theARCHIVES: Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance

“Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance”, Revisiting Manthia Diawara

Diawara’s piece resonates on, at times, uncomfortable levels. He is not the only individual I’ve read who deals with the idea of a resistant spectatorship on the part of viewers who reject presumptuous identifications (presumptuous on the part of XYZ casting director, writer, or director). Bell hooks, Black feminist scholar, calls it an “oppositional gaze.”

But more than character identification, which is Diawara’s primary concern, sign recognition should also function as part of the business of problematizing Black spectatorship. I should note that I am not under any circumstances trying to suggest that one Black work will satisfy the Black monolith, because no such thing exists. And in fact, Diawara’s disdain for “The Color Purple”, perhaps my favorite movie of all time, proves this point (even as it raises so many questions via the unusual marriage of Steven Spielberg and Alice Walker).

I do want to point out, however, that essays can be written at-length on the issue because of gaping absences and omissions of Blackness and formulaic treatments of Blackness—or any underrepresented identity—on the whole.

Diawara says, “The manner in which Black spectators may circumvent identification and resist the persuasive elements of Hollywood narrative and spectacle informs both a challenge to certain theories of spectatorship and the aesthetics of Afro-American independent cinema.”

Diawara has just laid out two important things:

(1) He has taken dominant theories of spectatorship, arguably, a key component of film theory at-large, and conceptualized it as a space where “Afro-American independent cinema” cannot be found (because, implicitly, it does not want to be found there); and

(2) He is naming an alternate cinema, not simply Afro-American, but “independent.”

Furthermore, he’s suggesting this cinema might or must follow aesthetic principles that do not comply with Hollywood narrative formulations.

The independent description is crucial, I believe, to understanding how we arrive at Diawara’s essay in the first place. It is an interesting point to expound upon as I return to the ‘Hollywood-as-colony’ motif. If the six men who understood the “whole equation of pictures” in Old Hollywood ran a colony, then whoever’s running the New Hollywood is Puppet Master-Big Brother to the whole world.

Haile Gerima, director of “Sankofa” (his most critically acclaimed film) and most recently “Teza” (winner of the ‘African Oscar’, the Golden Stallion of Yennenga) describes my sentiment this way: “In my view, I do not believe cinema is a benign entertainment. I feel it’s one of the most unexamined, unscrutinized tool[s] of colonialism. It’s the most effective weapon that’s made the world a colony of one world.”

He continues, “[A]s American capitalism spearheaded the industry of cinema, (…)not only was cinema [NOT] just ‘benignly’ being cinema, but transforming the grammar and language of white supremacy in cinema. Literature didn’t do that,” he says. “No European literature went to Africa and invaded Africa. Africans have their own oral tradition around the fire.” (emphasis mine)

The art of storytelling, then, has been shortchanged.

Dominant cinema is so good, and so universal that it is imposed, engraved even, on the rest of the world to the point of (colonial) self-loathing. Gerima, born in Ethiopia, gives the example of displaced identification using an actual film he recalls from his early years. In the film, one white man kills 6,000 Africans. Gerima says, “Like hell, you—an African—will identify with the Africans instead of the white hero.”

While one may find an alternate reading of the characters as they view, he explained the complex he subtly began to develop once he examined the disconnect between himself and the people who are “supposed” to be like him, in order to illustrate how cinema has, in his words, “expedited the language of film.” This is the reason a documentary like “John and Jane” can be made, briefly citing one Indian woman’s narcissistic obsession with her blonde-dyed hair, or multiple instances of skin bleaching—all subtle cases of self-mutilation—can happen without anyone flinching. Or, to return to Diawara’s examples, if a Black male child views “The Color Purple” repeatedly, he’ll come to believe he must behave like a bumbling, stumbling Harpo or a physically/sexually/verbally abusive master rapist called Mister where his relations with Black females are concerned, lest he be ‘castrated.’ Or should he view “The Birth of a Nation”, he’ll subtly come to absorb the idea of limitless desire for Little Sisters everywhere—or he may resent all of these representations and inscriptions of his identity and those who require him to perform his masculinity in these ways on a subconscious level.

Continuing with “The Birth of a Nation”, Diawara argues, “[It] appears to misread history for ideological reasons: Not only is Little Colonel a fake father and hero, but the Black experience is rendered absent in the text. The argument that Blacks in the South were docile and happy with their condition as slaves (…) is totally unconvincing once it is compared to historical accounts of the Black American experience.” History in itself is not a stagnant text, but Diawara’s point, that Black audiences won’t accept these readings against ‘reality’ is debatable as well.

When Diawara consults Eddie Murphy’s character in “48HRS”, he’s really invoking the spirit of a shameful and sizeable amount of films Hollywood puts forth as contemporary “Afro-American” film. The dearth of dramatic roles—to say nothing of full, feature-length films—still speaks to a misreading of Black people as “happy” if not “docile”, and noble savage, or just plain savage if not “happy.” I’m not protesting comedy or the bloodiest gunfight, but as long as a “production and consumption” model is what Hollywood stands on, I find it hard to believe that anything will change; and I find it harder to believe that as it continues, the Black people to whom these images are being force fed, aren’t subtly wrestling with this indoctrination—apart from some kind of “accurate” historical/real-time reference work being done. In other words, when I laugh at Tyler Perry in drag as “Madea”, it’s a recognition of a character based on some real grandmother or great-aunt-like figure I can relate to rather than an ‘emasculated Black man in a dress.’ But as a Black male, I don’t know how I might read or relate to Tyler Perry in drag as “Madea.” I may laugh, but not as fully; perhaps quietly resenting the reappearance of this trope that won’t die—the ‘emasculated Black man in a dress.’

To use Gerima’s thoughts in conversation with Manthia Diawara’s essay, even the greatest exhorter and missionary could not make the entire world submit to this kind of self hatred and subtle, but concurrent, obedience to the white supremacist construction of the cinema. Diawara recycles the Frantz Fanon quote, “Every spectator is a coward or a traitor” (p 900).

The answer to the problem of spectatorship, in my opinion then, is Diawara’s Afro-American independent cinema. But if this cinema is to exist, sustain itself, even thrive it must do as Diawara says. It must fully complicate and problematize every questionable representation. It must prompt the conversation that film ought to be in with the communities it’s meant for. It must complicate the spectator’s role as much as the film itself. “One of the roles of Black independent cinema, therefore, must be to increase spectator awareness of the impossibility of an uncritical acceptance of Hollywood products.”