Global bodies/postnationalities: Charles Johnson's consumer culture

Representations

Volumn 58, Issue , 1998, Pages 24-48

  Brown, Bill ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34247407354     PISSN: 07346018     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/rep.1997.58.1.99p0004c     Document Type: Review

References (123)

1. Charles Johnson, "China" (1983), in The Sorcerer's Apprentice: Tales and Conjuration (New York, 1987), 90-91. Subsequent references to Sorcerer's Apprentice are cited parenthetically in the text with the abbreviation SA followed by the page number
2. Facing a disastrous recruitment record for the previous decade, the army instituted its stunningly successful new advertising campaign, accompanied by $15,000 college fellowships for two years of service, in 1980. See Janet Meyers, "Learning to Deploy a Strategic Weapon," Advertising Age, 9 Nov. 1988, 94-96, 148
3. Ien Ang, "Culture and Communication: Towards an Ethnographic Critique of Media Consumption in the Transnational Media System," European Journal of Communications 5 (1990): 253
4. Eldridge Cleaver, "The Primeval Mitosis" (1968), quoted and discussed by Charles Johnson in Being and Race (Bloomington, Ind., 1990), 26-29
5. To appreciate Johnson's own long-standing interest in Eastern thought and the martial arts, see his analogy between "the severe discipline of the Asian martial arts" and writing; Johnson, Being and Race, 47-48
6. Susan Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Bloomington, Ind., 1989)
7. For the continuation of the story she tells, see Susan Jeffords, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (New Brunswick, N.J., 1994)
8. See also John Hellman, American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam (New York, 1986)
9. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York, 1978), 476-77
10. Subsequent references to the Manifesto of the Communist Party are cited parenthetically in the text with the abbreviation CM followed by the page number
11. See, for instance, Susan Buck-Morss, "Envisioning Capital: Politial Economy on Display," Critical Inquiry 21 (Winter 1995): 434-67
12. Charles Bright and Michael Geyer, "For a Unified History of the World in the Twentieth Century," Radical History Review 39 (Sept. 1987): 69-91
13. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C., 1991), 54
14. Arjun Appadurai, "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy," Public Culture 2 (Spring 1990): 1-24
15. Modikwe Dikobe, Marabi Dance (Portsmouth, N.H., 1973)
16. Abdelrahman Munif, Cities of Salt (1984), trans. Peter Theroux (New York, 1989)
17. Charles Johnson, Oxherding Tale (New York, 1982), 85
18. "Exchange Value" (SA, 25-40), Johnson's chilling account of psycho-economic blockage and paralysis, records how the utterly disenfranchised, even when finding themselves in sudden possession of riches, cannot transform those riches into objects of desire and thus cannot transform themselves. But for the middle-class characters in "China," the culture of the commodity is at once the site of stasis and metamorphosis
19. Richard Wright, Native Son (1940; reprint, New York, 1993), 13, 36
20. Toni Morrison, "Afterword," The Bluest Eye (1970; reprint, New York, 1993), 210
21. In other terms, Susan Willis addresses this crisis in "I Want the Black One: Is There a Place for Afro-American Culture in Commodity Culture?" in A Primer for Daily Life (New York, 1991), 108-32
22. For an incisive account of how black women's writing becomes the work "that promises resistance and integrity, the utopian supplement to Willis's own 'deconstruction of commodities,'" see Elizabeth Abel, "Black Writing, White Reading: Race and the Politics of Feminist Interpretation," Critical Inquiry 19 (Spring 1993): 488-95
23. Kobena Mercer, "Black Hair/Style Politics," in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. Russell Ferguson et al. (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 260
24. On the gendering of mass culture, see, for instance, Andreas Huyssen, "Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism's Other," in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, and Postmodernism (Bloomington, Ind., 1986)
25. Tania Modleski, "Femininity as Mas(s)querade: A Feminist Approach to Mass Culture," in Colin MacCabe, ed., High Theory - Low Culture: Analysing Popular Television and Film (New York, 1986), 37-52
