08 June 2012 By Daniel Ibn Zayd In May of 2005 I joined a group of students and
activists to watch a documentary entitled Paul
Robeson: Here I Stand. Paul Robeson was an
American political figure, though he remains virtually
unknown by most in his home country. Many might
recognize him from a booklet of stamps published by
the United States Postal Service, entitled
"African-Americans on Stamps: A celebration of
African-American Heritage". The booklet opens with
Robeson's smiling face, and states: "By the late
1930s, [Robeson] had become very active and outspoken
on behalf of racial justice, social progress, and
international peace." This is true. He was also exiled
from the United States, his citizenship revoked and
then re-instated; he was poisoned with drugs and
tortured with electric-shock therapy, the latter while
under American supervision in hospital custody in
London. He was repeatedly forced to defend himself
during the Communist witch-hunts of the House
Committee on Un-American Activities. He died in
relative obscurity in 1977. For any group that has
suffered similar treatment, this will sound all too
familiar. Like many acculturated Americans, I was familiar
with Robeson as an entertainer; his rendition of "Ol'
Man River" from Showboat (written by Oscar
Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern in 1927) is considered
an American classic. The dirgeful ballad describes the
toil and strife of the black slave working the
gambling ferry boats: Colored folks work on de Mississippi,
Colored
folks work while de white folks play,
Pullin' dose
boats from de dawn to sunset,
Gittin' no rest till
de judgement day. In the score this refrain is marked optional;
replaced with "[a] musical part" depending on the whim
of the director, in deference to audiences perhaps not
comfortable with this rendition. This "comfort level"
is the driving force of acceptance of Othered
minorities as citizens, as well as their presence
within cultural manifestations and national
mythologies. The allowance or not of these couplets
speaks of an understood ever-shifting limit of
tolerance, the tolerated never quite alloted full
freedom. From this vantage point, the recent presidential
election takes on a different significance, the
opposite of current received wisdom, that a historic
event has taken place with the election of a black
American as marking a "post-race" America. Barack
Obama's election instead represents a similar "limit
of tolerance", based on the behavior, thought, and
action of the one tolerated. His mediation* as a new
"ideal" on the other hand, wholly separate from
actions which make him hard to differentiate from his
predecessors, and removed from the mood on the street
and realities suffered on the ground, is, in this
light, not a contradiction. One month before the election in 2008 I stopped
into a hip-hop clothing store in Bloomfield, New
Jersey. Various T-shirts sported the visage of Obama
along with statements of pride and hope. "My President
Is Black" read one, against the backdrop of an
American flag, and with the words "The American Dream"
on the reverse. This explosion in production of
T-shirts and signage outside of the licensing purview
of the Democratic National Committee[1] bears witness
more to the weight placed on Obama's shoulders than
belief in "Hope" or "Change". On the wall of the shop
was a graffitied art piece reflecting Obama's
perceived political peers: Malcolm X, Martin Luther
King, Nelson Mandela. To peer into Obama's future we
simply have to examine King, sadly reduced post-mortem
to a shill for Alcatel and Cingular, and Mandela, who
now serves a similar function as an ideal wholly
removed from the realities of a post-apartheid South
Africa, currently morphed into a neo-liberal and
globalized nightmare. Malcolm X, on the other hand, represented in image
as well as in word and deed something much closer to
the reality of lived life for many in the country, as
stated in his famous "Ballot or the Bullet" speech in
1964: No, I'm not an American. I'm one of the 22
million black people who are the victims of
Americanism. One of the 22 million black people who
are the victims of democracy, nothing but disguised
hypocrisy. So, I'm not standing here speaking to you
as an American, or a patriot, or a flag-saluter, or
a flag-waver–no, not I. I'm speaking as a victim of
this American system. And I see America through the
eyes of the victim. I don't see any American dream;
I see an American nightmare…. Reframed, these T-shirts thus become a grassroots
manifestation of the poet Langston Hughes'sThe
Dream Deferred[2]; they implicitly contain the
projection of what might happen if the dream is put
off any longer. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said
of an Obama presidency. Malcolm X also happens to be the only Black
activist in the USPS booklet (this due to lobbying
efforts), nonetheless painstakingly described therein
as a "lifelong criminal" who did time in prison before
his conversion to Islam. No mention is made of his
assassination, perhaps due to his description of the
assassination of John Kennedy as America's "chickens
[coming] home to roost". This was echoed by the Rev.
