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5. Race Rebels: Whiteness and the New Masculine Desire
- University of Illinois Press
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5. race rebels Whiteness and the New Masculine Desire In “The Problem with White Hipness,” Ingrid Monson has suggested how certain affectations that signified and indexed the cool and the hip became associated with black avant-garde jazz musicians from late 1940s bebop culture , and which appeared to reject white mainstream conformity through a music and lifestyle viewed as socially deviant and therefore liberatory. The jazz culture of bebop would inspire the bohemianism of the white hipster and the beat poets and writers of the 1950s that included Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and other socially alienated white intellectuals. Through the adoption of modes of black male expressive behavior—slangladen speech, rhythmic black music, flamboyant dress, a new vocabulary of body gestures, and an attitude of aloofness that rejected the conformity of the “square” world—the white hipster reproduced the affecting black presence through manner and style as racialized performance in which “the attitude of the bebop musician as anti-assimilationist social critic became embodied in and visualized through various sonic, visual, linguistic, and ideological markers.”1 These markers became affective qualities associated with the black body in performance and were eventually appropriated and (re)presented in formulations of social identity and expressions of powerful masculinity for white males in popular culture not only in music but in other mediums, particularly film. Monson argues that through such superficial engagements “the idea of hipness and African American music as cultural critique” has become detached from the “socially conscious attitude that hipness has been presumed to signify .”2 Liberal white hipsters fall into a trap, she suggests, by viewing blackness as a kind of absence, for instance, of a morality that African Americans are presumed to lack and that defines them as perpetual social outsiders, and which “paradoxically, buys into the historical legacy of primitivism and its concomitant exoticism of the ‘Other.’”3 Monson apparently believes that white assumptions about black primitivism, deviance, and morality are somehow coincidental, which would overlook the fact that the racial imaginings of whites have always drawn upon tropes of primitivism and exoticism of the black Other. Perhaps what she means to suggest is that it is rather paradoxical that these cool, urbane, and sophisticated black actors whose sense of how enlightened human beings ought to interact with each other should somehow be read as primitive because the music they performed was as visceral as it was intellectual. In any case, Monson does not fully take into account the very real allure of notions of deviance and primitivism in the formation of white adolescent male identity, a matter certainly not lost on Norman Mailer in his construction of the white hipster. The socially conscious attitude that Monson suggests black hipness presumes to signify has arguably been less a critical factor in the adoption of aesthetic markers of black style by middle-class white youth than has been the association of such gestures with quaint notions of class revolt, the liberation from pseudo-Victorian mores, and the fetishization of the black Other as a radical social actor. In the same way that minstrel performance created liberatory spaces in which white actors could critically engage their apprehension and fears surrounding the complexities and contingencies of pre-industrialization and a rapidly shifting social order, subsequent appropriations of black subjectivity have served much the same role. When Monson eventually engages the ways in which stereotypes of blackness have historically been associated with madness, pathological sexuality, and deviance , she appears to suggest understanding all along, particularly when she acknowledges that white hipsterism and the performance of black masculinity have everything to do with the “bald equation of the primitive with sex, and sex with the music and body of the black male jazz musician.”4 Dizzy Gillespie’s cool style and mannerisms—his horn-rimmed glasses, goatee, and French beret—were widely imitated by white hipsters because they were read as subversive.5 Monson also acknowledges that “the ‘subcultural’ image of bebop was nourished by a conflation of the music with a style of black masculinity that held, and continues to hold, great appeal for white audiences and musicians.”6 However, it is not simply the case that black bebop musicians found themselves subjected to appropriation by primitivist racial ideologies, but that the black body itself has been prone to such cultural appropriations ever since T. D. Rice jumped Jim Crow. In the end, Monson concludes that 90 chapter 5 [18.234.202.202] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 12:45...