Contemporary African American Literature: The Living Canon

10. Post-Integration Blues: Black Geeks and Afro-Diasporic Humanism

ten post-integration bLues: bLaCk geeks and afro-diasporiC humanism Alex ander G. Weheliye 1 on the one hand, this essay grows out of a general interest in taking stock of some significant shifs in african american identity and cultural production subsequent to the civil rights Movement, and, on the other hand, it is a result of teaching a course about the recent history of the african american novel.1 When initially conceptualizing this course a few years ago, i felt it was necessary to provide a topical focus that moved beyond temporal or generic frameworks, and, as a result i named the course “post-integration Blues,” since all of the texts on the syllabus grappled with the consequences of integration, especially in educational settings. For my purposes, the phrase “post-integration blues” serves as an apt description of how integration has affected black subjects because it amplifies both the immense gains achieved by the civil rights Movement and the cultural, political, and psychological fallout from these benefits. in other words, “post-integration blues” insists on coarticulating the positive and negative dimensions of integration without resolving the tensions between them. The blues, as a structure of feeling rather than a particular musical genre, provides a pathway to understanding the central contradictions of the post-integration era. as albert Murray has argued: The blues as such are synonymous with low spirits. Blues music . . . with all its preoccupation with the most disturbing aspects of life, it is something contrived specifically to be performed as entertainment . . . its express purpose is to make people feel good . . . but in the process of doing so it is actually expected to generate a disposition that is both elegantly playful and heroic in its nonchalance. (Murray 45) 213 214 · A lex a nder W eheliye hence, the “post-integration blues” does not dwell solely on the losses precipitated by integration (loss of black cultural specificity, the continued existence of racism and white supremacy, etc.); instead it accentuates the manifold fissures that are integral elements of this particular culturo-historical formation. The figure of the black geek, as it has emerged in literature and popular culture, represents one of the principal embodiments of the “post-integration blues,” allowing black cultural practitioners to underscore how larger societal shifs impact specific black subjects and to create avenues for imagining blackness that refuse to be contained by the mutually exclusive poles of assimilation and separatism. huey riley, one of the main characters featured in aaron Mcgruder ’s popular daily comic strip, The Boondocks, declared in the spring of 2000 “i am the anti-cool!! i hereby declare myself . . . a nerd” (Mcgruder 40).2 spread across hundreds of daily newspapers in the united states, this statement seemed like a coming out of sorts, given that until recently black people have rarely been portrayed as geeks or nerds in literature and popular culture. What had been bubbling under the surface since the 1970s and gained some momentum during the two subsequent decades, was now part of the mainstream: the geek as a major category of black culture in the post-integration era (coates 2007; crew 2002; Ford 2007; hannaham 2002; peterson 2009; phi 2010, pressler 2007; rivero 2007, tocci 2007). Black subjects were rarely imagined as intelligent and/or articulate beyond the confines of afro-diasporic literatures, where their intellectual dexterity ofen led to tragedy. The prominence of steven urkel (portrayed by Jaleel White) on the long-running sitcom Family Matters (1989–98), who is by far the most well-known black geek in contemporary popular culture, suggests a significant shif in this development , since he was not doomed in the same way as his literary progenitors . still, his intelligence had to be masked and deflected by the character’s buffoonish, almost minstrel-like antics. another version of the black geek appears in contemporary black literature: besides huey from The Boondocks, black geeks can be found in paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle (gunnar kaufman), colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist (lila Mae Watson) and John Henry Days (J. sutter), trey ellis’s Platitudes (earle tyner), Zadie smith’s White Teeth (irie Jones), percival everett’s Erasure (Thelonious “Monk” ellison) and Fran ross’s Oreo (christine clark).3 What unites the characters is their circumvention of both the Post-Integr ation Blues · 215 pitfalls of the “urkel syndrome” and their lack of tragic pathos. Despite being confronted with serious difficulties, these black...