The ghettoisation of African American communities is represented in texts and film as the spatialization of racial discrimination. Progress is thus a notion exclusive to the white middle-class, mobilised through the course of gentrification. In discussing the significance of place in Diasporic history, I will argue that this manifests in the context of The Sellout through the text’s distinct absence of a homeland – and its figuration of the ‘lost’ African American. Moreover, I will discuss how this complicates the link between place and selfhood in African American texts, and the subsequent problematisation in the hyphen marking the African American identity. Yet the by-product of the popularisation of black culture within mainstream media, is the idea of the ghetto becoming a spectacle to white America, providing a source of fascination while romanticising urban success. This problematises the concept of progress, yet I will argue that societal progress is driven further away for impoverished African American communities due to the gentrification of ghettoed areas. I will be discussing this idea as the narrative backdrop of Carlos López Estrada’s directorial debut Blindspotting. Dissembling the etymology of ‘ghetto’ – once referring to a labour pool which was necessary yet unwanted – it underwent a semantic transformation as the societal necessity of their labour was eliminated. Thus, due to systematic unemployment, there lacked economic dependency to safeguard the community, creating a social severance from the majority populace.
The invisibility of the ghetto marks a societal refusal to acknowledge the African American populace. The want of place and home in The Sellout is mobilised as Dickens is taken off the map. This is crucial to the text as it becomes the narrator’s purpose to reclaim Dickens’ identity, his drive “bespeaks a diasporic desire for home, for visibility on the American map”. The symbol of a map as a plotting of visibility and social representation is imperative to Beatty’s standpoint on African American ghettoisation. Dobbs comments on its anthropological significance: “maps are “epistemological, political, and pedagogical tools for claiming territories and for legitimizing […] divisions between peoples and nations””. This act of taking Dickens off the map is thus a cartographical silencing of African American communities. The disposability of minority communities in America is literalised by Beatty through Dickens’ removal from maps. Morrison mirrors this concern in Sula, opening the novel with a depreciation of Bottom’s status: ‘it wasn’t a town anyway’. Like Dickens, Bottom’s identity is stripped away through Western classifications of place and civilisation at large. Lorde counters this through her decapitalisation of ‘america’, taking away the distinction of place through language. Lorde uses the novelistic form of Zami to stage her rebellion, combatting Western erasure of minority communities through their own individualistic medium.
This spatial erasure speaks to the place racial discourse holds in modern, liberalised Western culture. Beatty’s narrator marks a differentiation between concepts of closure and erasure in society. He contests the idea of ‘closure’ on racial equality, instead stressing a mode of ‘erasure’ in our culture of racial politics and the marginalisation of minority communities. Thus, to reinstate cultural conversation about race and the lack of social progress, the narrator “whispered racism in a post-racial world”. Beatty’s phraseology “post-racial world” is key in reviewing the state of modern social politics. The phrase looks back to ostracised ghetto districts and remembers their labour in a world that is refusing to acknowledge them or racial disparity to any extent.
Place and nationhood in many individualist cultures correlate directly with a sense of self and a concrete grounding for one’s identity – yet this is lost within African American discourse. Ellison talks of the weight of this locational absence in African American literature as the “symbol of the Negro’s perpetual alienation in the land of his birth”. This is demonstrated by Beatty as the narrator presents us with a bipartite identity: “Dickens was me. And I was my father”. The hometown is thereby a paternal figure, it shapes and informs identity as validly as parentage. Beatty’s withholding of the narrator’s and his father’s name further reflects this absence of identity. A loss of Self is thus figured when these things are taken from him: “suddenly I had no idea who I was, and no clue how to become myself.” The idea of “becoming” yourself imagines identity as not a fixed constancy, but a mutable, transitional process, subject to the idea of hometown and the loss of this. The anxiety over the construction of the Self in African American literature, stems from the severing of identity that accompanied slavery. Thus, this identity is often marked by its diasporic history, which becomes a point of significance when Kinshasa calls Dickens “too black” to be sister-cities with. ‘Blackness’ thus becomes a measure of ghettoisation and diasporic confinement. Ghettoisation is a crucial basis for a lack of place, which Ellison asserts “expresses the feeling borne in upon many Negroes that they have no stable, recognized place in society”, emphasising the inescapability of the “ghetto maze”.