26. and Patrice Petro, "Mass Culture and the Feminine: The 'Place' of Television in Film Studies," Cinema Journal 25 (Spring 1986): 5-21
27. On the productivity of consumption, see Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, 1984), 31
28. Consumption is defined as a "means of thinking" by Garcia Canclini (unpublished manuscript), quoted by George Yúdice, "Civil Society, Consumption, and Governmentality in an Age of Global Restructuring," Social Text 45 (Winter 1995): 18
29. The gender asymmetry that structures Johnson's story, however specified by the mediation of commodity culture, accords with the structure described by Joyce Hope Scott in "From Foreground to Margin: Female Configuration and Masculine Self-Representation in Black Nationalist Fiction," in Nationalism and Sexualities, ed. Andrew Parker et al. (New York, 1992), 296-312
30. As Andrew Wernick has shown in "[Re]imaging Gender: The Case of Men," chap. 3 of Promotional Culture: Advertising, Ideology and Symbolic Expression (London, 1991), the success of the post-World War II American male consumer thrives on a critique of classical consumer culture
31. The consuming male subject compensates for the ongoing feminization of consumption by consuming products as the source of gender - from male soap and male makeup to the latest magazine for men. This is how consumer culture perpetuates the masculinity that Nancy Hartsock, in Money, Sex, and Power: Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism (Boston, 1983), 241, defines as an "abstract ideal" attained only by opposing "the concrete world of daily life," most manifest in "the female world of the household." The history of this ideal, however, is inseparable from a history of its supplementation, where externalized figures of ethnicity, race, and class return to underwrite mainstream masculinity
32. From the Native Americans in the Leatherstocking tales to the blackface minstrels of the nineteenth-century stage, to Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and to the cigarette-smoking construction worker - ethnicity, race, and class all fund American masculinity precisely because they offer a particularity and materiality that masculinity, abstract as such, precludes. See, for instance, Michael Rogin, "Making America Home: Racial Masquerade and Ethnic Assimilation in the Transition to Talking Pictures," Journal of American History 79, no. 3 (1992): 1050-77
33. Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (New York, 1986), chap. 2
34. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York, 1993)
35. Simon During, "The Global Popular," Critical Inquiry (forthcoming)
36. Theories of national subjectivity (see note 23) have shown how the generic, noncorporeal "citizen" is an ideal no less abstract than masculinity, and how gendered embodiment thus becomes the condition of shame, experienced as a humiliating surplus. But the history of corporealizing supplements suggests how the abstraction of the national or masculine subject seems to entail, moreover, the humiliation of the disappearing body. In today's global cultural economy, when American blackness circulates elsewhere, it serves a familiar function. Japanese youth have gone beyond the display of ethnic signifiers (such as dreads) to the fad for disco dancing in blackface; Nina Cornyetz, "Fetishized Blackness: Hip Hop and Racial Desire in Contemporary Japan," Social Text 41 (Winter 1994): 113-40
37. A fantasy of subcultural defiance, the fad clarifies how the ethnic body itself becomes a prophylactic body with which to achieve difference within the claustrophobic psychodrama of the everyday, and to endure the homogenizing effects of late capitalism. This is why, as Michelle Wallace has warned, "multiculturalism" may do little more than occupy "the same place as 'primitivism' in relationship to Postmodernism," as dominant culture's reinvigorating (if ultimately destabilizing) supplement; "Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Problem of the Visual in Afro-American Culture," in Ferguson et al., Out There, 47
38. Rosemary Pringle and Sophie Watson, "'Women's Interests' and the Post-Structuralist State," Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates, ed. Michèle Barrett and Anne Phillips (Stanford, 1992), 64
