["There is nothing like this book. At once a magnificent work of social and cultural history, an anthropology of race, and a political economy of racial capitalism and Empire, this is the most original examination of the American film industry ever published. But like all of Robinson's work, Forgeries of Memory and Meaningthe works of Shakespeare, scientific discourse, and early minstrelsy. And his prodigious research has does much more, extending over three centuries to reconstruct the roots of modern black representation in uncovered celluloid gems and theater works I never knew existed."--Robin D. G. Kelley, University of Southern California, link]

There he is, on the frontispiece, and there he is again, on the contents page, and in his other antic guises, scattered throughout the pages of Robinson’s magisterial history – the original, endlessly repeated Jim Crow, the comedic deformity and defamation of a people; a sell, a fraud.

Selling is part of what it’s about – or what it came to be about. But there is much more to it than that … And it all began much earlier, centuries before, in fact. For Forgeries is much more than a scholarly exegesis of the treatment of race in fi lm and performance, though it does that brilliantly, excavating a wealth of obscure, scarcely known material, as well as re- evaluating the great landmarks obscured as much, in their way, by unreckoning critical acclamation. Its fundamental achievement is to lay bare the cultural wellsprings of modern American society, the weight and meaning of its rootedness in slavery and the ingenious rapacity with which that fraudulent inheritance was invested; the dividends it paid; the costs it incurred.

Robinson’s narrative – though that word does not adequately convey the reconstructive nature of his enterprise – begins with nineteenthcentury ‘race’ science, reaching back to the images and understandings of ‘blackamores’ forged under pressure of slavery in a Europe that had long engaged in such practices and the consequent inferiorisation of their subjects. ‘Race is mercurial – deadly and slick … By the time the moving picture camera arrived on the scene, the Negro was in full costume. But before then, that costume would undergo extraordinary changes in the seventeenth century and then again at the end of the nineteenth century.’

As Robinson demonstrates, many of those extraordinary changes were wrought by the salvoes fi red, campaigns fought, territory grappled over, in the battle over slavery:

the sheer audacity and apparently undeterrable stream of antislavery propaganda and the frequent occurrence of actual slave revolts compelled a proslavery counterattack. It was at this moment in the struggle over slavery that many of the caricatures of Blacks which would dominate American fi lm came into existence.

The first target to come under the attack of white caricaturists was the free black middle class – its growth, despite all the forces ranged against it, a testimony to black resilience and enterprise. Its representatives were the most egregious in not knowing or respecting their allotted place, in daring to organise their own social lives, their own institutions, their own media, and were consequently pilloried for this through a sustained grossness of imagery and ridicule that permeated national cultural life.

It is no small part of Robinson’s achievement that, in giving us a history of ‘race’ in American fi lm, he gives us a history of black America for that period. And, in giving us a history of fi lm itself, he gives us a dynamic portrait of the growth of the industrial and fi nancial development with which the fi lm business was inextricably linked and out of which it grew. It is a concrete demonstration of the way in which the representations blazoned on the screen and absorbed by millions of people, multitudes of them new immigrant Americans, were only the fi nal flowering of a growth that was rooted deep in the economic and political structures of the nation. With painstaking subtlety, Robinson elucidates the links between, for example, the banking and finance houses, the indebted railroad companies (their infrastructure constructed by black convict labour) transporting the raw materials for industry across the continent and transporting
mass populations to the thriving world fairs and exhibitions where ethnographic images (in keeping with the latest race science) of blacks as savages, or blacks as slavery-nostalgia were purveyed – to advertise and sell anything from porridge and pancake mix to washing powder, tobacco and shoe polish. Images that were then used as source and substance for the new wonders of the moving picture industry, that then fed back into advertising and other media in a continuous loop.

