Cultural Melancholy

Readings of Race, Impossible Mourning, and African American Ritual

Jermaine Singleton

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780252039621
• eBook ISBN:
  9780252097713
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: Social Sciences

A daring cultural and literary studies investigation, Cultural Melancholy explores the legacy of unresolved grief produced by ongoing racial oppression and resistance in the United States. Using acute analysis of literature, drama, musical performance, and film, Singleton demonstrates how rituals of racialization and resistance transfer and transform melancholy discreetly across time, consolidating racial identities and communities along the way. He also argues that this form of impossible mourning binds racialized identities across time and social space by way of cultural resistance efforts.

Singleton develops the concept of "cultural melancholy" as a response to scholarship that calls for the separation of critical race studies and psychoanalysis, excludes queer theoretical approaches from readings of African American literatures and cultures, and overlooks the status of racialized performance culture as a site of serious academic theorization. In doing so, he weaves critical race studies, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and performance studies into conversation to uncover a host of hidden dialogues—psychic and social, personal and political, individual and collective—for the purpose of promoting a culture of racial grieving, critical race consciousness, and collective agency.

Wide-ranging and theoretically bold, Cultural Melancholy counteracts the racial legacy effects that plague our twenty-first century multiculture.

1 THE MELANCHOLY THAT IS NOT HER OWN

The Evolution of the Blueswoman and the Consolidation of Whiteness

Alberta Hunter: My Castle’s Rockin’ (2001) documents Alberta Hunter’s critically acclaimed return to the blues stage in 1977 after twenty years in retirement. Hunter’s career spanned almost the entire twentieth century and her renditions of “Two-Fisted Double-Jointed Rough and Ready Man,” “Handy Man,” and “Downhearted Blues” continue to soothe and amuse today’s blues aficionados.1 A segment of the documentary depicts the late blues singer serving her traditional dish of double-entendre in “Handyman.” While Hunter delivers her lyrics with impeccable timing, the all-white audience responds with laughter and gentle shakes of the head that blur the line between amused identification and judgment of the “out-of-pocket” blueswoman. Two years after Hunter’s return to the stage of The Cookery in New York, the show woman received an invitation from President Jimmy Carter to perform for the closing of an annual Governor’s Conference at the White House, what was known as Carter’s “Mormon Tabernacle.” The Washington Post reported the following morning: “For last night’s black-tie audience, the raunchier the lyrics, the greater the response” (Taylor and Cook, Alberta Hunter, 20). The irony here is made palpable by a letter President Carter wrote Hunter the day after: “You continue to amaze us. Rosalynn and I loved your performance last night for the Governors following our dinner in their honor. Thank you for being with us and sharing your beautiful music” (Taylor and Cook, 23).

How did a music born of oppression become the nation’s feel-good-soundtrack? How do we explain the process through which the sounds and imagery of black sexuality seeped into normal, everyday American life and leisure? At one extreme are those who attribute the sale of one million copies of Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” during its first year in stores to “the ledger” (Barlow, Looking Up at Down, 122). On the other, more sociological, end of explanations, it has been noted that while there was “scarcely a [black] man’s name to be found” in the nation’s list of blues makers at this time, there are those who attribute the success of the ‘Negro female entertainer’ to ‘the emergence of many white women as entertainers’ and the ‘great swell of distaff protest regarding women’s suffrage’” (Jones, Blues People, 93). Another critic pointed out that once the ideal Victorian woman and her notions of “middle-class piety, racial superiority, and sexual repression were discredited,” modern America was “free to promote, not an egalitarian society,” but a sort of “egalitarian popular culture aggressively appropriating forms and ideas across race, class, and gender lines” (Douglas, Terrible Honesty, 8).

