In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post Civil-Rights Era (review)

In the American post civil rights period, tolerance and diversity are the measures of our national commitment to social equality. We acknowledge (and sometimes celebrate) diversity and differences of all sorts, including even racial difference. We are, however, constituted as citizen-subjects in a polity where the formal terms of citizenship, belonging, and recognition require civic and national allegiance to the nation-state. The histories and experiences of subjugation that such differences (especially blackness) structure and the oppositional politics they inspire cannot exceed the limits of the modern state. In his engaging and compelling new book, In Search of the Black Fantastic, Richard Iton charts the social movements, intellectual discourses, cultural practices, and institutional forms that circumscribe (even as they acknowledge) black subjectivity in the post civil rights black Atlantic Diaspora.

For a blackness constructed and circumscribed within the horizon of formal politics and nation-states, the cultural fantasy (expressed in black popular culture) that imagines an alternative blackness is the other of the national formation and the excess of the citizenship. This black excess, that is not easily contained and is therefore marked or expelled, is Iton's focus and for him the source of the black radical possibilities. Iton's bet is that if we pay attention to the rich history and clues that popular culture provides to this fantastic imagination, we will learn to see, hear, and feel a distinct radical and political tradition through the register of culture. Showing how culture moves through the political (and vice versa) means too that new possibilities are within our horizon. Iton is also interested in those expressions of the black popular imaginary that helped to narrate and align black futures with those of the neo-liberal and nationalist state through appeals for recognition and inclusion.

Iton reworks concepts like Diaspora and uses it to see modern forms of power like coloniality, modernity, and nation-state anew. Iton eschews the widely accepted notion of Diaspora that emphasizes resettlement and roots, stressing instead multiple temporalities and local connections within and across the black Diaspora; in the process he shows how cultural narratives of the nation and the formal terms of the state together conceal and re-inscribe the unequal relations and access to freedom, citizenship and equality. With popular culture as his guide Iton rethinks geographical space (and scale) and the kind of black Atlantic histories, intertextual connections, and affective registers it is possible to experience outside of the discourse of the nation and the formal terms of the state.

His nuanced reading of history builds an argument about the radical promise of black Atlantic popular culture, beginning in the period just prior to the civil rights movement. Iton traces some of the earliest expressions of a black fantastic imagination to black engagement with the popular front politics of Paul Robeson, Harry Belafonte, Ossie Davis and later Lorraine Hansberry. For Iton popular culture's political importance lies in its role in creating a space—what he calls a black super public—for black radical imagination in the post civil rights period. He offers a useful account of how (technology of representation, the increasing salience of the image, unlimited access to the archive and the mobility of sound) and why (the subjection of black politics to the formal rules and aspirations of the nation-state) this register emerged as important for black Atlantic diasporic politics in the post civil rights period. The black fantastic constitutes this space and serves as a hedge against hegemonies of nation-time and nostalgia and articulates new forms of connection and alliance within and across black diasporic communities expressed in the work of Richard Pryor, Me'Shell NdegéOcello, Bob Marley and others.

Iton deploys theory, history, and details about a staggering range of cultural forms, practices and traditions brilliantly! His grasp of cultural movements, practices, artists and representations in black Atlantic popular culture is impressive, as is his strategic...