The career of one such black icon is instructive – ‘Aunt Jemima’. Originally a fi gure from lyrics in the repertoire of the black minstrel Billy Kersands, ‘Jemima’ was then incorporated into blackface minstrelsy, and subsequently became the smiling ‘mammy’ face of a multi-million dollar food industry. The demeaning ‘mammy’ fi gure, with her fat jollity, knotted headscarf, devotion to the white family and total asexuality, bears, as Robinson demonstrates, no relation to any reality of southern black life for enslaved women. But this did not prevent her becoming the comforting face of race in popular culture. Aunt Jemima, launched

as a walking, talking fi gure at the massive Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, was performed by a black actress and a former slave, Nancy Green, who sang songs, told stories – and cooked pancakes; a front for bulk selling of this cheap, mass-produced commodity. Fictional Jemima took over real-life Green:

Though complemented by regional surrogates, Green would dominate the performance of Aunt Jemima till her death in 1923. By then her own biography and the fi ction of Jemima had long been merged by the corporate and historical reconstructions of the origins of Jemima. But hers was merely a particle of the fi ctionalizations of race, blackness and American history whose appearances would come to dominate American popular culture.

D.W. Griffi th’s 1915 Birth of a Nation is seen as crucial in what Robinson calls ‘the rewhitening of the nation’. He frames his discussion of Birth not only in terms of prior film historiography but also Griffith’s earlier work (‘paternalist, sentimental’); the source novel from which Birth is drawn; and the poisonous racial politics of the time. It was a time when the brilliant black boxer Jack Johnson (his mastery captured on fight films) so utterly refused to know his (blacks’ only) place that he was threatened by lynch mobs and public death threats and when a compound of anti- Semitism, racial and class hatred led to the railroading of a black man, Jim Conley, and a Jewish man, Frank Phagan, over the murder of a poor white woman; Phagan was eventually abducted from the prison farm where he had been sent and lynched. As Robinson laconically puts it, ‘class animosity and anti-Semitism superseded Negrophobia’; in Griffith’s fi lm elements from the murder case together with elements from the novel combined to

recast the American Civil War as a violent fratricidal confrontation between whites … Griffi th then reimagined the Reconstruction as a temporary moment of mulatto political ascendancy and Black triumph, rape, and anarchy … ‘Lincoln’s dream’ was to return Blacks to Africa, and only his assassination had frustrated his act of cleansing.

The film had opened in March 1915; Thanksgiving night that same year saw the formation in Georgia of the new Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. When is added to the wealth of this telling detail and close argument yet more contextual interconnection, between America’s subsequent ( arguably business-driven) involvement in the first world war and its growing expansionism, the formidable richness of Robinson’s research and the multi-layered complexity of his analysis become apparent.

That the weight of the racism, expressed in mass-manufactured cultural products, that Robinson documents is almost overwhelming is not surprising for:

At the onset of mass movie production, apartheid was the structural instrument of American capital, and American film makers supplied a galaxy of imagery and story lines which naturalized and popularized white hegemony.

Many of those story-lines, much of that imagery would, indeed, be surprisingly familiar to any student of English eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury drama. A 1911 Pathé fi lm For Massa’s Sake appears to lift its
main plot device from Thomas Morton’s 1816 The Revolt of Surinam, in which a freed slave sells himself back into slavery to clear his former master’s debt. Over and over, as in nineteenth-century English drama (with the towering exception of Ira Aldridge), blacks were represented by white actors in burnt cork make-up; while the evil mulatta/o, a staple of American motion pictures and an exemplar of the perils of race- mixing or ‘amalgamation’ had, also in the nineteenth century, crossed the Atlantic in the other direction, from a race-science obsessed America to England, that earlier home of racial science.

Yet it would be wrong to leave the story there. For in myriad ways black artists, actors, film makers, entertainers sought to challenge, subvert or broaden the humanity of those restricted images within which the major film industry attempted to confi ne them; from the black, independent and radical fi lmmaker Oscar Micheaux, whose best work was self- and community fi nanced on a shoestring budget; to the militant black actress Fredi Washington; the lesser known Theresa Harris; and the brilliant comedic presence of Mantan Moreland, with his capacity for ironic inversion of his role even as he played it. Even Stepin Fetchit on occasion neatly sidestepped his accustomed function. Not to mention those musicians and performers who, as blacks in minstrelsy, challenged the grotesquery of blackface minstrelsy, to deepen the humanity of the image of the black-skinned entertainer. At the end of the nineteenth century, one such entertainer, Bob Cole, actually performed in whiteface – an unprecedented cocking of the snook at America’s Jim Crow segregationist culture. Or there was the glamorous Aida Overton Walker, who from a singer and dancer became a choreographer – and the initiator of the dance craze, the cakewalk, which she taught to ‘English aristocrats and the cream of white American society’.

