NYU LOG: Summer 1993
27 May 93: It has
little to do with passion or the dominance of the phallocentric instrument in
the writing process. It is simpler than
that. I would simply find it very
difficult to be in New York and not write.
This is a writer’s town just as surely as it is the last American city
to need theatre. It is not a metaphor to
call New York a stage. Thursday’s arrival is adventure. Hillery
Knight remarked that some time among intellectually and genetically fit people
would be good for me. I looked at him as
we drove to the Jackson International Airport.
Perhaps. My usual skepticism.
Adventure --- my digs for the next two weeks: Apt. 5-R,
#1 Washington Square Village. Getting my
ID is one kind of adventure; getting the barcode for library use, another
----and I checked out four books the first day and bought an hour ($4.00) of
computer time to do a new draft of the syllabus & bibliography for my
seminar. The real adventure is visual
--- the discovery of how many ways the basic human body can be modified and
disguised, what can be wrapped, painted; what appended from or tattooed on
it. Called Lawrence Jordan ---he
suggests brunch w/Gilbert Fletcher on Saturday.
28 May 93: Friday –Worked
hard in the library today and finished the new drafts of syllabus &
bibliography for photocopying; delivered them to Claude Blinsman. Bought NY
Times. Picked up a free issue of the
Village Voice. Washington Square park is a disaster zone
---every variety of beggar, mentally unbalanced
person, normal person, young and old, traversing the ground --- all in costume. One doesn’t dress here. One costumes.
There are seven million frustrated actors in this city.
I see an article in Friday’s Times, Section B, on Riverbank State Park –“a 28 acre park on the
roof of the North River Treatment Plant –a $129 milion job ---over
garbage. It smells. It is in Harlem ---145th St and
Riverside Drive. Is magnificence
malignant? It reminds me of an extermination
unit!
29 May 93:
Lawrence Jordan calls around 9:00 a.m.
Meet him and Gilbert at 112th and Broadway ---Dress up or
dress down I ask, already falling into the fashion trap. It’s Saturday Larry says in his Jesus Christ
it-is-Saturday voice. I’m wearing
jeans. O.K. Dress medium. Leave around 11:00 a.m., catch the N/R uptown
at 8th St and transfer to a (1) at 42nd St. We have brunch and fairly good conversation at
Café 112. Gilbert, Tom Dent’s friend, I
discover works at Publisher’s Weekly. He looks New Orleans and is reserved but
friendly. After brunch we go to
Riverbank State Park. It is a handsome
structure, but the idea of having a park including café over sewerage strikes
me as ludicrous, very NY ---an invitation to a new life style. I have a coffee and croissant at The Violet,
get some rest, and have a late dinner at Charlie Mom Chinese Cuisine, 464 Sixth
Ave. The Chinese broccoli & chicken
are nicely seasoned and filling. Buy the
Sunday Times on the way back to the
apartment. This is a warm-up exercise
for more serious writing, I hope. To
write well, the mood or the necessity must be there. It just isn’t tonight. Oh, the Bulls beat the Knicks 103-83!! In Game
3 of the NBA playoffs. Michael Jordan
was less than superb, but he got his team together on home court.
“Black Cinema and the Public Sphere” by Manthia Diawara,
La Maison Francaise, 16 Washington Mews –June 8, 1993, 7:00 p.m.
Throughout this lecture a question floats in the
foreground: how is black film ituated in the public sphere? Or how is film as commodity located in the
market? The announced title provoked
expectation that were not met by Diawara’s presentation. The reason emerged at the end of his talk. His formulation of the concept PUBLIC SPHERE required a full elaboration
prior to our locating anything in relation to it.
Diawara proposed that the black public sphere is akin to
Habermas’s notion that the life world is to be considered in relation to
systems. Here one needs to consider
whether in theory the idea of system is
abstracted and divorced from actual human action. Diawara also proposed that modernity as
project has the end of emancipating life.