Jeremiah Wright[3] who said the same about the attack
on the World Trade Center, and Like Malcolm X and Paul
Robeson, Reverend Wright also suffered a smear
campaign to paint him as a threat to the nation. Full acceptance in a culture
which mocked their aspirations Part of what marks X, King, Robeson, and even Obama
is their not matching their bestowed stereotype. In
his book Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto[4],
Gilbert Osofsky states: What was most striking about the Negro stereotype
was the way it portrayed a people in an image so
totally the reverse of what Americans considered
worthy of emulation and recognition. The major and
traditional American values were all absent from the
Negro stereotype. The Negro was conceived of as lazy
in an ambitious culture; improvident and sensuous in
a moralistic society; happy in a sober world; poor
in a nation that offered riches to all who cared to
take them; childlike in a country of men….Negroes
hoped for full acceptance in a culture which mocked
their aspirations. The condition of the American black man was a
function not just of racism, but of a built-in
inability of those so tagged to voice or discuss the
nature of the problem; an inversion in which the
dominant discourse promulgated stereotypes which were
subsumed within the dominated culture itself, and then
further assumed and re-characterized by the targeted
group in question. It is only relatively recently that we are
witnessing documentation of Robeson and his work–time
having defused any revolutionary potential here–along
with one of the first stars of an entertainment realm
that tolerated black performance: Bert Williams. In
1903 Williams staged a musical comedy entitled In
Dahomey that was so successful it forced the
racial integration of many theaters in the States.
Simultaneously, W.E.B. DuBois was seeing the birth of
a Black cultural awakening in such work. In an essay
from 1916 entitled "The Drama Among Black Folk", he
wrote: In later days Cole and Johnson and Williams and
Walker lifted minstrelsy by sheer force of genius
into the beginnings of a new drama. White people
refused to support the finest of their new
conceptions like the "Red Moon" and the cycle
apparently stopped. Recently, however, with the
growth of a considerable number of colored theatres
and moving picture places, a new and inner demand
for Negro drama has arisen which is only partially
satisfied by the vaudeville actors….The next step
will undoubtedly be the slow growth of a new folk
drama built around the actual experience of Negro
American life. This cultural expression, wrested from the dominant
class, spoken in its own language, and directed inward
in terms of audience was the de facto segregated black
nation attempting to stand on its own feet and create
its own place, speak in its own voice. For this reason
it could not be tolerated. Dubois's appeals for funds
for such a theater went unheeded; audiences wished to
see re-affirmation of their view of black Americans,
as shaped by white actors in blackface makeup. The
stillborn theatrical awakening was reduced even
further to the horrific tragedy of actors such as
Williams smearing oily burnt cork ash on their own
[not] black [enough] faces. This inversion of Black culture through the
mediation of the white artist is evident as well in Porgy
and Bess, an opera about Black life (written by
George Gershwin and DuBose Heyward in 1935). In a
biography of George Gershwin, Duke Ellington, the
jazz-era band leader stated, "the times are here to
debunk Gershwin's lampblack Negroisms." Similarly,
when listened to outside of the dominant discourse
such as on the radio show L'épopée des musiques
noires broadcast on Radio France
Internationale[5], such artists speak openly of the
racism that they suffered and which continues to
plague them. That Duke Ellington successfully staged
all-black musicals that rose above the minstrel dross
remains lost within history; meanwhile, Showboat and Porgy
and Bess have replaced actual historical
memory.[6] Black to the future This specter of white men in black face rises every
so often as a reminder and as a warning, but also as a
marker of white privilege defended as "free speech",
as in the case of firefighters on Long Island who wore
Afro wigs and black face in a community parade in the
late '80s[7]: The police commissioner's management authority
has been undermined by federal Judge John Sprizzo's
June 23 ruling, following a non-jury trial, that the
city did not have the right to fire a police officer
and two firefighters who rode in blackface and wore
Afro wigs on a parade float in 1988. Police Officer
Joseph Locurto and the two firefighters were
punished, wrote Sprizzo, "in retaliation for
engaging in protected speech." This "protected
speech" involved being part of a float with the
banner "Black [sic] to the Future: Broad Channel
2098," which the defendants said was a parody of