That is Robinson’s history for you – built, piece upon piece, from the ground up into a fascinating multi-storied structure, displaying a historical sweep that encompasses both the seemingly insignifi cant detail and the overarching grand design. Forgeries of Memory and Meaning in its breadth of vision, its originality of scholarship and its supple clarity of analysis is, quite simply, a tour de force.

By Hazel Waters, Race & Class 50: 98-101

Al tikrar biallem il hmar (By repetition even the donkey learns).

—Arab proverb

Read here.

Part One:

Part Two:

Part Three:

Part Four:

Part Five:

[Use the search engine for more on Oprah.  I found also some research articles by Dr. Janice Peck I am thinking to post in another occasion. gess ]

The Age of Oprah, Cultural  Icon For the Neoliberal Era

A Black Agenda Radio interview by Bruce Dixon

The following is a rushed and lightly edited transcript of BAR Managing Editor Bruce Dixon’s on-air interview with Dr. Janice Peck, author of The Age of Oprah, Cultural Icon For the Neoliberal Era, broadcast Monday, June 2, on WRFG Atlanta’s Just Peace show.

BD: Unless you’ve lived the last 25 years in some cave under a mountain with no cable TV, Oprah Winfrey is one of those figures in American life that need no introduction. We’re all familiar with the outlines of her life and career, how she rose from rural poverty in Mississippi to head a vast media empire of radio networks, TV and movie production houses, multiple magazines, a web site and of course a long running syndicated talk show with multiple spin-offs. We know Oprah is a billionaire, and we’re acquainted with various, intimate personal details of her life, her favorite colors, how many dogs, cats and houses she has, and how she likes to shop and especially how she likes to give away money and things to the less fortunate.

Don’t we already know just about all there is to know about Oprah? What else is there?

JP: You’re right the vast popular literature on Oprah is enormous. I think there are things we (still) want to know, and that’s what drove me to write the book about her.

What I wanted to do is not look at Oprah from a personal perspective, but to situate her historically and politically, to understand how she became this very powerful, this world and international icon in relation to some political and economic developments in the US over the last twenty-five years. In some ways what I’ve done is tried to write a political history of the enterprise of Oprah and what she’s done, something quite different from most of the things we usually see written about her.

BD Since this is a political history of Oprah, how Oprah relates to culture and politics, does that mean that you had t sit down and talk to her about this?

JP: I actually did not interview Oprah Winfrey for this project, for a couple reasons. One is very simple. In the nineties when I was teaching at the University of Minnesota and first got interested in studying television talk shows, I wanted to go to Chicago to be in the audience and interview Oprah Winfrey, and I was told by her publicist at the time that Ms. Winfrey did not talk to academics, she did not give interviews to academics. Well, I thought, that’s alright, I don’t really need to talk to her. But also because the kind of book I’ve written is not really a biography, where you need to talk to the individual and learn a lot about her personally. I’m writing about her as a cultural phenomenon and public figure. I’m looking at her through the lens of this enormous amount of media coverage we have on her. In some sense talking to her wasn’t what my book was about, it’s more an observation about her power, her cultural significance from the perspective of a media analysis.

BD: So if we want to know where her favorite shoe store is or something like that, we’ll have to read the manazine, huh?

JP: Yeah, there are plenty of other places where you can find those kinds of things. I didn’t think I needed to repeat them.

BD: We probably couldn’t afford to go to her favorite shoe store anyway.

