Michael Eric Dyson's Reflecting Black: African- American Cultural Criticism and Making Malcolm: The Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X
Watts, Jerry
REFLECTING BLACK: AFRICAN-AMERICAN CULTURAL CRITICISM, by Michael Eric Dyson. University of Minnesota Press, 1993. 384 pp., $19.95. MAKING MALCOLM: THE MYTH AND MEANING OF MALCOLM X, by Michael...
...Worse, he was directing a seminar in which even white female students had the nerve to criticize Malcolm...
...Like many reviewers he sees this movie as a heroic attempt to depict the tragic way that racism affects black life...
...One can only hope that he will find an intellectual community that provides him with both affirmation and criticism...
...Dyson calls him a "Promethean allperson...
...A fire is lit and the shop is consumed by flames...
...Simply put, even rap groups with political intentions (for example, Public Enemy) are not politically sophisticated...
...Dyson celebrates the rhetorical, even going as far as to argue that the thousands of black sermons delivered every Sunday constitute a tradition of "rhetorical resistance that has been prominently featured throughout black cultural history...
...To his credit, Dyson has written a provocative discussion of these movies...
...On national television a few days before the Million Man March, Dyson claimed that it was a march against sexism, homophobia, and antiSemitism...
...In fact, there is very interesting material for an analysis of Malcolm as myth that Dyson simply overlooks...
...Hopefully, this cultural entrée can be harnessed to generate a broader dialogue between hip-hop and traditional intellectual communities...
...Like too many other writers, Dyson assumes that the mere association of the label postmodern with things black miraculously upgrades the cultural status of the black phenomena...
...Michael Dyson is a work in progress...
...In some crucial respects Dyson does not succeed in rescuing the historical Malcolm from the myth of Malcolm...
...His writings have appeared in many national journals, he has published two books, appeared on Oprah, testified before Congress, and delivered many, many lectures both 114 • DISSENT Books in this country and abroad...
...Till then, traditional intellectuals who write about rap may continue to use it as another badge of their "otherness" within the academy...
...If Malcolm was "our manhood," what does this say about the majority of black men who in no way were as public or vociferous in denouncing American racism as Malcolm...
...They can either unfairly condemn their fellow ethnic artists/intellectuals, defending the existing standards as "universal...
...I raise the question of the traditional black intellectual's relationship to rap because I don't perceive the profundity of the music...
...Where does this come from...
...The police arrive and Raheem is "accidentally" killed...
...The best essays here are quite dynamic, the worst are forced efforts at profundity...
...White progressives and black intellectuals like Dyson have in mind another Malcolm, who rejected crude nationalism for a more cosmopolitan vision...
...Is it possible that academics celebrate rap in order to feel vicariously connected with the plight of the black urban poor...
...A major absence in Making Malcolm is any discussion of Louis Farrakhan...
...But one has not been exposed to the Michael Dyson experience until one has heard him speak...
...Choreographed performances become moments of spontaneous joy...
...Still, this is an aside...
...The idea of Malcolm had been absorbed within various personal identities...
...Dyson states that "central to Jackson's career is an abiding spiritual and religious consciousness that is expressed in his body of work as a performer...
...I do not need to listen to rap to hear the latest versions of various conspiracy theories about the secretly planned destruction of black men...
...He argues that Lee is caught in a cul-de-sac resulting from divergent ambitions—"to present the breadth of black humanity while proclaiming a black neo-nationalistic aesthetic...
...Even for the experienced writer, essay collections are notoriously difficult to coordinate...
...There are no heroic qualities to any of the black folks to make this a tragedy...
...After all, it is Farrakhan who most conspicuously appropriates the stylistic mantle of Malcolm...
...Even so, Dyson believes that the movie fails as social commentary...
...Or they can celebrate every nuance of folk culture...
...He begins with a short reflection on an encounter he had with black male students in his class at Brown who challenged him on his right to run a seminar on Malcolm...
...As Dyson correctly argues, black nationalism thrives during moments of intense white racism (and thus will probably be on the scene as long as there is a United States...
...Cultural resistance—embodied in Michael Jackson...
...Yet, this can only occur if those traditional intellectuals who celebrate rap can overcome their feelings of ethnic illegitimacy and defensiveness when engaging and confronting black rappers...
