Page 116 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

110 CULTURAL STUDIES

10 For instance, in a scathing commentary on violence and sexism of rap group 2 Live
Crew (who met critics by claiming they were representing black culture), Abiola
Sinclair, veteran journalist for the New York black weekly The Amsterdam News,
wrote: The fact that the persons who created it are Black does not necessarily make
it representational of Black culture. Suddenly, but not really so suddenly this filth gets
wrapped up in Blackness’ (Sinclair, 1990:30–6).
11 See William Julius Wilson, with attention to the Appendix, ‘Urban poverty: a state
of the art review of the literature’ (1987:165–87), and, in particular, Thomas
Sowell, 1981. For an earlier essay which, indirectly but significantly, addresses
these issues, see Huggins, 1971:5–19.
12 One of the few exceptions to this dichotomous line of research is to be found in
Davis and Gardner, 1965.
13 Herskovits defined acculturation as ‘those phenomena which result when groups of
individuals having different cultures come into continuous first-hand contact with
subsequent changes in the original cultural patterns of either or both groups’
(Herskovits, 1937:259). An excellent illustration of the suppression of research
projects during this period is instanced in Guy Johnson’s discussion of Negro
spirituals and white revival camps where the data are clearly pregnant with
questions on inter-racial relations, interactions and exchange. Johnson’s discussion
however aborts this direction—despite the recognition of similarities between black
music and white folk music, Johnson’s position is to see these dynamics in
contrasting terms rather than as a dialectic: ‘It would be strange indeed if there had
not survived at least a few tunes from Africa and it is certain that a few white songs
have grown out of negro songs.’ Having made this observation, he retreats and
states: ‘on the whole it appears…borrowed from white music’ (Johnson, 1931:
170).
14 Nathan Huggins points out that ‘black-white dualism has always been manifest in
American life’ and therefore black ‘cultural boundaries are very loose and must be
seen in the broader context of American history’ (Huggins, 1971:16f.).
15 The rnethodological and conceptual disconnection between race and culture led to
‘a logical dead-end. Having debunked the racist concept that blacks were
biologically inferior, Boasian anthropologists assumed that there was not much else
of interest to the anthropologist in the study of African-American culture. Taken a
bit further, there was also the inference that to acknowledge cultural differences
between whites and blacks was to invoke race/biology as a factor in the
development of culture’ (Fraser, 1991:407).
16 During the slave period the binary racial opposition was persistently destabilized by
the presence of ‘mulattoes’ ranging in skin colour from brown to white who ‘were
a sore upon the social sight of white Southerners; each was a living indictment of
the failure of the strictly biracial society envisioned by the white Southern ideal, a
walking, talking, and mocking symbol of a white man’s lapse in morality’
(Williamson, 1971:216). The tenacity of white American dis-ease over racial
classifications which challenge whiteness is reflected in the film production of Alex
Hailey’s Queen. Consider the fact that although the text of the film specifically
refers to his grandmother as phenotypically white, the televised mini-series cast
brown-skinned Halle Berry who did not challenge American representations of
blackness and whiteness. One might compare this to the calculated treatment of
gender in the American/Irish film, The Crying Game, where audiences were