Blindspotting uses the image of oak trees to display the severing link between communities and their home as a result of gentrification. Estrada focuses on a photographer’s work depicting Oakland oak trees where they used to grow, who comments “Now they’re just street signs”. This motif recurs as an oak tree stump is used as a table; whereby black heritage transforms into an exotic piece of furniture. The thematic climax comes as Collin explicitly equates Oakland aborigines to oak trees: “search the trunk in my own town. | Did you count his rings when you bled him?”. The polysemy of “trunk” and “rings” creates ties between people and nature through a belonging to their landscape. Yet identity’s ties to geographical origin are problematised by what Harkness calls a white “over-identification with stereotypical elements of so-called Black street culture.”
Obscuring the notion of progression and the effects of ghettoisation further is its transformation into a spectacle for the white gaze. Blindspotting exploits and satirises the voyeuristic fascination with the disintegration of urban landscapes and weighs in on issues of gentrification as a co-dependent of ghettoisation in Oakland. Estrada parodies what Mukherjee termed the ‘ghetto fabulous genre’ which often “ascribe[s] a nostalgic allure to working class life”. This is illustrated through the use of hip-hop as a channel of communication to white America, and a vehicle for rage at injustice – which Collin voices: “Everyone conditioned to listen to a rapping [‘n’ word]”. Estrada thus demonstrates African Americans as voiceless unless through hip-hop, a medium founded in black communities’ “moment of greatest misery and anguish”. This notion is echoed in The Sellout as Dickens is made into a spectacle for a white audience. The narrator describes a tourist’s trip to Dickens as a “urban safari”, reducing the African American population to exoticized wildlife. Beatty creates a correlation between the ghetto as an exhibition for white voyeurism, and the more generalised spectacle of black life and racial progress:
At the zoo, I stood in front of the primate cage listening to a woman marvel at how “presidential” the four-hundred-pound gorilla looked […]. When her boyfriend, his finger tapping the informational placard, pointed out the “presidential” silverback’s name coincidentally was Baraka, the woman laughed aloud, until she saw me, the other four-hundred-pound gorilla in the room […]. Then she became disconsolate, crying and apologizing for having spoken her mind and my having been born. “Some of my best friends are monkeys,” she said accidentally. It was my turn to laugh. I understood where she was coming from. This whole city’s a Freudian slip of the tongue, a concrete hard-on for America’s deeds and misdeeds. (Beatty, 5)
This passage situates the African American under the white gaze. The narrator addresses this by explicitly naming himself “the other four-hundred-pound gorilla in the room”. The comparison works to satirically massage racist ideologies of black people as more primitive. The narrator becomes exterior and describes himself from the white woman’s perspective; who apologises for “speaking her mind” instead of her racism – suggesting there is an innate racism in the white public. The setting of a zoo further spatialises African Americans as under a constant white gaze and ridicule, trapped in a “primate cage” of oppression. Her “Freudian slip of the tongue” is generalised to the whole city, which acts as a microcosm for all America. Moreover, the city comes to represent the justice system – a city built on decisions of what is right and wrong. Yet Beatty complicates this sense of morality as the narrator “understood where she was coming from”. Beatty laughs in the face of a racist America trying desperately to seem otherwise. The novel opens and closes with an acknowledgement of Barack Obama as the first black US president. This however does nothing to break Beatty’s disillusionment in American social progress or change the events of the text. This satire of American exceptionalism permeates the text and is consummated at the end of the novel in Closure, as the narrator remembers when “the black dude was inaugurated”. The narrator cannot understand the celebration of Barack Obama’s presidency, because he knows this doesn’t signify progress. It shows racism not ended but changed – a change marked in his experience at the zoo.
Beatty aligns his novel with postmodernist ideologies through his disposal of grandnarratives. The Sellout challenges the grandnarrative of American exceptionalism, specifically targeting freedom and progress. The narrator challenges the relationship between progression and regression by reinstating segregation, while using the absurdism of the black slave-owner, to dismantle notions of racial advancement and relapse. Moreover, Blindspotting shows the complication of progression as Collin witnesses a cop-killing as he turns onto Martin Luther King Jr. Street, spatialising the idea of progression and where it is obstructed.