...This is particularly true among many of those black males most deeply invested in hip-hop...
...For him rap is significant because it captures the sensibility of urban black youth attempting to navigate a social structure that excludes them...
...Raheem's death is not tragic, it is pathetic...
...He labels rap star KRS-One's "edutainment" (the merger of entertainment and education) "a noteworthy and salutary achievement...
...Much of rap is decidedly sexist, if not misogynistic...
...From my vantage point, the pivotal scene in Do The Right Thing takes place when Sal, the Italian-American pizza shop owner, fights with a local black male, Radio Raheem...
...If this be the new black cinema, then bring back Shaft...
...Dyson has chosen to defend the emerging creative productivity of black Americans...
...Those of us who learn from this dynamic young voice can only hope that academic ambitions and the lure of fame do not derail him from realizing his considerable talents...
...The utter boundlessness of the subject matter informs us that it a young author's book...
...Yet rap cannot be ignored, for it contains creative forms of Afro-American opposition and accommodation...
...But herein lies the problem that Dyson conspicuously avoids...
...Perhaps an instructive example of this phenomenon would be the differences within the emerging postwar Jewish intelligentsia between a highbrow literary critic like Harry Levin of Harvard and a celebrator of Yiddish literature like Irving Howe...
...The students were angry at the fact that Dyson not only criticized Malcolm but did so in front of white students...
...We live in an age of cultural inflation, but then we always have...
...It was not long ago that very few readers had heard of Michael Eric Dyson...
...It is therefore no accident that despite Farrakhan's endorsement of Malcolm's murder (and possible implication in it), he is viewed by many blacks as a direct descendant of Malcolm...
...Are we to ignore the larger part of Malcolm's political life...
...Whether or not we have Malcolm to thank for this state of affairs is beside the point...
...In an interview republished here, Dyson makes further claims about rap that border on overstatement...
...It is like quoting from Hegel to illuminate the buttoning of one's shirt...
...He claims that the "moonwalk" dance performed by Jackson before fifty million viewers (on Motown's twenty-fifth anniversary show) elevated the performer from musical superstar to a "world historical figure...
...In this way, Jackson's apparent shallowness becomes a sign of his hidden depth...
...Although he claims he is commenting on the impact of these cultural media, he is in fact their prisoner...
...The main criterion that Dyson employs to evaluate these figures is merely their popularity...
...Reflecting Black: African-American Cultural Criticism, Dyson's first book, is a collection of previously published essays...
...Dyson recognizes but does not discuss that aside from his membership in the Nation of Islam, Malcolm's politics were decidedly rhetorical...
...might be considered the natives' promoters...
...At his best, Dyson harnesses his verbal mastery in engaging discussions...
...The burning of Sal's pizzeria is a feeble act of crowd mayhem...
...Evidently, these black male students viewed Malcolm as their ethnic/ class/gender icon and no one, including the black male professor, was supposed to criticize him Dyson was hurt and angered by their attempts to monopolize "Malcolm...
...As such, his significance depends in large measure on the vibrancy of the intellectual community that surrounds him...
...The only character with a political vision has a feeble if not farcical one, which centers around putting black people's portraits on the wall of the pizzeria in place of the Italian-American icons that Sal displays...
...For the greater part of his political life, Malcolm was an insular black nationalist, and worse, a black supremacist (a la the myth of Yacub and the morally superior black person...
...Perhaps he is correct, but he has to do more to establish this linkage than merely assert a correlation between the sexism and bravado of Malcolm and the sexism and bravado of black male film directors...
...I have no problem with calling rap an urban popular art form that simultaneously entertains and affirms marginal black lives...
...Dyson further states, "Rap music is a profoundly oral culture that exhibits the quest for literacy that has impelled the Afro-American community forward...
...Might our good man Hammer not better embody the gospel by spending his money on something other than race horses and huge mansions in Atlanta...
...248 pp., $19.95...
...One of the ironies of the legacy of Malcolm is the way his reactionary social vision becomes whitewashed and emerges in the Reagan era as proto-revolutionary...
...But the problem is that he attempts to offer creative discussions about materials that are often not very rich in meaning...
...Articles in the New Yorker, the Chronicle of Higher Education and the Atlantic Monthly have called him one of our nation's most prominent public intellectuals...
