Scripting the Black Masculine Body: Identity, Discourse, and Racial Politics in Popular Media

INTRODUCTION: Race and Corporeal Politics

Ideology is a representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence. —Althusser, 1994 No one would deny that race, as a cultural and social phenomenon, continues to retain its vitality and centrality in American life. Race clearly matters. —Miller, 1993 Opening a magazine or book, turning on the television set, watching a film, or looking at photographs in public spaces, we are most likely to see images of Black people that reinforce and reinscribe White supremacy. Clearly, those of us committed to Black liberation struggle, to the freedom and determination of all Black people, must face daily the tragic reality that we have collectively made few, if any, revolutionary interventions in the area of race and representations. —hooks, 1992 Much of the literature on the social construction of race, including the works excerpted above, has convincingly argued that the body is the primary site and surface of race and representation (Baker-Fletcher, 1996; Bordo, 1994; Dyson, 1994; Hall, 1997; hooks, 1995b). Certainly, the interpretations of mass-mediated inscriptions1 of the body reveal the hidden contours of psychic and institutional investitures that drive, indeed motivate, the producers of the inscriptions. Socially, the body facilitates the perpetuation of ascriptive devices used to assign meanings to ingroups and outgroups; it also serves to jog the personal memories of cultural interactants, to remind them visually of the constitutive discourses that provide form and structure to their social cognitions about racialized bodies. 1 INTRODUCTION Race and Corporeal Politics The terms inscription, scripting, scripts, inscriptive, and inscribing are used interchangeably throughout to mean figuratively that the body is socially understood and treated as a discursive text that is read by interactants. There are various racial meanings attached to bodily texts that can inspire individuals to behave differently toward foreign or unfamiliar bodies when encountering them in public and private spaces. In this book, I argue that mass-mediated depictions of culturally and racially different human beings encourage people to respond to the differences rather than the similarities. There is a hyperawareness, for example, of the negative inscriptions associated with the Black masculine body as criminal, angry, and incapacitated (Belton, 1996; Jackson, 1997; McCall, 1995; Orbe, 1998; Orbe & Hopson, 2002). These scripts are exacerbated by popular cultural portrayals of Black males, which make it almost impossible to retrieve custody of the meanings associated with blackness and Black males. Because mass media and popular culture are predominantly littered with these negative images, it appears they are unwilling to see Black bodies positively, and this affects everyday looking relations (Dent, 1992). Essentially, as human beings we are all involuted in a sort of Foucauldian “panopticism,” in which, as Evans (1999) puts it, “The visual [becomes] construed as an object for power/knowledge” (p. 15), which makes the body political—hence the term “body politics.” The construction of the Black body2 as a public and popularly mediated spectacle is evident in everyday televisual and cinematic images, as well as in routine interpersonal encounters between Blacks and non-Blacks (Bogle, 2001; Dixon & Linz, 2000; Ellis, 1982; Entman & Rojecki, 2000; Gandy, 1999; Watts & Orbe, 2002). Perhaps what is not so clear is how the Black body is discursively bound to an ideological matrix propagated by a socially preponderate whiteness. Although assigning the Black body in a “discursively bound” juxtaposition to whiteness ideology seems to place unimaginatively whiteness in sinister opposition to blackness, and blackness in inescapable subordination to whiteness, it is critical to note that the I–Other racial dialectic is pervasive and instructive in our present-day postmodern context. It is also extremely relevant to how we may come to understand multiple and sometimes devastating inscriptions of the Black body. Within the field of communication, systematic analyses of the body (and its politics) have been most often situated in performance and media studies, as well as in critical-theoretic work accomplished primarily by feminists and researchers of whiteness with scant attention paid to the total confluence of race, gender, discourse, identity, ideology, and corporeal politics. The infrequent analysis of this full convergence leaves a conspicuous void in interdisciplinary studies in general, and in the field of communication in particular. As the title conveys (Scripting the Black Masculine Body: Identity, Discourse and Racial Politics in Popular Media), this book seeks to fill that void partially and it does so without localizing the exploration to communication studSCRIPTING THE BLACK MASCULINE BODY 2 ies; hence it is admittedly and...