JP: Most people cannot… I chose the title “The Age of Oprah, cultural Icon for the Neo Liberal Era because in 2000 Newsweek magazine had a cover story that referred to it, to our age as the Age of Oprah. I thought that was a perfect title because I’m trying to make the argument that Oprah Winfrey represents certain important things about our era. That’s where I got the first part of the title.

BD: You’re calling her a cultural icon for the neoliberal era. Now we understand that you’re not calling her liberal, or even neoliberal, but that neoliberal is a label for the times in which we are living. So what are some of the hallmarks of this neoliberal era that we’re living in, and what makes Oprah a ciltural icon for neoliberalism.

JP: Neoliberal and neoliberalism is a term to refer to an economic theory and also a set of policies. We can historically situate that with the election of Ronald Regan in the US and of Margaret Thatcher in England. It’s a theory about what kind of relationship the government should have to the economy. It’s a response to what was seen as a kind of economic crisis in the 70s, with high inflatiion, what was called stagflation. This was seen as a way to correct that.

After World War 2 in the US the idea of the relationship of the government to the economy was that the government needed to intervene in the economy to make sure that we avoided crises like the Great Depression, for example. So it was the responsibility of the government to focus on full employment, and economic growth on the welfare of citizens and that would gurarantee economic and political stability/ When there was this crisis in the seventies with rising prices and inflation (falling profits) neolibearalism was presented as the solution. It’s got several things that are very familiar to us. First of all, very drastic tax custs, especially for big corporations and those at the top of the economic ladder, Deregulation, where government holds back from regulating the airlines, the banking industry and so on.

Privatization of services that had been the responsibility of the government so utilities and mail service and prisons and defense — we now have all these privately owned prisons, for profit prisons, and we hve contractors fighting the war in Iraq. And finally large cutbacks in spending on social programs. Most people can see that in cuts of like education. At the public university where I teach only seven percent =of its budget comes from the state of Colorado. And we especially we’ve seen cutbacks in the services that were to assis the most needy citizens.

BD: So neoliberalism basically started with Reganomics and the descendants of Reaganomics, privatization and militarization which are still with us. So what is it that makes Oprah the cultural icon of neoliberalism? She doesn’t talk about the army or about privatization, so what’s that got to do with her?

JP: That’s a great question. That’s the project I am trying to accomplish with this book. Basically Oprah has risen from the middle and eqarly eighties from somebody who was just a talk show host. Today she is seen as somebody who is a kind of a world figure, everybody knows her by her first name. My argument is that the way to undersand the journey of this woman is to understand neoliberalism as a political and economic project. For example, if we start looking at neoliberalism it argues that any political or social issue that we encounter today must be seen through the lens of the market, the free market. It turns all problems into individual ones that can be solved in the market. If there’s contamination of the water table, for instance, we should buy bottled water. That kind of attitude, that we should solve problems with the market and through individual activity and indivdual transformation is ultimately the same message that Oprah Winfrey sells to us.

BD: So you’re saying that Oprah is the messenger, she brings us the message of what’s required for us to adjust our attitudes neoliberalism and this neoliberal order require of us ordinary people, how it requires us to look at all of our problems as individual problems. None of our problems then, need to be addressed by organizing and communicating with each other.

JP Neoliberalism emphasizes a kind of minimal government, a stripped down, hollowed out government and maximum personal responsibility. I think this term personal responsibility will probably ring familiar with your listeners. We hear it all the time, we hear it from politicians and also we hear it from Oprah. If we have problems, if our lives are not going well if, we don’t have the things we want in our lives, then what we need to do is take personal responsibility, put our minds to it, have the right attitude and so on. That is the key to bringing about positive change. To give you an example of this, where Oprah very much exemplifies this idea that the market and individual positive attitudes are the solutions to social problems, Your listeners may be familiar with a show that was on this season called Oprah’s Big Give. It’s a “reality” show where people are competing, who can give the most, who can find the neediest people, and so on. There’s a couple of points in that series that really stood out.