39. See, for instance, Barbara Babcock, "Bearers of Value, Vessels of Desire: The Reproduction of the Reproduction of Pueblo," Museum Anthropology 17 (Oct. 1993): 43-57
40. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York, 1993), 176-92
41. See, for instance, Abraham Cahan's Yekl (1896), in Yekl and The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of the New York Ghetto (New York, 1970), 1-92
42. On the stasis of the feminine as the measure of the male achievement of modernity, see Jean Franco, "Beyond Ethnocentrism: Gender, Power, and the Third-World Intelligentsia," in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana, Ill., 1988)
43. Partha Chaterjee, "The Nationalist Resolution of the Women's Question," in Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, ed. Kum Kum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (New Delhi, 1989), 233-53
44. Olakunle George, "Postcoloniality and the Africanist Agon" (unpublished manuscript)
45. Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere (1972), trans. Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksilloff (Minneapolis, 1993). In a postnormative response to Jürgen Habermas and the Enlightenment tradition, Negt and Kluge take pains to point out that they "only understand the public sphere as an aggregate of phenomena that have completely diverse characteristics and origins. The public sphere has no homogenous substance whatsoever" (13)
46. On Immanuel Kant, see Negt and Kluge, Public Sphere, 10-11
47. on Søren Kierkegaard, and Habermas's recent interest in Kierkegaard, see Martin J. Matustik, Postnational Identity: Critical Theory and Existential Philosophy in Habermas, Kierkegaard, and Havel (London, 1993), 107-9
48. On Montesquieu and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, see Barbara Vinken, "Republic, Rhetoric, and Sexual Difference," in Decontruction Islin America: A New Sense of the Political, ed. Anselm Haverkamp (New York, 1995), 181-99
49. This point is fully elaborated by Lauren Berlant, "National Brands/National Body: Imitation of Life," in Bruce Robbins, ed., The Phantom Public Sphere (Minneapolis, 1993), 173-208
50. and Michael Warner, "The Mass Public and the Mass Subject," in Robbins, Phantom Public Sphere, 234-56
51. See Theodor Adorno, "The Schema of Mass Culture," in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London, 1991)
52. And on this point of Adorno's, see Miriam Hansen, "Mass Culture as Hieroglyphic Writing: Adorno, Derrida, Kracauer," New German Critique 56 (Spring-Summer 1992): 43-75
53. Ying-jen Chang, The Rise of Martial Arts in China and America (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1978), chaps. 1, 5
54. See also David Chow and Richard Spangler, Kung Fu: History, Philosophy, and Technique (New York, 1977), chaps. 7, 8
55. Robin L. Reilly, The History of American Karate (Hackensack, N.J., 1970), 53
56. Headlines in Variety, 7 March 1973 and 19 December 1973
57. Mark Werba, "Chinese Films Click in Europe," Variety, 7 March 1973, 7
58. On the history of kung fu film and its generic predecessors, see Verina Glaessner, Kung Fu: Cinema of Vengeance (New York, 1974)
59. and Marilyn D. Mintz, The Martial Arts Film (New York, 1978)
60. Jack Pitman, "Chinese Pix Tide in Global Flood," Variety, 2 May 1973, 5, 22
61. Gene Moskowitz, "Demand Still Brisk, Sez Shaw," Variety, 19 December 1973
62. Hsiung-ping Chiao, "Bruce Lee: His Influence on the Evolution of the Kung Fu Genre," Journal of Popular Film and Television 9 (Spring 1981): 31
63. Stuart M. Kaminsky, "Kung Fu Film as Ghetto Myth," in Movies as Artifacts: Cultural Criticism of Popular Film, ed. Michael T. Marsden et al. (Chicago, 1982), 137-45
64. Kaminsky, "Kung Fu Film"; Chang, Rise of Martial Arts, chap. 7
65. Tom Costner, "Hong Kong's Answer to 007," Village Voice, 17 May 1973, 92
66. See "Swish! Thwack! Kung Fu Films Make It," New York Times, 16 June 1973, sec. L, 14
67. "U.S. Rage of Chop-Socky Films; Karate Breaks out of Chinatown," Variety, 9 January 1974, 72
68. Addison Verrill, "Chop-Socky Fad Shrinks, but Expect Its Survival," Variety, 8 January 1975, 8
69. On the waning popularity see also "Kung Fu, 'Sold' By Bruce Lee, No Longer B.O., Even in Orient," Variety, 20 October 1976, 72
70. David Freeman, "Karate Flicks: What It All Means," Village Voice, 17 May 1973, 92
71. David O. Sears and T. M. Tomlinson, "Riot Ideology in Los Angeles: A Study of Negro Attitudes," Social Science Quarterly 49 (1968): 485-503
