The Funky and the Vanilla

Page 5 May–June 2008 The Funky and the Vanilla Alisha Gaines The first draft of this review began boldly enough: “There are very few writers I would call genuine ‘cultural critics’…and then there’s Ernest Hardy.” Satisfied, I kept the line until chancing upon an interview conducted by Steven Fullwood entitled “Writing in Ernest” (2006) in which Hardy emphatically denounces my attempt at flattery: “I hate the term cultural critic.” And while this review is not shaped to meet Hardy’s taste, his refusal to embrace a term often used to describe him challenges the work and role of the cultural critic, but also, more importantly, how the seeming exceptionality of that relation to cultural production has been grossly fetishized . Hardy then goes on to describe himself as simply a “film and music critic,” a description that falls way too short of fully summarizing the breadth and freshness of his work as seen in publications as diverse as Vibe, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, and most notably and regularly, LA Weekly. Then it hit me. Ernest Hardy is a black critic. Let me explain. Hardy operates from a modality of blackness where blackness is, by its very ontology, a trenchant critical stance. “I work from the position that blackness is the most expansive, dynamic and universal filter through which to gauge and interpret the world,” he says later in the same interview. “It just is. It’s certainly been the most vital and important cultural well in this country, the source of its heart and soul.” It is this very heart and soul that pulses throughout Blood Beats: Vol. 2 / The Bootleg Joints, the follow-up to the 2007 PEN/ Beyond Margins Award winner, Blood Beats: Vol. 1 / Demos, Remixes & Extended Versions. As Hardy’s epigraph to Vol. 1 cites James Baldwin’s hand-medown advice to “go the way your blood beats,” the quickening in his veins moves him both through and beyond LosAngeles as he turns a critical and adoring eye on communities working, living, and creating , most often in spite of, and in the cracks left by, the seeming hegemony of mass modes of cultural production. Reminding those “struggling creative folk, that you don’t have to wait for the machine to validate you, that you can do it for yourself,” Hardy’s collection of essays, reviews, and interviews unabashedly considers everything from the “real hip hop” of Kim Hill, the recently unappreciated stylings of Dolly Parton , and Agnès Varda’s remarkable documentary The Gleaners and I (2000) to the commercial blandness of actor Freddie Prinze Jr. and America’s favorite wigger, Eminem. Practicing a feminist politics when most are content to only pretend to do so, Hardy opens Vol. 2 with a choir of women’s voices, or a “SampledelicaFemmeatopia ” as he titles it. Citing Toni Morrison speaking to the Parisian press, “We [African Gumbs continued from previous page Press. Ebony Noelle Golden, womanist performance artist and scholar, is a student of bandele’s work and contextualizes it within the wider frame of black women’s healing and performance in the African Diaspora. INCITE! INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence is a feminist organization led by women of color. INCITE!’s “anthology project” is a process through which INCITE! edits and publishes a series of anthologies through South End Press, a collectively run, leftist publishing house in Boston, Massachusetts. Although INCITE! is not a press, it published two award-winning anthologies in 2007 alone, named after its groundbreaking conferences. I include the work of INCITE! here because its anthology project is directly linked to the methodology through which Kitchen Table Press documented and sustained a movement among women of color feminists in the 1980s and because the collective combines intellectual innovation, movement documentation, and movement building in their anthologies, asking for participation from invested readers and institutions . Paulina Hernández, co-director of Southerners on New Ground and board member of the Third Wave Foundation, is an active Chicana feminist who has been involved in progressive organizing centering on the lives of LGBTQ people, women, youth, immigrants, and people of color in the US for a decade. In her review, Hernández...