The Color Purple: Controversy At 25

The Color Purple marks its 25th anniversary this week with a Blu-Ray DVD release, prompting comparisons about the points of controversy it shares with contemporary films For Colored Girls and Precious.

The Color Purple: Controversy At 25
by Mark Anthony Neal | TheLoop21

When The Color Purple was released in December of 1985, Whoopi Goldberg was most known for her one-woman Broadway show and Oprah Winfrey was just a fledgling talk show host in Chicago. The film, based on Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel of the same title, went on to earn 11 Academy Award nominations including Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress nominations for Goldberg (Celie) and Winfrey (Sophia) respectively. This week the film will be released on Blu-Ray for the first time.

Though we often look back lovingly at The Color Purple, noting in particular the beauty of the cinematography, and its role in helping create mainstream interests in “Black” cinema—the film earned nearly $150 million—its release was shrouded in controversy. The Color Purple courted contention very much the way recent releases from Lee Daniels (Precious) and Tyler Perry (For Colored Girls) (films that, like The Color Purple, were male directed screen adaptations of literary works originally produced by Black women) did.

Read the Full Essay @ theLoop21

Imani Perry: Embracing Precious

We . . . yearn for the stories of those who sustain humanity and decency in the face of devastating poverty and marginalization . . . for those stories . . . are, after all, far more representative of Black life than the wreck that is Precious’ life.

Embracing Precious:
The nuances and truths in the individual and collective stories we tell
by Imani Perry

These are strange days indeed. We are firmly into the 21st century, and yet the 80s are haunting us. For African Americans it is yet again a decade of dream and deferral.

Back in the ‘80s, for the young Black and college educated, the doors of corporate America and other professions opened up and broadened the spectrum of the Black middle class like never before. But also, back in the ‘80s, crack cocaine and the aftermath of deindustrialization crippled areas of concentrated blackness in major urban centers.

Now in the 21st century, a new Black elite floods the popular imagination as Capitol Hill, the president and his administration become more and more colorful. But also now, in the 21st century, the recession hits Black communities hardest, and at the intersection of devastating rates of imprisonment, joblessness, and inadequate education lie a critical, hurting, mass of Black Americans.

Then came Precious.

The film, released in the Fall of 2009 elicited a flurry of responses. The debates over the film were complex, nuanced, impassioned. In fact, among the Black intelligentsia there seemed to be more discussion about Precious than there was about President Obama’s education agenda, the stimulus package, or rising unemployment and imprisonment. That was troubling. But then again, it is easier to fire off a blog post or provide a commentary about a movie than it is to write a concise response to a complicated web of policy, law, and economics. However, I believe the film elicited so much engaged response precisely because it highlighted the challenge of this moment when it comes to race in America.

The film tells an individual story, a poignant one, about an abused young woman in Harlem in the 1980s. If we attend to the individual story, fictional though it may be, our hearts go out to Precious. We see in her story personal resilience, possibility, healing. Those are good things.

The film tells a collective story. The story it tells is about the devastation that the 80s wrought on Black communities, and the failure of the public school system to provide a path out for “the underclass.”

In both the collective story and the individual story, there is truth. There is a real Precious out there. The story is fictional, but it is human. The problem is that fictional stories, especially ones on film, don’t just stand as individual stories, but they do “representative work.” They become part of the way we make sense of the world in which we live. The story of one novelist or filmmaker’s imagination becomes the story of entire groups of people or “types” of people. This is especially true when the kind of social location depicted in the story is remote from the experience of the majority of the viewers.

Read the Full Essay @ Afro-Netzien

'Precious' notes about un/predictability

Practicing What We Teach:
'Precious' Notes About Un/predictability
by Aisha S. Durham

Tuesday, I offered my black popular culture students a course summary. In the midst of reviewing the varied approaches employed to describe black popular culture from Hall, hooks and Darnell Hunt to Rose, Neal and Gwendolyn Pough, I stopped myself to ask the class what they thought of Precious.

Their comments echoed much of the preferred cultural criticism from institutional voices surrounding the film. They readily spotted controlling images, they critiqued ghettocentricity and ghetto realism in black cinema, they described the popular production of black women’s stories as told by men (making connections to Spike Lee, Tyler Perry, Steven Spielberg ), and they identified the ideological work used to construct the preferred reading of individual triumph sans structural/institutional support; and for the students who proclaimed (with added grunts, rolling eyes, and lip smacks) they would not watch a film that could make us look bad (i.e., black folks who look bad to white people), they had handy, ready-made speeches replete with age-old racial uplift rhetoric about positive/negative images. Both groups sat resolute in their “reading” of the film—demonstrating to me that they could apply the course material to engage critically with a media product. They anticipated my you-done-good smile. But, I took a breath and leaned over the laptop to announce:

I liked Precious.