In Black Pearls, Daphne Duval Harrison draws on biographical and autobiographical testimonies of both remembered and forgotten blueswomen to explore the overlooked role of black women in the creation and development of the blues and how the cultural form promoted the economic, social, and sexual liberation of black women in a sexist and white supremacist context. Certainly, the classical blues songs by these “blues queens” did much to provide black women with new modes and means of coping with and surmounting the pressures they faced in urban settings. Further, the most popular blueswomen profited handsomely from the patronage of “curious whites who trekked to Harlem in fine cars and furs in search of thrills” (Harrison, 14). Indeed, Alberta Hunter turned to the blues in search of social and economic uplift. As Hazel Carby notes, Hunter and her cohort initially turned to the “clean,” well-paying work of singing blues in an effort to escape the debilitating despair of the socioeconomic disenfranchisement they were to inherit as poor, black, single women.2

Angela Davis theorized that the blues of black women provided an outlet offering individualization beyond the psychic effects of gender oppression:

Women’s Blues cannot be understood apart from their role in the molding of an emotional community based on the affirmation of black people’s—and in particular black women’s—absolute and irreducible humanity. The Blues woman challenges in her own way the imposition of gender-based inferiority. When she paints blues portraits of tough women, she offers psychic defenses and interrupts and discredits the routine internalization of male dominance. (36)

The blueswoman’s affront to notions of female “place” and its established patterns of subjugation was a critical offensive force for black women living amid a burgeoning imperialist national project in which female challenges to patriarchal authority grew increasingly under fire. During the early twentieth century, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Ethel Waters, and countless other black female blues singers recorded songs for both black and white women.

The trope of the strong, impenetrable black woman made it difficult, however, for mainstream audiences to imagine black bodies assisting the work of advancing American civilization (Davis, 335). Chris Albertson notes the deep-seated racial anxiety that underpinned white America’s clamor for black entertainment in the twenties (52). While white show business stars could not afford to expose their unsightly private lives, impropriety and debauchery were prerequisites for black female entertainers of the time. The representational authority of race records and their advertisements linked the problems associated with black female urban sexual behavior to black patriarchy and culture at large. The advertisement for Rufus Jones for President (1933), a satirical musical comedy starring Ethel Waters and Sammy Davis Jr., characterized blackness and black domesticity with an ineradicable dysfunction (see fig. 2). Rufus Jones, an African American male child, finds his way to the highest office in the United States. Depicting mouths wide open, eyes boggled, excessive cleavage, and overexposed thighs, the image underscores the musical short’s depiction of an unassimilable and dysfunctional black patriarchy. Though merely a two-dimensional print ad for a satirical film, the form and content of both texts loaded the dice against African American political and social life during the Depression era. Working through visual modernity to consolidate biological notions of racial difference, these representations worked in tandem to secure white hegemony.

In the introduction, I argued that the “normal” white modern’s struggle for centrality and authority into and through the twentieth century was discreetly negotiated on sexual, gendered, class, and, moreover, performative terms. These struggles were motivated by and mobilized a virulent racism that embroiled figurations of blackness in notions of sexual, gender, and class deviance. Psychoanalytic engagements with social difference have always been intertwined with theorizations of gender and sexual difference. In “Not Even Past,” Dorothy Stringer reminds us that white racial fantasies of racial difference cannot be understood in isolation from other categories of social difference. Drawing on Joan Riviere’s (1991) theorization of the “womanliness as masquerade” and figurations of black rapist, Stringer points out the fact that Riviere’s control case study in this essay was a white, middle-class woman from the southern United States—a successful intellectual, a writer and public speaker who was nonetheless uneasy about intruding on a traditional male field of endeavor. As Stringer argues, the woman’s “major strategy for deferring both the rejection she feared, and her own negative feelings, was to assume a ‘mask’ of womanliness … as not a direct expression of sexual desire, but instead as a psychic translation of their fears about defying gender norms” (24–25). While normative Americans drew on the notion of a “black rapist” to disavow their own gender and sexual transgressions and thus bar the attendant guilt and fear from recognition, the blueswoman’s integration into and transformation through American popular culture also served this cultural work.

FIGURE 2. Advertisement for Rufus Jones for President (1933).
(Photo by John D. Kisch/Separate Cinema Archive/Getty Images)

Serving as a site of sexual and racial crossing for white audience members, the blueswoman’s rise to popular status during the interwar period marks the process through which the extreme fear and anxiety that underpinned the lie of racial difference found relief through cultural practice. While the status of the blueswomen as a fixture of popular culture during the early twentieth century was grounded in her controversial embodiment of the phantasm of the “primitive,” a trope partly responsible for the normalization of the ideal white modern citizen, her rise to pop-culture status, I argue, was grounded in her status as a cultural underwriter through which normal heterosexuality and whiteness reinforced one another during the Gilded Age.

