In reading and writing about the Post-modern construct of the world very little is written about the black experience, directly. There are plenty of allusions to post-racial America and the word bigot is applicable to ignorance outside of race, however there are constant indicators of how far we have progressed in this era. bell hooks writes;
Apparently, no one sympathised with my insistence that racism is perpetuated when blackness is associated solely with concrete gut level experience conceived either as opposing or having no connection to abstract thinking and the production of critical theory. The idea that there is no meaningful connection between black experience and critical thinking about aesthetics or culture must be continually interrogated.
Her critique of blackness in the post modern era hinges on the sense that critical theory is absent or muted in expressions of blackness. I would agree wholly with her assessment. Particularly within the media, blackness is quite churlish and stereotypically literal. In music, theatre, television, video games and films the black experience is depicted as reactionary and anti-intellectual. One main reason for this is as hooks writes in Postmodern Blackness
Postmodernist discourses are often exclusionary even when, having been accused of lacking concrete relevance, they call attention to and appropriate the experience of "difference" and "otherness" in order to provide themselves with oppositional political meaning, legitimacy, and immediacy. Very few African-American intellectuals have talked or written about postmodernism
Because blacks have not sufficiently defined themselves, there exists no clear consciousness of the black experience. While prolific in the modern era and early post modern, discourse on blackness has waned and devolved into an antiquated and inaccurate and an often self-promoted, stereo type of the reactionary emotional black person. This has allowed for the play of the 'otherness' card by those who would like to continue to exploit racial difference. One of the questions explored on this blog is what is British Blackness?
This article from the Guardian,
During the film Austin Powers in Goldmember, one of Mike Myers's characters, a Belgian criminal mastermind called Dr Evil, performed a parody of a hip-hop music video"...Dr Evil's intervention here typified postmodern culture: ironic, knowing, quoting from a source that was already quoting from another source and – perhaps this the main point – thereby cannily making a packet for a film franchise that, if one can be serious for a second, really didn't warrant a third outing. Such "bricolage", as Lyotard would put it (ie assembling artefacts from bits and pieces of other things from unexpected eras and sources), was key to the hip-hop culture Myers pastiched. And hip-hop culture, which is postmodernism's ironically adopted child, is everywhere – clothes, graffiti, poetry, dance, your iPod, my iPod, everybody's iPod. Everywhere apart from on Classic FM, because Classic FM doesn't roll that way.
Apparently, no one sympathised with my insistence that racism is perpetuated when blackness is associated solely with concrete gut level experience conceived either as opposing or having no connection to abstract thinking and the production of critical theory. The idea that there is no meaningful connection between black experience and critical thinking about aesthetics or culture must be continually interrogated.
Her critique of blackness in the post modern era hinges on the sense that critical theory is absent or muted in expressions of blackness. I would agree wholly with her assessment. Particularly within the media, blackness is quite churlish and stereotypically literal. In music, theatre, television, video games and films the black experience is depicted as reactionary and anti-intellectual. One main reason for this is as hooks writes in Postmodern Blackness
Postmodernist discourses are often exclusionary even when, having been accused of lacking concrete relevance, they call attention to and appropriate the experience of "difference" and "otherness" in order to provide themselves with oppositional political meaning, legitimacy, and immediacy. Very few African-American intellectuals have talked or written about postmodernism
Because blacks have not sufficiently defined themselves, there exists no clear consciousness of the black experience. While prolific in the modern era and early post modern, discourse on blackness has waned and devolved into an antiquated and inaccurate and an often self-promoted, stereo type of the reactionary emotional black person. This has allowed for the play of the 'otherness' card by those who would like to continue to exploit racial difference. One of the questions explored on this blog is what is British Blackness?
This article from the Guardian,
Postmodernism: the 10 key moments in the birth of a movement
really made me think about blackness and the black experience in the post modern era. A reference to hip hop was veiled in an Austin Powers reference,
Hip hop has as everyone's adopted child, a striking and accurate simile that defines a specific black expression and experience as abandoned by its parents and nurtured by 'others'. The article points out how art has become a commodity, it appears blackness has as well. In this instance, perhaps the bits and pieces that Lyotard refers to as 'bricolage' are the black experience, undefined.
Also currently, the V & A have an exhibit on Post-modernism..
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