72. Paula B. Johnson, David O. Sears, and John B. McConahay, "Black Invisibility, the Press, and the Los Angeles Riot," American Journal of Sociology 76 (1971): 698-721
73. For an important overview of the literature, see Kenneth L. Kersmer, "African Americans in the City Since World War II: From the Industrial to the Post-Industrial Era," Journal of Urban History 21 (May 1995): 458-504
74. Wallace Terry, Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black American (New York, 1992), 122
75. See, among the many accounts of this stereotype, Houston A. Baker Jr., "To Move Without Moving: Creativity and Commerce in Ralph Ellison's Trueblood Episode," in Black Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York, 1984), 230
76. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York, 1967), 170
77. Myra MacPherson, Long Time Passing: Vietnam and the Haunted Generation (New York, 1984), 559
78. Department of Labor, Office of Policy and Planning and Research, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (March 1965), 42. For the report's account of how "four times as many Negroes as whites fail the armed forces mental test," see 40-41
79. Combined with student deferments, the diminished Armed Forces Qualification Test standards transformed the armed forces in Vietnam into the most class-differentiated workforce since the Civil War. Quickly installed in combat units, the Project 100,000 draftees suffered a death rate twice as high as that suffered by the rest of the forces. Forty percent of the draftees were black; Christian G. Appy, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1993), chap. 1
80. See also Robert W. Mullem, A Look Back: Vietnam and the Black American (Needham Heights, Mass., 1989)
81. Thomas A. Johnson, "Negroes in 'The Nam,'" Ebony, August 1968, 32
82. Similarly, Whitney M. Young Jr., describing how racism has been transcended on the battlefield, argued that "the Negro has clearly developed sophistication, confidence in his own ability, and a sense of well-being in an integrated climate. He is a man accustomed to discharging duty and exercising responsibility"; Whitney M. Young Jr., "When the Negroes in Vietnam Come Home," Harper's, June 1967, 64
83. Terry, Bloods, 28, 7
84. In the words of Thomas Johnson, "The Negro has found in his nation's most totalitarian society - the military - the greatest degree of functional democracy that this nation has granted to black people"; "Negroes in 'The Nam,'" 40
85. In William Eastlake's The Bamboo Bed (New York, 1969), a leader of the Detroit race riots, "black sergeant Pike," begins with the sense that "there is no greater honor on this earth to a black man than to hand white men to yellow men for killing" (61)
86. He dies defending "his whiteys," having learned, through combat, to forget politics and history in the name of collective survival. The novel is discussed by Jeffords, Remasculinization, 54-59
87. Thomas Cripps, "Movies, Race, and World War II: Tennessee Johnson as an Anticipation of the Strategies of the Civil Rights Movement," Prologue: Journal of the National Archives 14, no. 2 (Summer 1982): 60. Cripps provides extensive primary and secondary resources through which to understand World War II as a rhetorical and mass-mediated "watershed in American race relations" (52)
88. See, for instance, Richard Dalfiume, "The 'Forgotten Years' of the Negro Revolution," Journal of American History 55 (June 1968): 90-126
89. and John B. Kirby, Black American in the Roosevelt Era: Liberalism and Race (Knoxville, Tenn., 1980)
90. Michael Rogin provides an extensive account of Hollywood's Civil Rights, the limits of those rights, and their relation to the pathology of the Moynihan report in "'We Could Cross These Racial Lines': Hollywood Discovers Civil Rights," in Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley, 1996), 209-50
91. Johnson, "Negroes in 'The Nam,'" 31-40
92. Young, "When the Negroes Come Home," 65
93. David F. Addlestone and Susan Sherer, "Battleground: Race in Viet Nam," Civil Liberties (Feb. 1973): 1-2
94. By the close of the war, the Congressional Black Caucus concluded that "despite the existence of progressive policies, day-to-day practices of arbitrariness, unfairness, and latent discriminatory practices render the stated policy almost meaningless"; ibid., 1