The ideological work that hinged on the figure of the blueswoman calls for an augmentation of what Roderick A. Ferguson defines as a queer of color analysis in Aberrations in Black, adding an account of the workings of unmourned social loss, hidden affect, and performance to the interrogation of “social formations as the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, and class” (149). The nation’s ambivalent relationship with the blueswomen was rooted in a larger phenomenon of inevitable nationalist change and accommodation by which the capitalist circulation of figurations of blackness solidified the color line amid a fragile ideological field of unstable class, ethnic, gender, and sexual identifications. The task before us is to illuminate the disavowed psychic underpinnings and cultural effects of this liaison between the blues-woman and white audiences. Indeed, literary and cultural representations of the performances and lives of African American blueswomen and blues culture reveal something beyond normative American nationhood’s reticence about its historical and social construction. How did the blueswoman unwittingly aid in the construction of the nationalist myth of the cross-class white racial sameness, purity, and promise? How did this ideological work of blues culture evolve into a sort of racial violence against white ethnics and black enfranchisement at once? What is the role of racial melancholy, a concept virtually missing from understandings of 1920s and 1930s black performance, in the evolution of popular performances of the cultural form as it “correspond[ed] with and diverge[d] from nationalist ideals and practices” (Ferguson, 149)?

The Disavowed Buttressing of Whiteness through Black Culture

Making large psychological and ideological claims about white racial identity requires first defining what it is, and recent cultural theory has done just that. “‘Normality,’” wrote Julian B. Carter in the introduction to The Heart of Whiteness, “provided a common, and deeply sexualized, vocabulary through which an increasingly diverse group of whites could articulate their common racial and political values to one another, while nonetheless avoiding direct acknowledgment of or confrontation with the many hierarchies that fractured the polity” (6). What exactly does Carter mean by “deeply sexualized vocabulary”? More significantly, how does such a vocabulary achieve its effects without direct acknowledgment, debate, and race politics? This discourse of racial difference, Carter argues, was camouflaged and policed by a depoliticized discourse of “normal” sexual desire and behavior. Justifying this controversial study of race, Carter explains:

In common speech during the interwar years, “normality” described a whole series of ideals regulating sexual desires and activities and, through them, modes of intimacy and familial structures. By 1940, this enframement had had the effect of helping to expand white racial definition to include most European Americans who adhered to these racialized sexual and relational norms. Erotically and affectively charged marriage became the privileged site for the literal and metaphorical reproduction of white civilization. At the same time and through the same gestures, that civilization’s core racial value was redefined in terms of love. (6)

Carter’s provocative linkage between the disavowed regulation of sexual desire and activity and the reproduction of white civilization allows us to look more closely at the reticent cultural work responsible for the mutually dependent racial and sexual hierarchies that at once commodified and made whiteness invisible.

During the era between the two world wars, the discourses of “civilization” and “normality” intersected and overlapped to relegate the work of advancing and populating America’s civilization to the domain of white men and women. By 1940 “normality” took the place of “civilization,” transferring “civilized Americans” into a broader, more inclusive category of “normal Americans.” While the conceptual content of both terms performed the same cultural work, Carter argues, the latter achieved these ends without political debate. Once the notion of “civilized and well-bred” bourgeois Protestant whites was decentered and replaced by the need for a more inclusive national self-image consistent with an ethnically diverse white racial republic, the myths of scientific racism were augmented with a more everyday nationalist culture of regulation. Carter’s argument is grounded in a set of diverse sources—descriptions of modern nervousness, sex advice for married couples, and educational materials about reproductive physiology and venereal disease—which all “speak about sex from and to the position of civilized modern whiteness” (18).