Progress is complicated through issues of gentrification and the fetishization of urban aesthetics. Blindspotting shows an epidemic of consumer culture’s romanticising of poverty. It narrativizes the process of gentrification as “turn[ing] the projects into prospects”. The film frames Oakland as the epicentre of contemporary urban life and portrays the loss of community value to monetary. Estrada puts this idea at the forefront of the film through the use of split-screen in the opening shots, presenting a dual view of Oakland. This functions to juxtapose perspectives of Oakland: a community run by and belonging to its locals, or a suburbanising city being modernised and rebuilt for a white population drawn to an urban aesthetic. This shot exemplifies this dichotomy, as the left half shows the message “Rooted in Oakland”, illustrating a resistance from the native people of Oakland against classist social change. The lexicology of “Rooted” holds historical weight, evoking the severance of heritage slavery caused, bringing into view the black diasporic history. Additionally, the image of a road sign places emphasis on consumer car culture in the evolution of gentrification, a marker of Western capitalism. This is another social structure alongside gentrification, ghettoisation, and colonialism that works to subjugate African Americans. This is corroborated by Balshaw’s description of the “white influence held at one remove figuring in the larger social and economic structuring of the city and the ghetto”.
Protagonist Collin expresses uncertainty over the effects of gentrification; between the luxury of commodities indicating this process such as ‘green juice’, and inflation driving out the predominantly black lower classes of the city. As this conflict becomes racially charged, he cannot fully identify with either and thus creates a metaphor for his identity in Rubin’s Vase. His character’s drive throughout the film is to prove himself as a holistic image – not wanting to be viewed singularly as a black ex-convict, nor wanting to identify with the white incursion gentrifying Oakland. Yet, the basis of Rubin’s vase is you cannot see both images at once. This culminates as he repeatedly exclaims at the policeman “I am both pictures!”, pleading to be understood as a product of increasing social and class divisions in a city trying to conform to middle-class taste. This refers back to the opening sequence – the mise en scene provides the viewer with two perspectives of gentrification, leaving the subconscious to choose which viewpoint they will register first. This impediment of progress caused by gentrification is affirmed in The Sellout, Hominy dubbing it as the “Ku Klux Influx”. This phrase suggests the white “Influx” which gentrification brings is the force obstructing racial equality. The narrator can only achieve progress in Dickens through resisting white gentrification’s influence, namely reinstating segregation and taking back black social autonomy.
Ultimately, American ghettoisation of black communities allows for a spatial repression of racial discourse in society – inhibiting any cultural memory of diasporic history. Ellison made the claim that “the novel has always been bound up with the idea of nationhood”. With this in mind The Sellout reverts this idea, and embodies a vision of America without nationhood, without visible citizenship. This is significant as place is inherently bound to identity in African American literature, as Bambara writes: “Where we are is who we are”.
Yet, ghettoes have become a spectacle, appropriated and turned into economic gain for white people through gentrification. These issues currently permeate African American life, and greatly obstruct the view of progress and change for racial minorities. The gentrification of ghettoed areas pinpoints how racism evolves with the times and finds new ways to ingrain itself into society, “But it don’t necessarily have to be that way”.
Bibliography
Bambara, Toni Cade, ‘The Lesson’, in Gorilla, My Love, (New York: Random House, 1972), http://www.cengage.com/custom/static_content/OLC/s76656_76218lf/bambara.pdf, [accessed 20/12/19] pp. 1-7
Balshaw, Maria, Looking for Harlem: Urban Aesthetics in African-American Literature, (London: Pluto Press, 2000)
Beatty, Paul, The Sellout (2015), (London: Oneworld, 2017)
Berman, Marshal, New York Calling, (London: Reaktion Books, 2007)
Dobbs, Cynthia, ‘Mapping Black Movement, Containing Black Laughter: Ralph Ellison’s New York Essays’, in American Quarterly, 68, (2016), 907-920
Ellison, Ralph, The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison ed. Callahan, John F., (New York: Modern Library, 2003)
Blindspotting, dir. Estrada, Carlos López (Lionsgate, 2018)
Harkness, Geoff ‘Thirty years of Rapsploitation: hip-hop culture in American cinema’, in The Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop, ed. by Justin A. Williams, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 168–180
Lorde, Audre, Zami: A New Spelling of my Name (1982), (London, Penguin Classics, 2018)
Morrison, Toni, Sula (1973), (London: Penguin Random House, 2004)
Mukherjee, Roopali, ‘THE GHETTO FABULOUS AESTHETIC IN CONTEMPORARY BLACK CULTURE’ (2006), in Cultural Studies, Vol 20, pp. 599-629 (p. 606), <https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380600973978>, [accessed 19/12/19]
Smith, Valerie (ed.), ‘Introduction’, in Representing Blackness: Issues in film and Video, (London: Athlone Press, 1997) pp. 1-12
Comments
Post a Comment