from Vibe.com
CRITICAL NOIR:
Elizabeth Alexander's INNERVISION
by Mark Anthony Neal
In a cultural and commercial world largely defined by the myopic pretensions of a largely invisible white male elite (the more visible they are, the less powerful they be), the contours of blackness--that amorphous, stasis-bending "giant" that is always in the room--can rarely be deciphered. In her book, The Black Interior (2004) Elizabeth Alexander--the recently tapped Inaugural Poet--observes that blacks are "too often prisoners of the real trapped in fantasies of 'Negro authenticity' that dictate the only way we truly exist for a mainstream audience is in their fantasies of our authentic-ness." (7) Alexander's observations seem perfectly pitched for a historical moment, that she will be largely remembered, for helping to frame for the American body politic. Throughout The Black Interior, Elizabeth Alexander posits a "dream space"--"the black interior"--where African Americans and others of African descent counter the debilitating and truncating affects of "mainstream constructions of our 'real'." (5) Alexander describes "the black interior" as "black life and creativity behind the public face of stereotype and limited imagination." (x)
Within black everyday life Alexander finds the black interior most powerfully expressed in the living room--the "literal 'black interiors,' inside the homes of that black people live in." [9] She extends this metaphor in examining the careers of poets Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Michael S. Harper and the 19th-century intellectual Anna Julia Cooper, as well as in considering black masculinity and Jet magazine (still ghetto-fabulous after all these years). She cites the latter, the largest circulating weekly aimed at black readers and the sister journal of the popular monthly Ebony Magazine, for its role in constructing and circulating "race pride"--a "handbook for a logic that understands the primacy of race, the primacy of blackness," observing the ways that the weekly pamphlet was "important for me to understand as I grew up in an era in which the happy rhetoric of integration was gospel." (95)
"Race Pride" is a term that Alexander also applies to Hughes, noting that his work presents a " 'race-pride' moment par excellence. He is 'our' poet laureate, our 'Shakespeare in Harlem'." (21) The essay on Hughes examines the poet's role in creating a canon of African-American poetry, notably through his editing of the anthology New Negro Poets: USA ( 1964). As published, the anthology was very different from the one that Hughes had originally envisioned. Whereas Hughes envisioned a collection that captured the embryonic energies of the still unnamed Black Arts Movement of the early 1960, his publishers were more interested in a collection that catered more to the taste sensibilities of mainstream readers. In Alexander's view the book was an example of how the "best of intentions can also be thwarted by the very real exigencies of the publishing companies--almost always white--that enable words to make their way to us." (40) Ironically Hughes is also a figure that also exemplifies Alexander's observation that the "black interior" is also a space "that black people ourselves have policed at various historical moments"--the space where race pride collides with Hughes's sexuality and the "troublesome" identities of so many other black bodies. (x) One of the best examples of this dynamics are the difficulties filmmaker Isaac Julien experienced during the making of Looking for Langston, where Hughes's estate denied the filmmaker use of Hughes poetry, because the film explicitly addressed the poet's sexuality.
Read the Full Essay @
Elizabeth Alexander's INNERVISION
by Mark Anthony Neal
In a cultural and commercial world largely defined by the myopic pretensions of a largely invisible white male elite (the more visible they are, the less powerful they be), the contours of blackness--that amorphous, stasis-bending "giant" that is always in the room--can rarely be deciphered. In her book, The Black Interior (2004) Elizabeth Alexander--the recently tapped Inaugural Poet--observes that blacks are "too often prisoners of the real trapped in fantasies of 'Negro authenticity' that dictate the only way we truly exist for a mainstream audience is in their fantasies of our authentic-ness." (7) Alexander's observations seem perfectly pitched for a historical moment, that she will be largely remembered, for helping to frame for the American body politic. Throughout The Black Interior, Elizabeth Alexander posits a "dream space"--"the black interior"--where African Americans and others of African descent counter the debilitating and truncating affects of "mainstream constructions of our 'real'." (5) Alexander describes "the black interior" as "black life and creativity behind the public face of stereotype and limited imagination." (x)
Within black everyday life Alexander finds the black interior most powerfully expressed in the living room--the "literal 'black interiors,' inside the homes of that black people live in." [9] She extends this metaphor in examining the careers of poets Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Michael S. Harper and the 19th-century intellectual Anna Julia Cooper, as well as in considering black masculinity and Jet magazine (still ghetto-fabulous after all these years). She cites the latter, the largest circulating weekly aimed at black readers and the sister journal of the popular monthly Ebony Magazine, for its role in constructing and circulating "race pride"--a "handbook for a logic that understands the primacy of race, the primacy of blackness," observing the ways that the weekly pamphlet was "important for me to understand as I grew up in an era in which the happy rhetoric of integration was gospel." (95)
"Race Pride" is a term that Alexander also applies to Hughes, noting that his work presents a " 'race-pride' moment par excellence. He is 'our' poet laureate, our 'Shakespeare in Harlem'." (21) The essay on Hughes examines the poet's role in creating a canon of African-American poetry, notably through his editing of the anthology New Negro Poets: USA ( 1964). As published, the anthology was very different from the one that Hughes had originally envisioned. Whereas Hughes envisioned a collection that captured the embryonic energies of the still unnamed Black Arts Movement of the early 1960, his publishers were more interested in a collection that catered more to the taste sensibilities of mainstream readers. In Alexander's view the book was an example of how the "best of intentions can also be thwarted by the very real exigencies of the publishing companies--almost always white--that enable words to make their way to us." (40) Ironically Hughes is also a figure that also exemplifies Alexander's observation that the "black interior" is also a space "that black people ourselves have policed at various historical moments"--the space where race pride collides with Hughes's sexuality and the "troublesome" identities of so many other black bodies. (x) One of the best examples of this dynamics are the difficulties filmmaker Isaac Julien experienced during the making of Looking for Langston, where Hughes's estate denied the filmmaker use of Hughes poetry, because the film explicitly addressed the poet's sexuality.
Read the Full Essay @
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