What kind of modernity or modernism is at issue, for Diawara certainly
throws forth a complex term. He does not
have in mind quite what Houston Baker means in the book Black Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Baker figures modernism in individual example
of model and mastery of form; Diawara’s object is a mastery of agency as
collective enterprise, a social, or perhaps cultural, activity as opposed to a
singular, privatized set of acts.
Diawara mentions four figures, all male, who seem to him
to have created rich discourses on modernity in relation to a public sphere: C.
L. R. James, Frantz Fanon, W. E. B. DuBois, and Malcolm X. Their writings seem to have positioned people
to listen. Did their writing also
position people to receive and respond to vision? That is to say, is the Autobiography of Malcolm X such a work which elicits illocution?
Diawara mentions Chester Himes and the novel A Rage in Harlem, focusing in on the
refrain “Don’t trust a short, fat black man.”
Somehow the irony of reification must be tied up with the character who
speaks and the other character who encounters misfortune as a result of
trusting. Again, more elaboration of this “reading” is necessary to understand
Diawara’s ideas.
Diawara, rightly I think, wants to distinguish black
popular culture from mass culture in terms of economic force. Black popular culture seems to involve a
tradition of oral advertising and consumption (a satisfaction of ethnic
appetites): have you heard (seen) this? This might be a song by Aretha Franklin
or Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale.
The problem to be resolved or accommodated involves the overlapping of popular
and mass especially with regard to production
[making]. Later, Diawara complicates the problem by insisting on a shift of
interest from means of production in the Marxist sense to interest in the
productivity of “service enterprise” (money generating) in the public
sphere. These levels of analysis seem to
be of a very different order. And what
strikes my ear as the great SILENCE is the long history of black American
service – forced or necessitated service [labor of slaves/working for]. I think Diawara has in mind another idea of
service that is somehow freer, somehow more independent. It may be that the axis of interdependence is
angled differently.
Another feature of public sphere is its character as
productive space. For example, it
enables the appropriation of science as procedures that are not the private
property of the West. Science can be
appropriated (and translated) for meeting the needs to improve the quality of
life in underdeveloped economies. At
this point I think Richard Wright’s White
Man, Listen is germane, insofar as Wright addressed modernization as a
major change from thoroughly historicized, tradition-boundedness to full
participation in twentieth-century focus on technology. The moral consequences
are under erasure. Literacy (recognition
of signs) is crucial in the project of modernity. So too is use of signs. At the semiotic level Diawara’s interest in
public sphere and the interest of my seminar on “Representing the African
American South” might have a conversation.
Diawara would read The
Autobiography of Malcolm X (he referred to pages 8, 344 and 365 in one
paperback edition) selectively for the moments of reflexiveness. Malcolm gazing [thinking] upon/into the infinitude of
the sky. Also making a noise, a sound,
the use of sound (?). I take sky to be
an infinity. A “natural” space of
endless possibilities. And Diawara does
toss in the idea of man (artifice and activity) and nature. But how the gesture is made is not clear yet.
He would search for African American economic narratives,for
a black economic ethos. He claim that
black Americans fear, have a suspicion of, selling, of commerce. He claims that black Americans fear the risk
of business --that they lack an economic
ethos. Later he is challenged. It seems that he might argue for the absence
of sustained tradition just as he brings up the matter of KOSHER as the primal
Jewish economic myth --- the mystery that
fuels economic behavior/ Islamic prohibition against INTEREST may nurture other
kinds of economic behavior. Diawara
proposed the Black American was/is in need of a master narrative of economy to
realize a position in the public sphere.
We begin to move toward consideration of film and other
objects as he proclaims that African Americans have deep-rooted doubts
concerning the use of blk culture as commodity (saleable item). The film, for
example, that enlarges the economic possibilities of black people ---cf. the work created by Spike Lee’s School Daze. Or M. C. Hammer’s creating jobs through video
and performance. And already I worry
about the length of viability. How long,
oh Lord, how long will movie or video produce income? The market is not infinite.
