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  • The Changing SameThe Evolution of Racial Self-Definition and Commercialization
  • Brian Yost (bio)

In 1903’s The Souls of Black Folk W. E. B. Du Bois made the prophetic announcement that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line” (3).1 True to this proclamation, a number of reform programs attempted to resolve the issue of creating a humane and equal space for African-American culture within a larger American cultural consciousness during the years that followed. Notable among these efforts were those of Du Bois and others associated with the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 30s who devoted much of their energies to proving to the white American elite their ability to produce works aesthetically on par with the Western canon. While the Harlem Renaissance undoubtedly made significant contributions to the development of an African-American art, Amiri Baraka and other leaders of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s criticized these efforts for what they perceived as a failure to improve the everyday social and economic conditions of black America. Nathan Huggins and David Levering Lewis give similar assessments in their seminal historic studies of the period, Harlem Renaissance and When Harlem Was in Vogue. Huggins argues that the political agenda driving the Renaissance’s aesthetic advances largely failed to materialize as sweeping social reform because “Harlem intellectuals saw political issues and reform in moral terms and assumed a high moral tone. Racial problems were social aberrations due to moral corruption, fear, or ignorance. They offered no radical solutions therefore; the system was basically sound” (27). Likewise, Lewis comments that “those who knew of the existence of cultured Afro- Americans, reacted to the Harlem Renaissance as no more than the latest creative bubble in the American melting pot” (120). Baraka and his peers organized in reaction to this and focused instead on defining a concretely independent black identity, autonomous from surrounding white culture.

While the intent of the Black Arts Movement was to form a strong and independent community, the image which the Movement left in the American popular imagination allowed neither the African-American individual nor a broader black community access to greater socio-economic or representational power. Instead, Baraka’s radical black imagery became the victim of commercial appropriation, the consequences of which Percival Everett illustrates in his novel, Erasure. As Everett portrays it, the violent reaction of the Black Arts Movement became the de-politicized surface for the mainstream media’s ghetto, a further and more insidious social constraint against African-Americans who wish to express complex non-traditional identities. This article will begin with a brief discussion of theorizations of whiteness in order to locate similarities between strategies historically used to define white society and those Black Arts Movement artists employed to differentiate [End Page 1314] themselves. Consistent throughout the manifestos of the Black Arts Movement was the insistence that works of art that speak to working-class and urban African-Americans were the vehicle necessary to stir the community to political action. A close examination of Baraka’s famous play Dutchman reveals both this effort to cultivate in viewers an awareness of themselves as a community as well as the playwright’s ironic use of the very strategies previously used to establish white superiority through denigration of African-Americans. Finally, Everett’s depiction of the contemporary condition of an African-American artist shows his critique of previous efforts to unify the population under essentialist and biological definitions of group identity. Moreover, Everett vividly illustrates the disastrous consequences commercial interpretations of such aesthetics have had on the individual artist and on the internal production of identity for the commercially represented community. Through examining a genealogy of black identity’s representation beginning in Du Bois’s early theorizations, moving to Baraka’s writing, and finally to Everett’s satire of this type of strategic representation, it is possible to observe the evolution of an oppressed people-group’s strategies of resistance to exploitation as commercial object alongside the commercial reappropriation of these images.

Extreme Blackness

The debate surrounding racial identity and definition includes as its stake not simply the definition of blackness or whiteness. Central to these discussions...

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