A Collective Appetite: Reception and the White Gaze from Shange to Sapphire

While the film Precious, the Hollywood adaptation of Sapphire's novel Push, has garnered awards and praise by the predominantly white mainstream press and award-granting organizations, it has also received much criticism for its treatment of black life, particularly its representation of black men. Much of this criticism seems to echo the reception of Ntozake Shange's choreopoem, for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf, which was produced as a successful Broadway play in 1975, drawing a predominantly white middle-class audience and a resounding critical backlash from black male critics. Examining the reception of these two works written by black women, works separated by over three decades, two seemingly opposing questions arise: Do these works demonstrate how cultural gatekeepers, including the media, embrace and manipulate certain representations of race, reinforcing stereotypes and working to alleviate contemporary white guilt through the act of laying blame elsewhere, specifically on black men? Or are the works vital expressions of black female experience, voicing the lives and concerns of black women and girls, voices that have been left out of both dominant white culture and African American culture?

A special 1979 issue of The Black Scholar focused on these polarized perspectives in response to the reception of Shange's work, and the largely gendered opposition found there seems to be at play once again in response to Precious. However, to examine the reception of these works solely in terms of issues of gender is shortsighted. Both Sapphire's novel and Shange's choreopoem were adapted and produced in venues through which they reached broader (read whiter) audiences. Their works are partly judged in the context of a lack of representation of writers of color. Thus, these texts-turned-performance are experienced as representative texts rather than single voices within a broad landscape of African American experience. Some of the tension in the reception of Shange's play on Broadway was that so few African American plays had found a place in front of a broader audience: Shange's work was only the second piece by an African American woman to be produced on Broadway. But in the case of Precious, Sapphire herself is quoted in the New York Times saying that in the era of the Obama White House, the climate in which the film version of Push is released, there are certainly other black role models: "With Michelle, Sasha, and Malia and Obama in the White House and in the post-'Cosby Show' era, people can't say these are the only images out there...Black people are able to say 'Precious' represents some of our children, but some of our children go to Yale."¹

Why, then, these familiar refrains in the reception of Sapphire's work? In both cases, roughly three decades apart, attention continues to be deflected from the creative works and the experience of black women and girls they depict and is turned over to the experience of white audiences along with the (white) media's representation of race. Robert Staples, in a controversial article in the aforementioned 1979 issue of The Black Scholar, responds to the work of Shange by commenting on the audience of the play: "Watching a performance [of for colored girls] one sees a collective appetite for black male blood."² Thirty-five years later, in 2009, Armond White, in the New York Press, criticizes "patronizing white audiences" of Precious who watch "for the sense of superiority—and relief—it allows them to feel."³ The predominant concern for both of these critics is not the individual works, but the reception itself; they critique the works' popularity with audiences and critics, popularity that they locate in stereotypes, particularly about black men. The negative critical receptions translate into a concern about white audiences, and, more broadly, white perceptions of African Americans, generally defined as black men. Ultimately, both for colored girls and Precious are being criticized not for what they do represent, or even what they don't represent, but for how popular culture as a whole does and doesn...