...Jokes aside, the celebration of rap by intellectuals like Dyson gives them a way to enter into dialogue with their less fortunate WINTER • 1996 • 115 Books urban peers...
...My hunch is that a sector of the black intelligentsia (including Dyson, Cornel West, Henry Louis Gates, Tricia Rose, and Houston Baker) have concertedly assumed responsibility for defending the creative validity of rap music in the face of its devaluation by mainstream white society and cultural institutions...
...From the reports of others, Dyson at his worst can appear to be more fluff than substance...
...Like Washington, the Nation of Islam abdicated a critical political engagement with a racist status quo in behalf of "self-improvement" and moral uplift...
...Rap is therefore both an affirmation of black urban life and a scream about its dead-end possibilities...
...More precisely, though he criticizes the sexism of Malcolm, he doesn't seem to realize how much Malcolm's appeal depends on his sexism...
...Besides his frivolous commentary on the mediocre musical score to a banal and easily forgotten film, Mo ' Money, the only truly vacuous essay in the Dyson collection is a discussion of Michael Jackson's postmodern spirituality...
...In other words, does not the invocation of Malcolm as the quintessential black male speak to a sense of unacknowledged weakness in the black community...
...What does rap mean to intellectuals like Dyson...
...Why, for instance, wasn't the anger of the black mob directed at the police instead of Sal...
...This stems in part from the image of rap as thoughtful and even "deep...
...Because of the diversity and disjointedness of these essays, the collection is difficult to review...
...I beg to disagree...
...His commentaries on Michael Jackson, Michael Jordan, and Bill Cosby are essentially commentaries on their media-created personae...
...In the portrayal of black ghetto life in movies like Juice, Straight Out of Brooklyn and Boyz N the Hood, Dyson sees an image of black maleness that he believes has as its focal point the idealization of Malcolm X. Dyson believes that the prevailing image of Malcolm as the model black man is saturated in sexism and macho bravado, and states that "without the sustained hero worship of Malcolm X, contemporary black cinema .. . is almost inconceivable...
...Such first generations to "break through" are often incapable of being honestly critical of the artistic productions of their ethnic peers...
...For most of his political life, Malcolm was the advocate of an anti-intellectual, cult-like movement that had as its basic philosophy a neo-Booker T. Washington celebration of petty capitalist enterprises (dry cleaners and small restaurants...
...MAKING MALCOLM: THE MYTH AND MEANING OF MALCOLM X, by Michael Eric Dyson...
...The tale is quite telling, for it exposes the depth to which the myth of Malcolm has saturated some black male minds—even Dyson's...
...from Leonard Jeffries, the reigning charlatan of African-American parochialism at New York's City College, to the 2 Live Crew pornography trial...
...I must confess to a degree of pessimism...
...He is an intellectual instigator, one who starts the tension but leaves before the rumble...
...In many respects, 118 • DISSENT Books he will rise to the level of his intellectual ambitions...
...Whether the linkage exists or not, we do know that the values proWINTER • 1996 • 117 Books jected in such films are often quite frightening...
...Cosby is "a formidable national icon . . . a powerful symbol of the graceful confluence of talent, wealth, and industry that are the American Dream...
...Often such universalists are seeking individual acceptance from those in cultural authority...
...The best part of Making Malcolm is an extended review of the literature on Malcolm X. The discussion is excellent and could serve as a road map for any novice student of Malcolm trying to weave through the literature...
...His rhetorical flourishes have left many audiences gasping, for Dyson is able to integrate the polysyllabic vernacular of academic philosophy with the cadences of black urban speech...
...They are primarily journalistic and impressionistic forays into contemporary black life and culture, covering topics from rap music to the cultural significance of the Cosby Show to the commodification of Michael Jordan's body...
...Come now, Mike...
...WINTER • 1996 • 119...
...In the movie, the black urban dwellers are by and large shiftless jokesters who have little more to do than "hang out...
...After all, it was the police who killed Raheem...
...His capacity for glib apologetics casts doubt on his political and moral seriousness...
...Like Malcolm, he is an avid black nationalist...
...In effect, instead of being native informers, Dyson et al...
...In Chapter 4, "Malcolm's Shadow: Masculinity and the Ghetto in Black Film," Dyson surveys the images of black manhood in some of the most popular recent "black" films...