black racial integration into the mainly white Broad
Channel neighborhood. They threw watermelon and
fried chicken at parade goers and, as the parade was
ending, a firefighter grabbed the back of the truck
and dangled himself toward the ground, re-enacting
the brutal dragging murder of a black man in Texas
two months earlier. Although we might not remember the vaudeville
circuits of the early 20th century, this news item
attests to the lingering epithets and uglinesses that
were used to disparage blacks of that period. Their
deep-seatedness is revealed in the non-reaction to
their use, and the ensuing disapproval if not
dismissal of the discussion that might follow such an
event. This legally protected "free speech" leaves no
humanizing aspect untargeted, by referring directly to
black stage characters and their disempowering
nicknames (Step-‘n'-Fetch-It, Jim Crow); to the sight
of white eyes peering out of black face ([rac]coon);
to the percentage of black blood in a person's
bloodstream (high yellow, quadroon); to one's renegade
slave background (maroon). Furthermore, the "reverse"
of this often used as a defense, namely, disparaging
terms for whites, are few in number, hardly as
powerful, and are by contrast comical in their
ineffectiveness. This brings up the main point of any such
discussion of representation, which cannot be limited
to its visual or aural perception: the power
differential involved. Who is the audience, and where
do they fit societally speaking? What is my physical,
technical, and economic ability to reach them? What
are the various legal rights that enable and/or
impinge such communication? What is my privilege to
make such a statement, and what personal, communal,
moral, etc. limitations might I place on myself before
doing so? What is my luxury to so speak, above and
beyond these other aspects of such expression? Examples of unspoken referents thus weigh even
heavier, in the sense that one need not even speak to
evoke the same racist sentiment: Confederate flags
flying over southern state capitol buildings (or in
hidden locations out of public view); separated
primary elections that reflect the class breakdown of
the political parties along racial lines; the voting
down of a federal holiday commemorating Martin Luther
King ("states' rights" makes direct reference to
George Wallace's statement of "segregation now,
segregation tomorrow, segregation forever"); the
practice of diluting minority power via the
gerrymandering of electoral districts; the use of
scare tactics at the polls; the prohibition of the
vote for felons; etc. The equivalent disparity of direct expression
within the culture, along similar overt as well as
covert lines, includes endless examples: Billie
Holiday used to relate how she was run out of Mobile,
Alabama for singing Strange Fruit (written by
Abel Meeropol in 1937), a song about the infamous
practice of lynching. In Louisiana more recently,
black students were convicted and imprisoned for their
protest and reaction to a noose[8] being hung from a
tree on the school lawn; this "warning" to the black
student population came after they decided to assemble
underneath the "white student's" tree.[9] A
super-mediated* discussion of the word "nigger" took
place when Michael Richards (Kramer from the
television show Seinfeld), not happy with
some black hecklers, informed them that "fifty years
ago we'd have you upside down with a fucking fork up
your ass." More disturbing are the commemorative
postcards made from photographs of hanged men, these
"black bodies swinging/in the Southern breeze",
surrounded by smiling white faces as might be seen at
a picnic or a communal pigsticking, and today
disturbingly mimicked by images from Abu Ghaib prison
in Iraq, as well as of soldiers in Afghanistan posing
with corpses. A share of the wealth and a
piece of the action It should thus come as no surprise that during the
Democratic primaries of 2008 Andrew Cuomo made
reference to Barack Obama's "shuck and jive", a phrase
which has no meaning outside of imposed black
vaudeville dialect for shiftiness and evasiveness,
making semantic reference to costume change, rapid
dance steps, and a fancy ability with words. The
attorney general's disavowal of the term as racist is
contradicted by his former statement that voting for
his [black] rival for the New York governor's race,
Carl McCall, would result in a "racial contract"
between Black and Hispanic Democrats which "can't
happen".[10] Similar was the statement from Georgia
Congressman Lynn Westmoreland that Obama seemed
"uppity". Everyone who speaks American English
completes this noun phrase with the one epithet that
follows, explicitly referring to a black man who
should "know his role". These terms and images are so loaded that they only
need be hinted at to get the message across; even in
their denial they hit the target and leave their mark.
