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The Empty Space of African American Sorority Representation 417 417 15 The Empty Space of African American Sorority Representation Spike Lee’s School Daze Deborah Elizabeth Whaley Director Spike Lee established himself as a popular auteur and cultural icon in 1986 with the release of his film She’s Gotta Have It. Lee thus has a great deal of cinematic credibility in the imaging of African American life. His 1988 film School Daze is the only major motion picture in which black Greek-letter organizations (BGLOs) are the central subject. The film thus operates almost entirely alone in representing African American college students and their Greek-letter organizations.1 The film is also the subject of a book by Lee and Village Voice writer Lisa Jones, titled Uplift the Race: The Construction of School Daze.2 The book provides a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the film; problems that arose in bringing it to theaters;production notes;anecdotal commentary by actors,crewmembers,and motion picture executives;and the original script. Taken together, the film and the book provide ample material to discuss from varying viewpoints a popular cultural product that has shaped the perception of BGLOs. Lee presents two diametrically opposed views on culture and perceptions of self in School Daze: the haves and the have-nots. The haves are the Wannabee characters, beige- to light-brown-hued men and women who are members of two fictional organizations: the Gammites (fraternity) and the Gamma Rays (little sister sorority). The Gammites and Gamma Rays flaunt crass materialism , are politically (a)pathetic, are presented as a mimicry of white fraternal members, and spend the majority of their time engaging in unproductive hazing and pledging rituals.Lee calls the have-nots the Jigaboos.These dark-brownhued college students are Afrocentric and politically focused; they commit their energy and activities to demanding that their college, the fictitious and historically black Mission College, financially divest from South Africa. School brownchap15.pmd 1/11/2005, 4:04 PM 417 418 Deborah Elizabeth Whaley Daze explores the following question: In what ways do BGLOs, which claim to uplift their communities, find themselves trapped within their own color biases and class elitism, where the masses of African Americans suffer as a result?3 I propose that School Daze is a textual representation of African American sororities that begs for analysis. Lee does not disclose that his Wannabee characters , the women’s sororal group the Gamma Rays, depict an actual African American sorority. Yet in his production notes, commentary suggests that the film’s characters parallel two existing sororities: Alpha Kappa Alpha (AKA) and Delta Sigma Theta (DST). For example, Tisha Campbell, one of the actresses in School Daze, relates in Uplift the Race that she asked a member of DST about colorism in African American sororities and was told that “AKAs are Wannabees, that they always dressed [well] and they go around thinking they’re better than other people.”Campbell summarized the DST interview in the following way: The bond between [DST] seemed similar to the one the Jigaboos had. I asked them about Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Incorporated and how I could meet one. . . . The Deltas said AKAs will dick each other around [and that] . . . there’s always jealously between them. I never got to talk to any of the AKAs. I did ask the Deltas, “Are all of you dark skinned?” And they said no. And I said,“Are all the AKAs light skinned?” They said yes. I guess we are divided that way.4 It is not too much of an interpretive leap to say that the text is suggestive of the perceived aesthetics of AKA and DST. School Daze, therefore, creates a cinematic lens to view these two organizations in terms of popular representation . For my analysis, I am interested mostly in the cultural work that School Daze performs and has the potential to perform. In other words, I consider what the representations in the film do and have the capability of doing in terms of dispersing the cultural and political ideologies of African American sororities. I analyze School Daze within the debates of popular culture while assessing the film’s potential and its reception. I therefore work from the idea that consumers of popular culture encode and decode meanings differently and subjectively. As cultural critic Stuart Hall writes, consumers of popular culture generally approach such cultural products through a dominant, negotiated , or oppositional reading.5 That is, a given spectator...

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