With three words, I risked unraveling my tightly woven media/cultural studies course. On the final day of class, I had run the risk of losing credibility from my black feminist media studies teachers in training. Yet, in that moment, I had to run off course from my scripted notes to address the un/predictability of Precious and the implications of my empathetic re-reading of the film for media studies.

The Un/Predicability of Precious

First, I liked Precious for reasons other than its emotive, evocative rhetoric of struggle that recalls what some have dubbed poverty porn. Precious offers racial sincerity and a class sensibility without announcing itself as real or some authentic re-presentation of black urban life. There are varied depictions of blackness in conversation with one another, which disrupts the singularly focused and celebrated come-up, overcome narrative that makes it commercially viable. Visually, Daniels undercuts minor narrative arcs by splicing “real” violence with fantasy (i.e., real-fantasy as an escape from violence and real-fantasy to re-imagine another way of being in the world), and by using the voice of Precious as the narrator and the voice-over that interrupts and disrupts institutional voices (e.g., the teacher, the case worker) speaking for her and about her.

The institutional voices are the voices of authority—the ones who are heard. What we hear from some institutional voices in the popular is that moviegoers should read the book to appreciate or denounce the film (i.e., read the book to read the film accurately). What we hear from some institutional voices in the academy is that we should know the social facts or the statistical realities to talk about the un/realness of this story. Both of these responses assume stories—as social fact or fiction—get us closer to some knowable truth when each of them (with their own codes and conventions), use numbers, words and images to tell a story. And it is because of these voices that I imagine that a “Precious” could never be heard. She can only stand-in for or represent positions that already call her body into being.

As a media studies scholar, I am interested in what story is being told and whose story is being heard. From weeklong conversations about the film, it would seem the story depends on who you ask. Some identified with the teacher, the caseworker, the daughter. Few could digest the mother as both victim and victimizer. As a baby who was nicknamed Precious because of my mother’s perceived overprotection and as a the professor with educational capital who still carries a form of ghetto girl class consciousness from my public housing community in Norfolk (VA) to the university halls of College Station (TX), I found myself shifting viewing positions and aligning myself with different characters, which speaks to the multiplicity of blackness present and the competing stories that drew me to Precious in the first place. There can be multiple stories. There can be multiple stories. There can be multiple stories. What Precious reveals is the cultural politics surrounding class for black folks—especially those consumed with the omnipresence of whiteness. (Here, I am reminded of other discussions about hip hop and even some of my own commentary about Tyler Perry for that matter.) Here, class as a differential consciousness remains a thorny subject in media studies because there is an assumption that we agree on what constitutes the black popular proper. After hearing my own voices and those of homegirls and students, I am left to wonder when do the working class have “permission” to speak about lived realities and how do we really account for multiple representations of blackness in the black public sphere?

Second, I liked Precious because it does illuminate the impact of the patriarchal state vis-à-vis violence. Violence is structural and systemic through poverty, institutional and disciplinary through the welfare, juvenile justice and educational system, and interpersonal through emotional, physical and sexual, and verbal abuse and aggression. (And, yes those are interrelated.) The life chances of the poor black women in the film are deeply impacted by their navigation through and their cooperation with the state. Food, shelter and family cohesion are tied to (or severed by) the state. Precious must perform a re-victimization for the caseworker to “get her check” while performing acceptable black motherhood for another caseworker to keep her kid(s). The state commands the performance while simultaneously using these “acts” as evidence of black pathology. While national discussions about the state has routinely addressed the lived realities of black men, Precious forcefully depicts the significant role of the state in the policing and surveillance of poor black females. These are vulnerable bodies whose privates (body, home and otherwise) can be invaded, used and abandoned. As domineering as the Mary mother figure appears, she too is a victim of these varied modes of violence. I watched the film thinking about our inability to see anything redeeming in Mary speaks to our inability to see poor black women in general as vulnerable, as victim. Precious calls attention to the state of some poor black women by highlighting heteropatriarchal state/violence.

I came to Precious thinking that I knew the story, that I knew her story. I was prepared—like my students—to be a mad black woman because the stereotypes do exist in the film, and do perform the ideological work of the state. The cultural criticism highlighting the two is warranted. My reading shouldn’t contest it. Instead, my reading asked me to consider how these cinematic representations gain meaning. I left Precious thinking how and why is Precious so meaningful to me? The film invited me to access modes of differential consciousness in the same way that I was drawn to forms of hip hop to announce that I was a hip hop feminist years ago. Ultimately, Precious pushed me to hear another story—an unlikely and disliked one. And it is because of this push, I interrupted myself (and the student echo) in the classroom. Tuesday, I thought—for one moment—that there could be another Precious story to tell.