Diawara criticizes Malcolm X’s placement of the
spiritual. For Diawara, the spiritual is
an aspect of culture, is subsumed by culture [ I suppose he speaks
anthropologically. The main components
of his idea of he modern project (modernizing project) are 1) politics (human
rights as prior to civil rights); 2) economic; 3) culture. And the crux of his thinking is that man
(person) must be the controlling AGENT in use and production in the public
sphere. Thus, his rejection of victim studies
--- his affinity with black thinking from the Diaspora that African
Americans essentialize blackness and are too mired in attention to slavery
rather than visioning themselves as actors in now time.
My initial doubts about Diawara’s construction are
centered on vision and definition. How
does the project of modernity deal with the proliferations of the post-modern? If he does not address or explain dismissal
of the post-modern (and its habits of trivializing), then he will be accused of
ahistorical analysis.
Diawara does not want to buy into Walter Benjamin’s idea
of art in the age of mechanics [ images can be produced in mass and thus
disrupt notions of value] – and where he stands in relation to Althusser,
Gramsci, Habermas -- where he stands in
the shorthand of Eurothought is not always clear enough. Yet, his lecture was only a trial, a trying
out of ideas rather than a fixing of
ideas ( writing in cement).
myth ---transubstantiation of reality
June 18, 1993 log entry
Distance, lack of
access to information --- the cost of returning home; then, too, the absence of
a level of intellectual exchange that nurtures the critical consciousness. For example, the brief exchanges with Manthia
Diawara about the critical positions he occupies as one who is engaged in
cultural study, exchanges which cast light on the potholes of my pre-future
discourse. But there are advantages, particularly
economic advantages, in returning to Ridgeland.
The three weeks in New York have opened ideas about
situating verbal aspect of Black film ---reflecting on th use of profanity as
limiting device. It might be argued that
FUCK (and other words HO/BITCH as in Menace II Society) are realistic, offer
verisimilitude for spectators, and simultaneously represent the critique of
inner city limits. It could be argued
that what is real and proper
artistically [drowning the ear in vulgarity as it is drowned in daily life]
raises concern for values that evaporate/have evaporated -- cf.
Cornel West’s nihilism -- in the ongoing
construction of reality.
June 20, 1993
AFTER NEW YORK
After New York –three weeks of NYC, the crush of daily
crowds, the circus of Washington Square, and deranged beggars, the relatively
quiet provinciality of Mississippi seems almost necessary, almost refreshing. New
Yorkers who survive -- the lucky ones –deserve
respect. They are the stalwart veterans
of America’s urban experiment. Despite
the sanctuary of Washington Square Village #1, five floors above ground, the
city, the fact of citiness, would kill me.
I am not at heart an urban person.
So, it is back to Mississippi on a Fathers Day Sunday,
the mythologized recollections of my father now thirty-six years dead surround consciousness
rather like this mountain air. Willing
farewell to the realpolitik of multiethnicity.
July 15, 1993
The Filmworks: Entering Another’s Dream of One’s Own
Film is best when in the dark you gaze upon the illusion
of three-dimensionality, the flatness of the surface thrust upon your retina by a
haunting contour & texture, by the desire to participate as nobodies are
transformed, and transform themselves by mimeis, into larger-than-life somebodies. Your eye feels what your mind can only
process through the agency of sight and sound.
