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59 Early on in her prickly, brilliant film Without You I’m Nothing (1990), the comedienne Sandra Bernhard adopts the persona of a black wouldbe diva thoroughly at home with the players and other ubiquitous habitu és of inexpensive cocktail lounges and party clubs. Although there are African American venues that are high-falutin’ and expensively appointed, Bernhard’s imaginary venue is not one of them. We might think of the fictional audience for Bernhard’s fictional performer as consisting of Barry White’s lower-class cousins, lazily applauding Bernhard’s smalltime song-stylist in the small hours of the evening. Lots of the typical markers of that social world are in evidence in Bernhard’s monologue: mentions of cognac (Rémy Martin), astrology, and smooth jazz, swept up by an overriding desire to “mellow out” in an incoherent frappé of luxury.1 The humor of Bernhard’s character is difficult to read because her deliberately rebarbative vocal blackface (call it blackvoice?) puts the audience in an uncertain position. Are we supposed to be laughing at the tastelessness and lack of skill of the character? At our own judgments about her? At Bernhard’s vertiginous play, with the difficulty of distinguishing between the performer playing a second-order character and the performer Sandra Bernhard who is always already a fiction? How far does this regression of images go, and where and how are we supposed to direct our laughter? These carefully troubling awkwardnesses set the stage for the song Bernhard’s lounge singer is aiming toward—a cover of the 1972 hit “Me chapter 3 Transport and Interiority in Soft Soul 60 | Chapter 3 and Mrs. Jones,” first recorded by the Philadelphia-based jazz and soul singer Billy Paul.2 This song is a typically canny choice for Bernhard, who in most of her performances has liked to push questions of representation (like the ones I have asked in the previous paragraph) into politically and culturally fraught terrain by invoking early 1970s moments . Bernhard is not white in the mass media’s archetypal Protestantblondes -of-the-suburbs manner. The lips and hair that usually read “Jewish ” according to ethnic stereotypes suddenly acquire an Africanesque quality in this scene of Without You I’m Nothing, recalling that only in the recent historical past did Jews (not to mention the Irish or the Italians ) begin to count as “white” in America’s racial system.3 We might also recall the complex historical relationship within popular music between black folks and Jewish folks—coon songs and blackface merging into vaudeville and the Yiddish theater, the symbiosis of Tin Pan Alley and jazz, the vagaries of Jews and blacks in the record business as a business.4 Bernhard sings a song that, if identifiably “black” to listeners who know the style, is nevertheless vulnerable to the charge of being so heavily produced and ornamented, so audibly oriented toward the success of mass commerce (that is, so Brill Building), that it seems“white”aspiring . But the whiteness that it fixes upon can also seem disreputably lumpen proletarian. It is easy enough, in our high-minded moments, to sneer at entertainment that flaunts its commercial designs ostentatiously; but our lips may often curl in contempt even more quickly when we turn our attentions to the people who appreciate this kind of entertainment. This whiteness is vulgar. Its Vegas-like, frugal yet hedonistic materialism calls into question all terms of racial and ethnic rapprochement. In the spectacle of a blackness that seems so close to lower-class whiteness, there are troubling questions of “ownership” and the right to control representation; they cannot be answered, however, without first considering the roles of performer and audience. If we are white, and maybe middle class, how do we relate to the ambivalences of the black people within the frame of the film? To what extent are attitudes about black and white (and Jewish) the point of the spectacle, and to what extent do these questions mask less racially specific troubles about class status and economics? Given the troubling problems of race, ethnicity, and class as they have appeared in American showbiz, are we supposed to laugh at “Sandra Bernhard” or her character at all? Even if we are, should we be doing so? The history of the representations of black sexual desire in America shows that the authority these images can claim is frequently impossible Transport and Interiority in Soft Soul | 61 to disentangle from their availability to sentimental or...

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