Aisha S. Durham is the co-editor of the books Home Girls, Make Some Noise!: A Hip-Hop Feminism Anthology and Globalizing Cultural Studies: Ethnographic Interventions in Theory, Method & Policy. Durham is Assistant Professor of Communications and Africana Studies at Texas A&M University.

"She's Not Just a Fat Aunt Jemima on a Pancake Box"

"She's Not Just a Fat Aunt Jemima on a Pancake Box":

A Response to Ishmael Reed
by Khadijah Costley White

Precious is one of the few movies I have truly appreciated in a while--and I've seen a good number of the "notable," patriarchal and sexist Black films that show how much Black men love white/light-skinned women that Reed uncritically admires in his review (ahem, The Great Debaters?!). Moreover, it sounds like Reed's central complaint is more about the lack of other similar portrayals of non-Blacks than an ACTUAL critique of this specific movie. In fact, based on his summary of the movie in his review, I'm not even sure he's seen the film.

Precious provides a new twist to an old stereotype--the "mammy" figure in this film speaks, she suffers, she schemes, she aspires, she fights back... she's not just a fat Aunt Jemima on a pancake box. I don't see typical, humanistic portrayals of overweight Black women that aren't comedy. I definitely see problems with Precious--one of them being that in order to create a sympathetic Black female welfare recipient, she has to be so ridiculously beat down. I wouldn't argue that it's a scot-free portrayal-- I'm just saying that its complexity deserves much more of a thorough critique than the "oh it's stereotypical" arguments that I've seen thus far. Finally, we get a film in which an overweight Black woman isn't just happy and funny.

Additionally, the fact that the character Precious narrates this film is extremely significant--the idea that she understands her own subjectivity and the conditions of a system in which she is undernourished and undereducated is absolutely integral to the power of this piece. Precious takes the stereotypes of Black people and transforms them into a real person with thoughts and ambition and complexity. THAT alone makes it a worthwhile film. Much better than The Green Mile or any of those other magic negro movies. No one said that Precious is supposed to represent the experience of all of Black humanity--no more than the Cosby show did.

Let's talk about what it means for her to be welcomed into the home of a loving lesbian couple. Let's talk about why it's important that she is so aware of her own surveillance that she steals her social worker's file and discusses the realities of a morally bankrupt system like "workfare" with her peers. Please, someone, analyze why its so poignant that one of her classmates can't help but laugh at the absurdity of a baby wrapped in a blood covered blanket. How about the damaging impact of colorism, represented by a dark-skinned girl's fantasy about being a white woman with blonde hair or being loved by a light-skinned man with "good hair"? And, ideally, we can ponder why Precious' mother tells the social worker "bring my baby back,"stating truthfully "that's what you do!" -- in this she reminds us of all the family reunification projects that have resulted in any number of murdered or horribly abused children, often after ignoring other types of kinship ties within the Black community.

In any case, who gets to decide what serves as Black "reality"? Ishmael Reed? Is there a review board? There are any number of human experiences--I don't like the DuBoisian tendency to pick and choose which ones count as worthwhile and which ones don't (thus, the complete disregard for a luminary like Zora Neale Hurston 100 years ago). Would a film about the savagery that some of us have seen our own female relatives suffer at the hands of male relatives make the "representational black film" cut?

And, even more importantly, can anything about Black women ever be about BLACK WOMEN, or will a male-centric gaze always shove us aside --even in our own narratives?

Khadijah White is a PhD student and Fontaine Scholar in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Previously, she worked as an Associate Producer at NOW on PBS.

'The Precious Specials' - A Conversation with the Brothers

'THE PRECIOUS SPECIALS' - A CONVERSATION WITH THE BROTHERS

Hosted by Esther Armah (WBAI/Wakeup Call)

Guests are: Quintin Walcott, Director of the CONNECT Training Institute and CONNECT’s Male Anti-Violence Initiatives; Mark Anthony Neal, author and Professor of African and African American Studies @ Duke University; Sharif Simmons, Creative Writing Teacher at the Alice Steven Center from 5th Grade to High School in Birmingham Alabama, Poet, Musician and Single Father.

Discussion of Black Male media reactions to the film Precious

Ishmael Read "The Selling of Precious" (Counterpoint)
Armond White "Pride and Precious" (New York Press)

Listen to Conversation HERE

A Young Father Thinks About 'Precious'

Thinking about Precious, Talking about Black Cinema
by Abdul Ali

I’m not sure if there’s been a film in my generation that has been the object of so much mixed emotion, and perhaps vitriol, drawing a line in the sand along gender lines. Almost all of the guys that I know have talked about Precious at arm’s length. Some of us have even said “I’m not ready to see that film.” Yet my female friends have almost unanimously said “I got to go see it”, etc.