The resulting backtracking can be seen to be
prefigured; meaning they are planned if not staged,
the knowledge remains that exculpation awaits for
simply denouncing the action of having stated them, or
else by labeling the targets thereof as
"oversensitive", "politically correct", or "racist"
themselves. In this way, the legacy of the ignoble
practices and codes of that time most assuredly live
on, as a chronic condition of the culture itself; the
equivalent of linguistic sucker punches such as "I
would never refer to my opponent as a Communist"[11]. Then candidate Obama listlessly defended himself
against such provocations, and was rewarded with the
presidency. In stark contrast, no U.S. postage stamp,
indeed, few American history books represent any
leader from the Black Power movements of the 1960s,
and this despite the acknowledgment at that time by
then president Richard Nixon, who used the term Black
Power in a speech attempting to subvert the movement
at its core: [M]uch of the Black militant talk these days is
actually in terms far closer to the doctrines of
free enterprise than to those of the welfarist
thirties–terms of "pride", "ownership", "private
enterprise", "capital", "self-assurance",
"self-respect"… What most of these militants are
asking is not separation, but to be included in–not
as supplicants, but as owners, as entrepreneurs–to
have a share of the wealth and a piece of the
action. And this is precisely what the Federal
central target of the new approach ought to be. It
ought to be oriented toward more Black ownership,
for from this can flow the rest–Black pride, Black
jobs, Black opportunity and yes, Black power….[12] The actuality is better known: the former Black
Power movement leaders have either been assassinated
or put in prison, have come around to parrot the
dominant discourse, or have retreated to obscurity
and/or academia; all have been rendered place-less,
historically silenced and disappeared. Similarly, if
no one remembers the black musicians of jazz, blues,
funk, gospel, etc. that the U.S. Postal Service
attempts to pay tribute to, everyone on the other hand
knows their white stand-ins, their role-reversers:
Elvis, Joe Cocker, The Rolling Stones, Eminem, etc. To
reinforce this diminishment, blacks of a certain
celebrity are often referred to as the shadow of their
white counterparts, especially in terms of politics
and culture: "the black Daniel Webster" applied to
Samuel Ringgold Ward, or "the black Callas",
attributed to Barbara Hendricks, or now, "the black
Kennedy", in a reflection of racial privilege, and the
one-way directional flow of cultural appropriation and
political designation. The rainbow sign In one such Black spiritual now forgotten, God
gives Noah the "Rainbow Sign" that ends his
estrangement from the land; however the sign comes
with a warning that He is done with water, promising
"the fire next time". In his book of the same name,
James Baldwin describes Malcolm X's relationship with
the United States thus: Whether in private debate or in public, any
attempt I made to explain how the Black Muslim
movement came about, and how it has achieved such
force, was met with a blankness that revealed the
little connection that the liberals' attitudes have
with their perceptions or their lives, or even their
knowledge–revealed, in fact, that they could deal
with the Negro as a symbol or a victim but had no
sense of him as a man. When Malcolm X, who is
considered the movement's second-in-command, and
heir apparent, points out that the cry of "violence"
was not raised, for example, when the Israelis
fought to regain Israel, and, indeed, is raised only
when black men indicate that they will fight for their rights,
he is speaking the truth. The conquests of England,
every one of them bloody, are part of what Americans
have in mind when they speak of England's glory. In
the United States, violence and heroism have been
made synonymous except when it comes to blacks, and
the only way to defeat Malcolm's point is to concede
it and then ask oneself why this is so….there is
no reason that black men should be expected to
be more patient, more forebearing, more farseeing
than whites; indeed, quite the contrary. The real
reason that non-violence is considered a virtue in
Negroes…is that white men do not want their lives,
their self-image, or their property threatened. Here Baldwin presages the purely symbolic
non-threatening black man who will be acceptable in
the United States. Another such example, Bill Cosby,
echoes this when he states that "all the problems [on
his TV show] were not solved, but were dealt with
without violence." In contrast to the [acceptable]
violence of Israel and England (which too has its own
"Jerusalem"[13]) Baldwin reveals what is most
threatening about the landless or placeless minority
nations within Anglo-Saxon realms. More importantly,
he reveals society's inherent fear of those who have
similarly examined the topic of self-representation (Ture,
Fanon, Roy, Dabashi, etc.), and who conclude that
violence is, perhaps, the only possible reaction to
greater violences both actual and virtual suffered by
the oppressed. We're here without any
rights This discussion of violence controlled by those who
have the power to define the parameters for said
violence brings us to Sacha Cohen, and his portrayal
of an Arab leader in his movie The Dictator.