This culture of regulation, of course, prompts a few pertinent questions: what is “normal”; what is “deviant”; and through what cultural and psychic forms and conditions does the former constitute the latter, and vice versa? For Carter, the internal focus of the popular-science sources that developed a definition of “normality” that centered white racial marital romance as the desirable mode of white civilization’s reproduction required the refusal of the sexually and racially nonnormative subject’s claim to civilization. Countless studies have explored the ways in which the core at once defines and mediates itself through excluding and rendering the periphery invisible. Moreover, the role bodies on the margins play in mediating the sexual desire and activity of the center—thus, defining the center—is never discussed in terms that register the interplay of performance, unmourned social loss, and hidden affect. What is missing from studies of the blues culture and critical race studies is knowledge about how the normative social body appropriated representations of the cultural form to power a culture of sexual and social regulation that secured its hegemony. The psychoanalysis of jazz and blues offers an elegant means of writing performance studies into the project of critical race studies, addressing the difficult relationships among racial identities, categories of social difference, and performance. Knowledge of the ideological underpinnings of the unmourned social loss and hidden affect that mobilized jazz and blues cultures provides a grammar for reading race as less biological and more of a performative construction of belonging and intimacy at the intersections of class, sexual, and gender difference.

Flesh That Moans in the Age of Racial Conservatism

Psychoanalytic studies have drawn usefully on the concept of melancholia to theorize the stable yet fragile structures of racial, gender, and sexual identification.3 Judith Butler’s theorization of gender performativity points to the ways embodied behaviors, speech acts, and other cultural forms fortify and constrain fragile melancholic states and their constitutive social losses (Psychic Life of Power, 132–50). Of course, as Stuart Hall reminds us, cultural identity is an act of being and becoming.4 But why and how does this happen? A rearticulation of critical studies on blackface minstrelsy through the prism of racial melancholy, suggests that working-class Irish actors and audiences who worked through the popular ritual to become more self-consciously white were unknowingly masking their own gender and sexual particularities as a result of cultural prohibitions against miscegenation and homosexuality. Indeed, the popular cultural form facilitated a crossing and policing of the racial divide on disavowed gender and sexual terms and conditions.

Scholars of blackface minstrelsy stress the racial crossing component of the cultural form, and they are quick to point out “that immigrants at times developed significant contacts with Black culture” (Roediger, Working Towards Whiteness, 188). Understanding social identity as a melancholic construction helps us read the movement of the immigrant in blackface steadily toward normative American identification in the image of blackness as a sort of misrecognition of the gender and sexual particularities veiled beneath their image of whiteness. According to Eric Lott in Love and Theft, on the one hand, the fantasy of racial crossing enacted in blackface seems to gesture at once toward sexual envy toward and desire for black men. On the other hand, the minstrel’s identification with potent male heterosexuality deflected latent homosexual desire. At base, the cultural form was a melancholic strategy through which “normal” white working class identity is stabilized through the ritualized and disavowed engagement with and containment of the threat of miscegenation and homosexuality.

While much of the scholarship on the spectacle of minstrelsy revolves around the Americanization of the working-class white immigrants who engaged in the cultural form during the late nineteenth century, little has been said about the modern sites of popular culture designed to secure white psychic subjection long after minstrelsy’s fall from the popular stage. Picking up where minstrelsy left things, the nation’s relationship with the blueswoman is deeply embroiled in this early twentieth century cultural imperative. The social history between the blueswoman and early twentieth century white racial subjects clamoring for national belonging is at once contradictory and complementary. The three decades before the term “heterosexuality” gained common usage and, in turn, mobilized the construction and consolidation of “normal” whiteness in the 1940s, white moderns enlisted the mass culture of visual modernity to align themselves with primitivism associated with black and immigrant bodies to promote the masculine yet refined superiority of “civilized” men. (See Bederman, esp. 213–15.)5 During the 1920s, gender ideologies conflating white male power with self-restraint were under serious scrutiny and reconstruction. Victorian re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Melancholy That Is Not Her Own: The Evolution of the Blueswoman and the Consolidation of Whiteness
• 2 Reconstituted Melancholy: Impossible Mourning and the Prevalence of Ritual and Race in August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson
• 3 The Melancholy of Faith: Reading the Gendered and Sexual Politics of Testifying in James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain and The Amen Corner
• 4 Queering Celie’s Same-Sex Desire: Impossible Mourning, Trauma, and Heterosexual Failure in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple
• 5 A Clearing beyond the Melancholic Haze: Staging Racial Grieving in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus and Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change
• Coda: On Conformity to the Category of Time (Race)
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index