95. Katherine Verdery, "Beyond the Nation in Eastern Europe," Social Text 38 (Spring 1994): I
96. Huey P. Newton, "Letter to the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (With Reply)," in Vietnam and Black America: An Anthology of Protest and Resistance, ed. Clyde Taylor (Garden City, N.Y., 1973), 290-93
97. Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (London, 1992), chap. 1
98. Arjun Appadurai, "Patriotism and Its Futures," Public Culture 5 (Spring 1993): 411-29
99. Angela Y. Davis, "Black Nationalism: The Sixties and the Nineties," in Black Popular Culture, ed. Michele Wallace and Gina Dent (Seattle, 1992), 317-24
100. First Lieutenant Archie "Joe" Biggers, in Terry, Bloods, 142
101. MacPherson, Long Time Passing, 553
102. Freeman, "Karate Flicks," 92
103. D. Keith Mano, "Kung Phooey," National Review 32 (2 May 1980): 547
104. Denis Lévy, "Le kung-fu, le sang et la mort," Telecine no. 194 (Dec. 1974): 13
105. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford, 1989)
106. and David Harvey, The Urban Experience (Baltimore, Md., 1989)
107. Don Ethan Miller, "A State of Grace: Understanding the Martial Arts," Atlantic, Sept. 1980, 88
108. Stuart Hall, "Notes on Deconstructing the Popular," in People's History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel (London, 1981), 235
109. Reilly, History of American Karate, 134
110. "Kung Fu Fighting," supposedly recorded in only ten minutes to complete the "B" side of a single, was released as the "A" side in the explicit effort to draft off of the popularity of kung fu that Bruce Lee had established. The song became the number one hit in both the United States and the United Kingdom. See Free Bronson, The Billboard Book of Number One Hits (New York, 1985), 385
111. The Guinness Book of 500 Number One Hits (Middlesex, N.J., 1982), 162
112. Although the technomasculinity and gym culture of the 1980s would seem to have established an altogether different paradigm for rebuilding bodies, the martial arts continue to fascinate, mediated by high technology, in the best-selling computer game Mortal Kombat and its filmic manifestation in the 1995 summer movie season. Though a trip to your local video store in Chicago's South Side, for instance, will show you that the martial arts film industry continues to thrive, a very different image from Bruce Lee and his progeny has become central to the youth culture of the American ghettos - the ghetto-centric rapper - whose global popularity might be said to invert the underclass reception of kung fu. Rap articulates an ethnic, sociocultural, and historical specificity that the global body necessarily silenced; a certain Utopian abstraction finds itself succeeded by a dystopian materialism, which now enjoys the status of being one of America's best-known cultural exports. By now, of course, the literature on rap, important not least for its effort to redescribe a black public sphere, is extensive. See, for instance, the following articles in Public Culture 7 (Fall 1994), a special issue on the black public sphere: Reebee Garofalo, "Culture Versus Commerce: The Marketing of Black Popular Music" (275-88)
113. Todd Boyd, "Check Yo Self, Before You Wreck Yo Self: Variations on a Political Theme in Rap Music and Popular Culture" (289-312)
114. and Paul Gilroy, "'After the Love Has Gone': Biopolitics and Etho-Poetics in the Black Public Sphere" (49-76)
115. Laura Kipnis, "'Refunctioning' Reconsidered: Towards a Left Popular Culture," in MacCabe, High Theory - Low Culture, 34
116. These essays emerged from a 1984 conference. Meaghan Morris, "Banality in Cultural Studies," Block 14 (1988): 15-25
117. See Jeff Rosen, "Merchandising Multiculturalism: Benetton and the New Cultural Relativism," New Art Examiner (Nov. 1993): 18-26
118. Henry A. Giroux, "Consuming Social Change: The United Colors of Benetton," in Disturbing Pleasures: Learning Popular Culture (New York, 1994)
119. Yúdice, "Civil Society," 5
120. This logic is literalized when we're told that a percentage of the purchase price will be donated to a particular cause. These politics by other means - consumption - arrogate social responsibility from the government and work to install the corporation, not the state, as the arbiter of justice
121. Adorno, "Schema of Mass Culture," 74-78
122. See Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge, Mass., 1993)
123. Matustik, Postnational Identity, viii