In naming the dictator "Gen. Shabazz Aladeen", pointed
reference is made to the Nation of Islam and Malcolm
X's taken name, juxtaposed mockingly against the
exoticized "Aladdin" (which removes any religious
significance here). In an interview with Howard
Stern[14] Cohen states: "All these dictators blame everything on the
Zionists," said Baron Cohen, "it's a great
scapegoat. Now, young people are saying the reason
we're not happy is we're living in these
dictatorships. There's a guy who's a trillion-aire
who's sleeping with models and actresses, and we're
here without any rights being persecuted." In a failed bid to play victim, Cohen instead
reveals his "Arab-face" minstrelsy; his portrayal of
stereotypes are in fact directed at an audience the
class of which has controlled the destiny of those
living "under dictatorships" for the greater part of
the last century, if not the past 500 years. The
insinuation here is that such dictatorships are a
function of the Arab inability to assume democracy (a
great Orientalism, barely worthy of non-scholars such
as Bernard Lewis) and claiming falsely that the region
has no democratic or, indeed, socialist, pan-Arabist,
anti-colonialist, etc. aspects to its past. It is too
easy to discuss these neglected historical forces of
liberation in the Arab and Muslim world to debunk such
heinous racism–Mossadegh, Shari'ati, Fanon, Memmi,
Nasser, etc. (among many, many others) all come
quickly to mind–and this, coupled with the fact that
the Third World's leftist realm has been targeted for
extermination for decades if not more than a century,
only reinforces the hubris of Cohen's statement. In economic terms, it also reveals the power
differential inherent to capitalism and globalization,
and is reminiscent of Bill Cosby's attacks on "bling"-style
rap artists–he doesn't even admit to their more
political precursors–who have managed to acquire
wealth and status by following all of the lessons
learned in a neo-liberal society (similar to Mexican
drug cartels, the Mafia, the Saudi monarchy, etc.) but
who get punished when they become too competitive
(like Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan) and are thus
rendered docile and brought within the domain of
global Capital. "The trillionaire sleeping with models
and actresses" is a glorified trope within American
culture, so it is odd to find it given populist
overtones as concerns the current Arab revolts and
uprisings, as if we are to believe that in any way
Sasha Cohen finds common cause with the Arab street. The idea that the struggle against the colonial
apartheid state of Israel, indeed, that the resistance
to First-World globalizing dominance in the region as
premised and foregrounded by the Palestinian struggle,
might somehow be simplistically reduced to "criticism"
of Zionism (in and of itself an ignoble ideology) is
so Orwellian an inversion as to be unworthy of retort.
There is no point wasting time considering the
cultural "flip", in imagining an Arab or Muslim "doing
the same thing" culturally speaking; there is likewise
no point in discussing the ridiculous concept of
"reverse racism" when such debates require a thorough
examination of said expression along economic and
political lines. This, the power differential of the
dominant culture as portrayed by that culture's media,
is the central point of this discussion, and however
we might examine it, those who are minority, who are
Other, fundamentally cannot rise above such
representations as they are played out within this
mediated system. A critical black gaze As a black American convert to Islam, Malcolm X,
despite mediated attempts to historically reduce him,
could very well be a case of a sub-mediated* image
that survives such a pulverization[15], and as such,
serves as a model to follow to bring us out of this
quandary. As stated by bell hooks, in one of her
essays[16] concerning and quoting Malcolm X: Understanding the power of mass media images as
forces that can overdetermine how we see ourselves
and how we choose to act, Malcolm X admonished black
folks: "Never accept images that have been created
for you by someone else. It is always better to form
the habit of learning how to see things for
yourself: then you are in a better position to judge
for yourself." Interpreted narrowly, this admonition
can be seen as referring only to images of black
folks created in the white imagination. More
broadly, however, its message is not simply that
black folks should interrogate only the images white
folks produce while passively consuming images
constructed by black folks; it urges us to look with
a critical eye at all images. Malcolm X promoted and
encouraged the development of a critical black gaze,
one that would be able to move beyond passive
consumption and be fiercely confronting,
challenging, interrogating. Proclaimed "hope" or promised "change" should not
derail any criticism of the Image Machine, especially
when this Machine has minimized minority histories to
literally belittled images riding on tickets of
commerce; to bogus misrepresentative celluloid trash;
to symbolic representations of white privilege
embodied in the heads of state and power: All the more
reason we must be "fiercely confronting, challenging,
interrogating…look[ing] with a critical eye at all
images". The answer to such racism lies not in a faux multi-culturalism,
nor in a homogenizing, "borderless", "nomadic"
neo-liberalism. The answer lies in manifestations of
resistance to this dominant culture which are able to
pre-emptively prevent co-optation by the dominant
discourse. Hamid Dabashi, in his book Post-Orientalism:
Knowledge and Power in Time of Terror, states: Out of this cul-de-sac, one possibility has
always remained open: a creative re/constitution of
cultural character and historical agency from a
range of poetic and aesthetic possibilities, where
the notion of the beautiful is violently
wrested out of the banal, the sublime forcefully
out of the ridiculous, agency defiantly out of
servitude,subjection combatively out of humiliation. This requires, however, that we change our
perspective and our own viewpoint first; that we
radically re-orient ourselves in terms our
relationship to cultural consumption and its source.
