Bodies, Revolutions, and Magic: Cultural Nationalism and Racial Fetishism

Bodies, Revolutions, and Magic: Cultural Nationalism and Racial Fetishism JOSEPHINE LEE Now, being in the movement was about change Changing the injustices in our society Changing the system that ignored OUf history in this country But the movement changed something else ... my wardrobe.... CHANGE ... TALK ABOUT CHANGE L ...] first you had an army jacket with lots of buttons on it then to complete the I ~k ... a beret now blacks had black berets, Latino - brown berels maToon was our color ... better with our complexion [...] we were remaking ourselves creating our own images and expressions - Nobuko Miyamoto,A Grain of Sandi We might consider race in accordance with Judith Butler's useful conception of gender as constructed in terms of a corporeal style; in this sense the racialized body is also made meaningful through "the legacy of sedimented acts rather than a predetermined or foreclosed structure, essence or fact, whether natural, cultural, or linguistic" (Butler 274). The particular ways in which we perceive, interpret, and value racial difference in the United States today can be understood as a kind of 'performance' that takes its significance from not one but, in fact, many layers of social meaning that history has deposited on bodies. Some of these meanings are determined by racist ideologies disguised as "natural" or "biological" hierarchies of difference, "punitively regulated cultural fictions that are alternately embodied and disguised under duress" (273); others present somewhat more optimistic possibilities for racial performance . Such a conception of racial performance is consistent with Michael Omi Modern Drama, 44:1 (Spring 2001) 72' Cultural Nationalism and Racial Fetishism 73 and Howard Winant's figuring of race as "an unstable and 'decentered' complex of social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle" (55). Within Omi and Winant's terms of "racial formation," the civil rights period of the t950Sand 1960s figures prominently as the period of "the great transfonnation,"2 where new social movements would "expand the concerns of politics to the social, to the terrain of everyday life" (96). The excerpt that opens this essay, from Nobuko Miyamoto's A Grain ofSand, a theatrical recollection of Miyamoto's experiences in the civil rights movements, recalls the quest for a 'new look' to accompany a nascent Asian American movement's pan-ethnic, diasporic, and collective politics. Miyamoto's playful reminiscence marks but one of the many new kinds of racial performance that emerged from this period. For her and others, such 'looks' went hand in hand with distinctive modes of thought and action; bodily style was inextricably linked to activism and revolutionary sensibility_ For instance, Kobena Mercer notes that the wearing of Afros, the urban guerilla look of the Black Panthers, and elements of 'traditional' African dress such as the dashiki or the headwrap did indeed delineate "massive shifts in popular aspirations among black people," thus furthering "a populist logic of rupture" ([07). . These bodily performances have clearly left their mark on how race is understood today. However, the particular cultural legacy of this period, like its political legacy, is still uncertain. Celebration of uniquely "black" or "Chicano " or "Asian American" modes of cultural expression has given way to a questioning of these often overburdened identity categories. In a recent essay on Asian American theatre, Karen Shimakawa describes her students' less than enthusiastic responses to a revival of Frank Chin's The Chickencoop Chinaman (originally produced in [972): For while, in keeping with the "retro" style currently popular, many of these young people affected the idioms (clothes and musical tastes) of the 19705, they were utterly baffled by this artifact of the era; and post-play discussions revealed that, to their eyes. this play had very little to do with"Asian American identity" as they understood that concept (or even a hetero-masculinist version of it). Cenainly, protagonist Tam Lum's jazzy, beat-poetic/strcam-of-consciousness style of oration was pan of their difficulty ("why can't he just talk like regular people?!" one student asked in exasperation) but their discomfort and bewilderment went far beyond their unfamiliarity with aparticular aesthetic: the critique centered primarily on the appropriation of (stereotypes of) African American culture and discourse (Tam's childhood friend goes by "Blackjap Kenji," for...