The movie’s been out for a few weeks now. Granted, I’ve been busy but I know I could have seen it sooner. There was almost an instant retreat when I saw the extra large darkskinned black women featured prominently on film—a rarity for contemporary film. And this is unfortunate as the darkskinned black woman is a part of all of us, so why the hesitation? I suppose it’s because the big-boned black women aren’t framed in a flattering way and this is a part of a larger narrative. Remember growing up we’d call the fat black girl in class “fat and ugly?” Seeing this film made me confront the inherent self-loathing that so many of us have inherited.

For starters, I’ve always felt that American film, Black American cinema in particular, was lacking in so many ways. It didn’t have the pacing of indie films that I so love. I didn’t treat its viewers as intelligent. There wasn’t much poetry or going on with the cinematography—as these are all things I look for in films, as well as literature. And of course, most black characters are written as flat, stereotypes, never truly inhabiting that space that we all know is human and difficult to categorize.

Add to that, in my entire twenty years of movie going there may have been only ten films worthy of discussion on an intelligent level. The rest of them seem to embarrass the race rather than illuminate audiences about black life.

Considering all of that, I said “what the hell” and went to see a 9:30 showing yesterday evening and I was instantly surprised. Surprised because I knew angry black women back home in New York who were that cruel to their children, who were that mentally ill, and who were that invisible to society at large. Then all of a sudden, I didn’t think much about all of the “stereotyping rhetoric” that has been programmed from reading Donald Bogle and taking literary criticism in college.

Instead, what I saw was a young woman-child who was curious, fierce, and longing to be more fully human.

Read the Full Essay @ WORDS MATTER

A 'Precious' Debate

“Precious,” about a disadvantaged young woman played by Gabourey Sidibe, left, has sparked controversy over its meaning.

To Blacks, Precious Is ‘Demeaned’ or ‘Angelic’
by FELICIA R. LEE
Published: November 20, 2009

A reinforcement of noxious stereotypes or a realistic and therapeutic portrayal of a black family in America?

“Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire,” the new film about an obese, poor, illiterate, young black woman who is sexually and emotionally abused, has sparked this heartfelt and at times heated debate about its meaning in the two weeks since its limited release.

Now, as it opens nationwide in 100 markets this weekend, the conversation about which black stories are told, and how, is bound to intensify, thanks to post-screening discussion groups; the cultural influence of two of the movie’s executive producers, Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry; and the Oscar buzz the critically acclaimed film has already begun generating.

“In some ways, it’s ‘The Color Purple’ all over again, with people writing and talking about what this film represents,” said Mark Anthony Neal, a professor who teaches black popular culture at Duke University. He was referring to the 1985 film based on the novel by Alice Walker, which was directed by Steven Spielberg and starred Ms. Winfrey.

Read full article @ The New York Times

'The Color Purple' vs. 'Precious'

These two commercially successful, much-hyped films both explore incest, teenage pregnancy, illiteracy and colorism within the black community. So why has “Precious” not gotten “The Color Purple” treatment?

The Color Precious
by Salamishah Tillet

Given its celebrity fanfare and feminist themes, is Lee Daniels’ Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, a 21st-century The Color Purple? Or is it Native Son in drag?

Lee Daniels’ second film, Precious, fared quite well last weekend. Despite its soft release in only 18 theaters, Precious pulled in a remarkable $1.8 million, suggesting that on average, each theater made $100,000 off its showing. Even my brazen attempt to see the film in Times Square on Sunday night resulted in my having to purchase a ticket for Monday morning, because all four of the remaining shows were sold out in Harlem and Union Square.

With its mostly positive critical reviews and its popularity among African-American audiences, Precious, for all appearances, has struck gold. In many ways, the cultural phenomenon that has become Precious harkens back to the financial success of The Color Purple, Steven Spielberg’s 1985 adaptation of Alice Walker’s 1982 novel of the same name. A year after its original release date, The Color Purple, which also boasted a strong opening had made almost $100 million.

However, unlike the favorable reception that has greeted Precious, The Color Purple sparked great controversy about its negative portrayals of African-American families, and, in particular, African-American men. Given their explorations of the similar themes of incest, teenage pregnancy, illiteracy and colorism within the African-American community, why has Precious received so little backlash?

Read the Full Essay @ THE ROOT

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Salamishah Tillet is an assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and co-founder of the non-profit organization, A Long Walk Home, Inc., which uses art therapy and the visual and performing arts to document and to end violence against underserved women and children.

Sapphire Chats Up 'Push' and 'Precious' with Katie Couric

Author Sapphire talks about the new movie "Precious" inspired by her novel "Push," the process of casting the lead actress Gabourey Sidibe, and the inspirational message of the story.