These manifestations as described by Dabashi are hard
to suss out since we have unfortunately lost the
ability to read them as such, for having been so long
out of touch with our own creative potential, and for
having forgotten the formerly "local" media
manifestations of guerrilla television, public access
cable, pirate radio, radical journals, homegrown
theater, etc. True to our native land On January 30, 2009, in Denver, Colorado, a black
woman was asked to sing the national anthem during the
State of the City address by the mayor of Denver, John
Hickenlooper[17]. Instead of theStar-Spangled
Banner, Rene Marie offered a rendition of the
"black national anthem", resulting in hate mail and an
outcry denouncing her action. She stated that her
decision was based on "how I feel about living in the
United States, as a black woman, as a black person".
Further, she said that she would no longer sing the
national anthem because she "often feels like a
foreigner in the United States". The correct response of the mayor's office should
have been "this is her right; this is her freedom of
speech", like our blackfaced firemen, like Andrew
Cuomo; this was not forthcoming. The song which
originally debuted in 1900 is entitled, Lift Every
Voice and Sing (words and music by John Johnson,
ironically quoted in the benediction for Barack
Obama's inauguration ceremony), and it ends with the
lyrics: "May we forever stand,/True to our God,/True
to our native land." This takes on a particularly
humbling tone given the replacement of the previous
attempts of minority Americans to leave their ghettoes
with more current almost prideful acceptances of this,
their "allowed" place. This is manifested in the outlying reaches of Los
Angeles–180 degrees removed from Cohen's Hollywood–the
scene of the Watts and Rodney King riots, and
described in the music of Bambu[18] among many others,
and where a "beautiful" form of dance was created from
the "banal" by Tommy Johnston, aka "Tommy the Clown",
borrowing from stripper pole-dancing, although
performed by both sexes, and used to entertain
children and adults at birthday and block parties. The
dance is referred to as clowning, and it went
on to spawn another form of dance, angrier and
reflective of street realities for a generation lost,
often mimicking police beatings and other brutalities,
called crumping. Both are performed by youth
attempting to escape the reality of gang-controlled
streets, where misuse of colors is a marker for
murder, and choices of home, school, job, and future
are systemically limited. In the documentary about this dance form called Rize![19]
the youth in the movie describe their lives imbued
with a renascent spirituality, sense of purpose, and
avoidance of the commercialization that has befallen
previous expression from this community. Included in
this film is the striking image of a black man now
painting his face up in white clown makeup and not
minstrel black burnt cork, referencing a forgotten
cultural marker and not a racist imposition; following
Malcolm's advice to "never accept images that have
been created for you by someone else." Speak from the street While we point out this obvious classist and racist
arrogance, we must also strive to find the
countervailing non-mediated* representatives that
exist closer to home and which speak from the street:
the Egyptian women whose strikes in the textile mills
(not Twitter) led to intifada;
similarly the women of the neighborhoods surrounding
Tahrir Square in Cairo whose cooking fed this
revolution; the 70,000 Palestinian refugees marching
to the Lebanese border in May of 2011; the owner of
the last kufiyyeh factory[20] in occupied and
embattled Al-Khalil, undone by sanctions and outdone
by Chinese imports; the Syrian migrant workers slaving
to build Beirut skyscrapers, far from their rural
communities rightfully rising up in revolts kidnapped
by regional powers; the Bedouin populations kept
stateless and impoverished; Palestinian hunger
strikers; etc. ad infinitum, all with their
unique creative contributions of craft, art, music,
graffiti, dance, calligraphy, song, poetry, spoken and
written word, theater, etc. For of this common resistance might rise the
creative manifestations–the "new folk drama"–that feed
back into the revolts against the likes of Sacha Cohen
and his ilk who would define us and confine us;