Your eyes, surrounded by another, darker and harder Balwinesque
[Baldwinian] darkness ----the magic of
being lost in the fun/fearhouse ---of being lost in the manipulation of your
own complexity. Film is best when the images of the actors are merely
reflections of human beings who are not stars, who bring to your viewing no
disruptive baggage. It is, for example,
so disruptive when you are viewing What’s
Love Got to Do with It that
Angela asset is not TinaTurner (Anna Mae Bullock) but Betty Shabazz out of Malcolm X and Laurence Fishburn ( who is
Larry Fishburn from School Daze and
the off-Broadway performance of August Wilson Two Trains Running) is not Ike Turner but Dap or the person you
wished had portrayed Robert Johnson in Trick
the Devil. The devil does indeed
find work in the cinema. The anonymity your mind desires the eye cannot behold;
the eye is forced to see what is not there in the anti-philosophical Platonic
cave. Film is foremost
entertainment. Your making it the site
for intellection is a perversion! Film
is best when you take it as the disruptive entertainment that it is, and
indulge yourself in the pleasure of your vulgarity. It is not far afield in possibility that
contemporary film is a tattle-tale mirror of our most repressed imperfection.
As a representation at least three removes from reality,
film has an immediacy and power that is enchanting. As you reflect on your participation in the
work of being entertained, tutored in the intricacies of misreading reality
(however much it is argued that film reflects reality --the mirror is a distorting device).
What is happening physically & psychologically as you
witness fil
What does the activity tell you about the social
construction/constriction of RACE
Confronting the film, you assume a cultivated positionality ---If all these years you have been figured
as African (American), you IDENTIFY consciously or by sheer animal instinct
with the sound, shapes and colours re/presented before your eyes. You remember
this was a matter of choice; you paid to enter!
You chose to saturate your cultural life, your
audiovisual sensibility. But the
analysis of the film is not a luxury. It
is an essential. What’s Love Got to Do with It will certainly cure you of any
distant romance you have had with pop cult icons. The cure is only attained through analysis of
why the displacement of bodies [Bassett’s and Turner’s] in the film is so
problematic. The camera reveals a
certain physicality from workouts, the gym, in Bassett’s body that you did not
imagine when you casually spoke of Tina Turner’s strength as a black
woman. What did you expect?
Notes for Something
The T. Turner movie provides a nexus for concerns about
(1) Non-black representation of the Black
(2) Transformation
from collaborative autobiography to film
(3) Black
indie vs. Hollywood film
(4) Preoccupation
(political/ideological) with film’s possibilities
N.B. The Turner
film parallels Terry McMillan whereas Dash’s film [Daughters of the Dust] parallels T. Morrison in complexity of
challenge
Viewed 7/14/93
JUICE (Paramount/Island World) 1992 95 min. Featuring Omar Epps, Jermain Hopkins,
Samuel L. Jackson, Queen Latifah
New York traffic/record overlay-scratch-mix story by
Ernest Dickerson
Scan of technology to sleeping figure of Quincy
Preoccupation with style & technology
The Filmworks:
Entering Another’s Dream of One’s Own
Watching film is
akin to dreaming. It is also a shared
experience. We share a space with other
watchers, and we enter another’s dream
--- that of the filmmaker. If the
film is to reach us (in other words, if we are to enter the dream created for
us) it must be accessible: we must share the reality upon which it is based, or
be convinced to do so.
David Nicholson, Black
Film Review, Issue #1 (December 1984)
A substantial number of so-called black films stink of
nihilism ----the rank, male penchant for exercising the power of death over life!
Russell, Kathy, Midge Wilson and Ronald Hall. The Color Complex: The Politics of Skin
Color Among African Americans. New York: HarcourtBraceJovanovich, 1992. 305.896 Rus in Northside Branch.
Ghettocentricism = style = driven cult of Blackness or
the image of the brute revisited
pp. 59-60 ---language symbolism as source of bias against
the darker
origins of the color complex
Jamestown
1607/1619 ---& before
Home of the Brave. 85 min.
Directed –Mark Robson. 1949
Audio-Brandon Films
34 MacQuestion Parkway So
Mount Vernon, NY 10550
Intruder in the
Dust. Dir. Clarence Brown. 87 min 1949
Films, Inc.
227 Pharr Rd. N.E.
Atlanta, GA 30309
Maynard, Richard A., ed. The Black Man on Film: Racial Stereotyping. Rochelle Park, NJ: Hayden Book Company, 1974.
