"Niggers Got a Right to be Dissatisfied": Postmodernism, Race, and Class in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

"Niggers Got a Right to be Dissatisfied": Postmodemism, Race, and Class in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom JOHN J. HANLON When August Wilson's play Ma Rainey's Black Bottom debuted in New York's Cort Theatre in the fall of 1984, it was received rather coolly by the critics, but quite wannly by its audiences. Early critical reception pigeonholed the work as an overdone piece on the problems of race in America. John Simon, the reviewer for New York magazine, wrote that what Wilson delivers in the work "is only intermittently drama, more often rousing monologues, and finally more melodramatically didactic than imaginatively satisfying." Simon concluded that, for all its strengths, the play "sorely misses the transfonnative spark" - he wished the playwright "[bletter luck next time" (148). Edwin Wilson, writing for The Wall Street Journal, observed that "There is an abundance of atmosphere and banter, and a strong racial statement, but not much of a play." After summarizing the plot, he proclaimed that "The theme of the play is racial injustice" and explained how that theme is executed; but he, like Simon, concluded that "polemics do not make a play" (26). In its 17 October issue, Variety magazine introduced Ma Rainey's Black Bottom as yet another "tragedy of racial bigotry," and suggested that "its technical clumsiness and downbeat story make it a difficult Broadway box office proposition " (Hummler 156). Such hasty dismissals of Wilson's first Broadway production proved to be shallow and obtuse, as word-of-mouth raves generated a high volume of ticket sales and turned Ma Rainey into "the first hit of the season.'" The critics took a second look at Wilson and "his powerful play," which according to The New York Times was "reawakening audiences to the wonder and dimensions of drama" (Mitgang 15). The production went on to be nominated for three Tony awards, including one for best play, and it won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play of the 1984-85 season. How do we account for this split between the critics' early perceptions of the work as a tired, fonnulaic piece of bombast and the powerful way in which it Modern Drama, 45: I (Spring 2002) JOHN J. HANLON seemed to register with audiences? I want to argue that while on the surface the play seems to be a simple statement about racial injustice in the American past, at the deep level of the political unconscious it is working with the problems of class conflict and tensions engendered by late capitalism that affect the lives of everyone in postmodern societies. This argument, at the intersection of economics, politics, sociology, and aesthetics, uses as a model the theoretical work of Fredric Jameson. In The Political Unconscious Jameson identifies three concentric frameworks in which to ground a text for a properly Marxian interpretation. Utilizing these frameworks involves widening the "social ground" of the text, first, to political history, then to society (with "a constitutive tension and struggle between social classes"), and finally, to history "conceived in its vastest sense of the sequence of modes of production" (75). From such perspectives, we can see the ways in which Wilson's play makes manifest various aspects of the contemporary political scene, the class struggle as it appears under late capitalism, and the entire capitalist mode of production. With these insights, one can more clearly discern both the means by which the play subverts or supports the societal status quo that Wilson seems to be writing against and the way in which audiences reacted to these stirrings in the political unconscious. At the first level of analysis, then, the level of political history, we are faced with the challenge of understanding how a play whose action takes place nearly sixty years prior to its first performance is relevant to the contemporary political situation. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom revolves around the lives of five blues musicians who assemble on a cold Chicago day to record a few songs for a studio owned and operated by two white men. The year is [927, but it seems to me that it might as well be 1977, as Wilson is working with the post - Civil...