One was in Houston, where one of the contestants decided that they were going to help this public school, this grade school in the city that needed computers, and had no playgrounds and basically had very few resources. You’ve got all these kids at the end, they built the playground, the kids were screaming with joy, the teachers were sobbing, they were so pleased. It’s a city school, it’s a public school where most of the kids we see are black or Latino. We’ve got this really “feel good” moment where the kids get this, but if you step back from it one of the things we might ask is why are public schools in the United States are so drastically underfunded and why is this seen as a solution, this charity, as opposed to taxation, where (through) the government, that we all pay taxes to we are all collectively responsible for things like education.

That is the way in which Oprah models the (neoliberal) attitude we should have toward the world. We can be personally generous with others when we find people who are the deserving needy but we don’t ask questions about the way our society is organized and the way resources are distributed.

BD There are even imitators… the “Extreme Makeover (Home Edition)” show where they build somebody a new house every week

JP: Other people have studied this too, they call it “charity TV”. In the final episode (of Extreme Makeover) this season they went to New Orleans. They found a couple families who were made homeless by Katrina. They built them new houses, and everybody feels real good, but they don’t step back and ask the questions most of us would like to have answered…

BD: (Such as ) Why whole neighborhoods never got their sewer and water service restored, or why vast square miles of real estate that black families actually owned are gone.

JP: …and what parts of the city are going to be rebuilt and which citizens of New Orleans are going to be welcomed back. None of those questions are asked, nor why the levees were in such terrible shape to begin with, because of this gutted government that doesn’t pay for things.

BD: Oprah’s life and career are offered as living proof of the maxim that if you can dream it, you can envision it, you can pray on it, it’ll happen for you, no matter what the odds. Most people will agree that this is a message that has no politics, liberal, neoliberal or otherwise that it’s a profoundly positive and empowering message. What, if anything are these people missing, what ?

JP: There’s nothing wrong with saying we should dream, have dreams and aspire to fulfill them, but I think it’s important not to decontextualize that. Because of the misallocation of resources in our society you have to begin with those kind of questions. The idea that the only thing that stands in the way of someone like me, who is at this point a professional middle class white woman with lots of education and a good salary, that there’s no difference between me and some woman, also my age, in her fifties, a woman without all those resources, that we’re the same and all we have to do is take personal responsibility and dream big, that’s actually a very harmful message, because it’s a desocialized message, it’s a depoliticized message. I

Part of what I’m arguing here is not that she’s personally a liberal or a conservative or whatever, but that there is a politics to her message…

BD: Like you just said, it’s a desocialized politics that puts the personal responsibility for being poor and oppressed exclusively on the poor and oppressed.

JP: Yeah, and it’s a comforting message for those who don’t have to feel that they have any responsibility or any obligation to their fellow citizens, because we’re all simply about personal responsibility. I’m trying to argue that that is a political move which ultimately denies that we are all responsible for one another.

BD: Speaking of comforting messages, Oprah is also one of those characters who, like a certain presidential candidate this season, who is said to have “transcended race.” Now, “transcending race” should be a good thing, shouldn’t it? Why is this not a good thing with Oprah?

JP: I have a chapter in my book that’s about this question of “transcending race”. The idea that we should aspire to live in a world in which we all regard each other as equals and fellow citizens regardless of race, that’s a very nice idea. I’m not opposed to that. But to say that Oprah “transcends race” in my analysis has a lot to do with the fact that she is a very comforting presence for her majority white following. The way she accomplishes that is not to do or say anything that would make her white followers uncomfortable. So to present the world as though it’s a post-racial world, and race is no longer a problem, that we’ve swolved all that in the sixties and so on, is a very comforting thing for her white followers.

So Oprah has disassociated herself from a lot of the political aspects of the civil rights movement, even as she mentions certain kinds of heroic figures, like Sojourner Truth or Martin Luther King. Early in her career she talked about going to an all black college and not feeling comfortable with her fellow students…

BD: Why not?

JP: Because they were angry…

BD: Oh dear. All those angry black people

JP: …and she was not comfortable around those kinds of students. At the beginning of her career she gave interviews distancing herself from that kind of black history and black experience, so when you say she has “transcended race” I say in my book that in some ways that just means that white people like her. We don’t live in a society that has transcended race, so it’s only possible to do so if you cover up, if you avoid certain kinds of issues. That’s been very much the case with Oprah Winfrey.

