File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_1998/postcolonial.9804, message 265


From: Sfrajett <Sfrajett-AT-aol.com>
Date: Fri, 17 Apr 1998 14:59:42 EDT
Subject: Re:  HNIC



In a message dated 4/17/98 6:21:30 PM, Terri Senft wrote:

<<is it *possible* to treat race ironically, in the US, without
your irony  being subsumed back into the same shitty system you tried to
critique?>>

I think that the Living Color example is a good one because it highlights
questions of creative authorship, context, and audience (created and then
reconsidered and thus recreated).  I worry about South Park for the same
reasons, as the stereotype of Chef, the hypersexual Black man singing Barry
White songs about how to lay a woman down by the fire, is a central "laugh" in
the show (as is killing Kenny).  But if I don't laugh at the fact that
everybody gets made fun of (does everybody?) then I don't get to join the cool
post-pc fraternity of magically unmarked bodies. The question of course is WHO
gets to treat race ironically for WHOM?  I remember In Living Color as a show
which began as geared primarily to an African-American (and male) audience,
complete with inside jokes about stereotypes WITHIN African- American popular
culture, fly girl dancers, etc.  If non-AA audiences wanted to watch, fine,
but they weren't the center (for a change).    Yes, the two queens in men on
film were stereotypes, but even they were hard to read for a while, seeming to
push against the elision of black gay representations of any kind as much as
capitulating to effeminate "drop the soap" humor.  I remember gay people
watching this very closely, and being quite divided over whether it was funny
or not.  Jim Carey got brought in as a send-up of whiteness, and I remember
the show shifting to a "broader" audience and becoming a bunch of boring
stereotypes trotted out for sure laughs, most of which felt like ridicule.  
	I suspect the notion of a level playing field is surfacing once more, without
consideration of inside and outside, or context.  It is not funny to reduce an
educated and accomplished man to the head butler in Ol Massa's house, unless
the thrust is on the fact that Harvard IS Ol' Massa's house, which is not at
all clear in the cryptic headline.  In the context of a racist society,
replete with a still very much intact symbolics of colonial discourse, the
inside/outside ambiguity of the speaker is not politically determinable, and
thus is a problem.  Ambivalence does not menace, in this case, but only
functions to reduce the achievements of a great man--and he is great whether
you like him or not--to the favors conferred on a bonded and degraded lackey.
This is our interpretive context, is it not?  How can this so-called joke NOT
fly back and hit Gates?  If most of America does not believe race is socially
constructed, then they wouldn't "get" racial irony, would they?  I guess the
humor turns on whether or not it is all behind us now.  And who, I mean which
constituencies precisely, get to put racial pain behind "us" now?  Three
guesses.  So I guess this notion of universal subjects on even ground feels
awfully paramnesiac to me!  Did the last thirty years even happen, or did I
dream it? --Best, Jaime 


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