manifestations[21] that do not allow simply for a
misconstrued and patently false "comfort level" or
status quo, that do not inadvertently sell us short,
that do not continue to sell us out. In this is
perhaps a great step forward, since, as Malcolm X asks
of us, once the realization of such mediated deception
and the unveiling of the deceivers hits home, once we
move from defensive mode to rediscovering the energy
that would be better put to creative output, once we
wean ourselves from the source of our own
misrepresentation, then we might actually recognize
the creative source all around us; a new nahdah;
proving with our creative action what we already know
to be true in our thoughts and words. Paul Robeson, in
control of his own creative manifestation in concert,
changed the formal and staged lyrics of "Ol' Man
River" to better frame his feelings of being an
outsider within American society. It is likewise time
for our own re-imaging; our own reformulation; our own
restaging. * Mediation Non-mediated: A spontaneous expression that is not
designed, pre-selected, edited, planned; the voicer of
the unsaid. Example(s): The spontaneous verbal utterance or
physical actualization in reaction to witnessing a car
accident; Kanye West going off-prompt during a
televised fundraiser for the victims of hurricane
Katrina, stating: "George Bush doesn't care about
Black people." Super-mediated: Expression that is designed,
pre-selected, edited, or planned, possibly within the
constraints of a given group, its ideology, its
manifesto or tenets, that may or may not stand in
opposition to the dominant discourse, but whose use of
tools, languages, systems, and technologies in fact
are meant to enable, sustain, and promote such
dominant discourse. Example(s): The television show Cops with an
episode concerning drunk driving; drivers' education
movies; a presidential press conference in the
aftermath of Katrina. Sub-mediated: Expression that is designed,
pre-selected, edited, or planned within the
constraints of a given group, its ideology, its
manifesto, or tenets, that absolutely stands in
opposition to the dominant discourse often in its
uniqueness and its non-derivation from current customs
or tropes, and which avoids or attempts to subvert the
tools, languages, systems, and technologies of
super-mediation. Example(s): The white-painted ghost bikes of
various cities that represent both the individual
killed in an accident and their collective whole; the
Legendary K.O's rap song set to mashup videos for
"George Bush Don't Like Black People". "Dreaming XXL"; Jake Austen. Harper's, November
2008. pp. 58–59. What happens to a dream deferred?/Does it dry
up/Like a raisin in the sun?/Or fester like a
sore–/And then run?/Does it stink like rotten meat?/Or
crust and sugar over–/like a syrupy sweet?/Maybe it
just sags/like a heavy load./Or does it explode? Harper Torchbooks, 1966. The Story of Black Musics [sic] < http://www.rfi.fr/taxonomy/emission/187>; Both musicals are featured as postage stamps. To
note is that "First-day" issue of stamps exists for a
very particular audience that collects such stamps for
their value; this is a different audience than the
subject of the stamps themselves. Reference to this conversation taped by a reporter
for the Jewish Forward. Interesting here and
necessitating another treatise is the ability of Cuomo
to claim "whiteness", as opposed to his formerly
equally marking ethnic identity. Testimony of Paul Robeson before the House
Committee on Un-American Activities;;. Black Liberation and Socialism, Ahmed
Shawki. William Blake poem and later hymn. Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations USA Today, January 31, 2009; "Controversy
after singer substitutes ‘black national anthem' for
‘Star-Spangled Banner'. Pull It Back:; Rize!:; Kufiyeh project:; Daniel Ibn Zayd was adopted in 1963 and
returned definitively to his land of birth in 2004;
there he teaches art and illustration and in 2009
founded the artists' collective Jamaa Al-Yad. He has
written for CounterPunch, The Monthly Review Zine, Dissident
Voice, and The Design Altruism Project, as well as on
his blog: danielibnzayd.wordpress.com. He is a
contributor to Transracial Eyes, a web-based
collective of transracial adoptees. He can be reached
at @ibnzayd on Twitter and by email: daniel.ibnzayd@inquisitor.com. Comments 💬 التعليقات |