BD: So Oprah can keep enough of her black self to be able to do that neck thing that sistas do, or to drop a couple paragraphs in fluent ebonics if she needs to, but she makes folks comfortble, she’s a comforting figure for people who maybe shouldn’t be all that comfortable.

JP: You don’t get to be popular the way she is if you make too many people uncomfortable. It’s the same sort of thing with the Cosby show, (which) was the number one TV show for years. In order to be number one, to have that massive audience, it’s got to be careful not to upset people.

BD: There’s a saying that goes “nothing succeeds like success”. Oprah’s done very well for herself in building audience share and influence, and a vast personal fortune. So isn’t the lesson for bright young people, especially black people, who are looking to change the world through media, isn’t the message to follow in her footprints, right? …to be upbeat and positive, to give the market what it wants. Isn’t that the lesson of Oprah’s career?

JP: It’s certainly the lesson that she would like to pass on. But as a media critic I guess I would encourage not only black young people, all young people who are interest in going into media to think about some other kinds of contributions they could make to society as well.

BD: So thank you for this half hour, this twenty-five minutes, really. Say the name of the book again, please.

JP: the book is the Age of Oprah, Cultural Icon for the Neoliberal Era. It seems to be selling OK. I was interviewed by the New York Times last week about a story that has to do with Oprah’s ratings declining over the last few years.

BD: Why would Oprah’s ratings decline?

JP: There’s been a flurry of news stories in the past week that began with a Times story… her ratings have declined for the last three years straight. She is still the number one talk show, but she has lost a quarter of her female audience age 25 to 54 over the last 3 years. Her circulation for the magazine is down too. There are questions too as to whether her endorsement of Obama has hurt her, but I guess we’ll have to discuss that in another venue, since we are out of time now.

BD: I guess we will… we’ve been talking with Dr. Janice Peck, author of The Age of Oprah, Cultural Icon for the Neoliberal Era. Thank you so much, Janice.

JP: Thank you for inviting me.

[Excellent article, and I am surprised to find it from Le Monde diplomatique. It covers alot of the issues Obama's campaign propagandises; among others racial division, why Obama was chosen to embody the overcome of colour line and why this picture is false ("because that progress has not made American society more open or equal. In fundamental respects it is less open and equal today than it was in the days of Jim Crow when racism was not only prevalent but was state-sponsored."), on affirmative action and why it to applies to elites. gess]

Some Democrats are more equal than others

By Walter Benn Michaels

There have been two defining moments related to race in the Obama campaign, and more generally in United States progressive politics. The first was in January on the night of the Illinois senator’s victory in South Carolina when, in response to comments by Bill Clinton about the size of the black vote, the Obama crowd started chanting: “Race doesn’t matter.” (more…)

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats on Wednesday said they would like to see Germany take on thousands of refugees from Iraq. The hitch? They only want the Christians.

It would not for long other European countries will follow this trend.  Also, notice how the other CDU’s coalition partner, The SPD - the Social Democrats is silence about this proposal.

The blood thirsty war warriors and propagandist due are back! Spielberg’s and Lucas’:

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

A pathetic but an effective tool to dehumanize Non-Europeans.

And there is Iron Man film, a Pentagon Blockbuster.

Read the superb article by Nick Turse

Found another way to embed this short video. Hope it will work.

Go here for more information.

[Or how woman's body becomes a justification of a capitalist economy. I don't want to miss up Zine Magubane's brilliant essay, but you need to read and print. Once I read the article I appreciated more of my hijab. gess]

The Mammy and the Panopticon: African American Women in the Self-Help Movement

Posted May 8th, 2008 by Zine Magubane

(more…)

Which I can’t download.

Click the picture or here.

[I better post this essay before Zine  deletes again, gess.]

Oprah in South Africa: The Politics of Coevalness and the Creation of a Black Public Sphere

Posted May 1st, 2008 by Zine Magubane

(more…)