy.

I love how this poem begins, with the image of the pregnant woman riding her unborn child piggyback into the heavens. The image is a reversal of the normal image — the rather standard image in popular culture of a child on the father’s shoulders, riding him piggyback. In addition, Derricotte’s image creates a sense of how the mother is oddly dependent on the child rather than the other way around.

Why does she begin this way? The answer to that question may be that she is writing this poem to her son. Derricotte has provided us with an imagined situation — her son, in high school, reading The Scarlet Letter, about an unwed single mother branded with a social stigma. Naturally, Derricotte and her son are tempted to make the analogy between their situation and the situation described in the novel. Derricotte thinks about the situation as a mother would. She cares less about the social stigma that Hawthorne focused on in his novel, and instead she worries that her son will feel bad about himself… will ask her, “Mom, did you regret getting pregnant with me?” It’s a scary question, and as Jane Juffer points out in her book Single Mother, it’s a question that countless images in popular culture provoke millions of unwed mothers and their children to ask… or to feel afraid to ask. And in answer to that question, she concludes “you are the one gold ever to come of alchemy.” The poem affirms the relationship between mother and child.

But it does not do so simply or vapidly. Like the plot of Hawthorne’s novel, the poem recognizes the hostile environment in which the mother and child find themselves, and it transforms the difficulties and challenges Hester faces into a source of strength — transforms the negative  into a positive. The poem evokes a negative, uncertain void with words such as groundless, namelessness, wide open, night, ocean. But Derricotte uses these words in order to remind her son that they are rooted together. Here again, a line like the first that reverses a standard image. Normally, we think of fingers rooting or searching through something, but in her line, “i prayed you, miracle, to root through my fingers,” she says the opposite. What we would expect the subject of the sentence to be (fingers), she makes the object, and in doing so, she flips our sense of experience and perception.

The effect, I think, of her poem on the reader is one of simultaneous intimacy and alienation.