...For the urban black youth, the Malcolm that is being recuperated is the parochial Malcolm, the Malcolm who was a spokesperson for the Nation of Islam...
...One cannot say, "If only Malcolm weren't sexist," for it is in part his sexism and his rejection of all femininity that makes him such a "heroic" black male figure...
...The choice is his...
...His weirdness embodies a universal representativeness...
...Undoubtedly, much of my disagreement with Dyson about the significance of Malcolm stems from the fact that Malcolm is a hero to Dyson whereas I don't think of him as a significant political thinker...
...He may be closer to a celebratory mode than he would like to admit...
...But Dyson outdoes himself when he argues for the significance of MC Hammer's dance record "Pray...
...I am aware that to designate Farrakhan as Malcolm's direct descendent will be considered ethnically sacrilegious to some blacks...
...Perhaps Dyson is referring to Jackson's abiding commitment to accumulating pieces of green paper with the inscription "In God We Trust...
...Dyson is a critic whose worldview has been dominated by the influence of the electronic media...
...Like Malcolm, he is a master of strident denunciations of white America...
...Had a white director or producer created Do the Right Thing, Dyson would have been up in arms claiming racism...
...Oxford University Press, 1995...
...But as far as I am concerned, rap is merely this generation's equivalent of Little Richard, James Brown, and Carla Thomas, with one major difference: rap has a more pernicious hold on the minds of today's urban youth than rhythm and blues had on us thirty years ago...
...As if this were insufficient, Dyson proceeds to drown Jackson in cultural studies hy116 • DISSENT Books perbole: Jackson's performances richly fuse Bakhtinian conceptions of carnival with Afro-American forms of spiritual ecstasy, producing a highly animated hybrid that creates space for cultural resistance and religious agency...
...Like previous generations of ethnic intellectuals on the verge of entering center stage, the black intellectuals of today come bearing the fruits of their devalued culture...
...Might this identification with the music substitute for authentic political engagement...
...Dyson must contend...
...Dyson's discussion of Spike Lee's movie Do the Right Thing is quite illuminating...
...Dyson offers an intriguing overview of rap music...
...The image of Malcolm as "our manhood" speaks to the deeply held needs of the Afro-American community and particularly the Afro-American male community...
...I went to hear one of these edutainment lecture/performances at my college and was shocked at how much of what KRS-One had to say was utterly superficial and wrong...
...Dyson argues that Hammer's record and video bring the message of the church "into a secular arena with the powerful motifs that are common to the church, and yet they transcend the narrow, sanctuary-bound messages that don't reach a wider populace...
...Some rap artists crudely celebrate violence while others offer humane condemnations of it...
...Dyson is critical of Lee's inability to create characters who are more than symbols: Lee's characters often lack complexity and instead are caricatures of pre-determined racial roles...
...Dyson's second book, Making Malcolm: the Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X, is significantly better than his first...
...Others are just elaborate restatements of received wisdom...
...I, for one, have rarely seen Dyson when he wasn't in top form...
...Raheem, the victim of police brutality, is a brain-dead brute who plays the same record over and over on his boom box...
...The Malcolm that is reconstituted in the 1990s has a split identity...
...I read Do the Right Thing as a crude neoconservative farce in blackface...
...As Dyson notes, there are severe tensions within rap music between those rappers with political visions and those who are simply interested in providing entertainment...
...Unfortunately Dyson seems to have taken anything and everything he has written and thrown it together...
...And why not...
...In retaliation for his murder, Mookie, a black male who works for Sal, throws a trash can through the pizza shop window...
...However, during the past five years Dyson has been an intellectual whirlwind...
...One can enter into a more informed political discussion at any neighborhood barber shop...
...I am often left speechless by their attempt to define Malcolm's recognition of the humanity of white folks as a crucial moment for all Afro-American people...
...Grandiose claims of cultural influence always abound when any new group of intellectuals and artists begins to push into the mainstream...
...So a rapper's admonition to pray while he sings and gyrates his hips is important because it leads listeners to piety...
...Needless to say, the center does not hold...
...If anything, rap may have hindered the quest for literacy among many members of our younger generation...
Vol. 43 • January 1996 • No. 1
