George Crum with Aunt Kate

The culinary history of America has erased the true contribution of African Americans to American cuisine in every phase of its development, and continues to pigeonhole African American cuisine in the category of soul food, used as a type of cultural and culinary shackle. Moreover, there are numerous African American women and men who have served in the capacity of chefs and cooks in America’s kitchens and against all odds made indelible marks on the cuisine of this country.

One such narrative surrounds the resort town of Saratoga Springs, New York, home to African American residents who were largely hotel service people in the early to mid 1800s, working in the capacity of chefs, cooks, waiters, and maids. Black musicians were employed at the hotels as well. While serenaded by Francis (Frank) Johnson’s very own music compositions at Congress Hall Hotel and United States Hotel in Saratoga Springs, you could experience wonderful dining treasures supplied by Mrs. Anne Northup. She and her husband Solomon Northup, who became a familiar name in African American history, were year round residents and both worked at the United States Hotel, which opened in 1824.

Having garnered a reputation as an outstanding cook, Anne Northup had been hired to take charge of the “culinary department” at Sherrill’s Coffee House in Sandy Hill, twenty miles away. In the latter part of March, 1841, on one of her days there, her husband Solomon was approached on the street by two slave dealers pretending to be interested in hiring him as a violinist to play for a circus. Solomon Northup, a free African, was drugged, kidnapped, and sold into slavery – a common occurrence in America. His riveting narrative, Twelve Years A Slave, published in 1853, chronicles his life and some of the lives of Africans with whom he suffered, on plantations in Louisiana. After Mr. Northup’s rescue, he returned to his family at Glen Falls, in Warren County, where his wife was in charge of the kitchen at the Carpenter’s Hotel.

For many diners–including a number of senators, governors, wealthy financiers, and presidents–Saratoga had its legendary waiters and chefs. George Crum, the African/Native American chef at Cary Moon’s lake house, was particularly celebrated for his fish dinners. His most famous creation came into being when he responded to a customer complaint that the fried potatoes served were cut too thick. Crum prepared some new ones by shaving some potatoes paper thin and dropping them in hot oil. Salting them first, he sent them out to the customer never expecting to receive approval. The customer loved them. Crum’s “Saratoga chips,” i.e., potato chips, received rave reviews and were soon on menus throughout the country. The man who invented the potato chip and launched a multi-billion dollar snack business died on July 22, 1914, and was said to have left behind a small fortune.

If you could afford to have your meals professionally prepared, New York City was the place to eat. Black caterers were numerous in New York, and their services have a long history. According to Booker T. Washington, catering in New York City began with Black women. Between 1780 and 1820 Cornelia Gomez, great-grandmother of Dr. P. W. Ray of New York, was among the most recognized of Black women caterers. She catered for the most prominent families in the city and was succeeded by “Aunt” Katie Ferguson, who stayed in business until about 1820. Washington states that catering had been almost totally in Black hands, and that Black men “[took] it up where the women left it.”

Some early to mid-nineteenth century Blacks in Brooklyn responded to their exclusion from the labor force, or their status as “outcasts and indigent sons of Africa,” by selling oysters and crabs about town on Sundays. Late nineteenth and early twentieth century Brooklyn’s small group of Black businessmen, whose businesses centered on food service included William Pope, owner of the Square Café, and John Connor, who operated the elite Royal Café, which only a few white cafés could surpass in beauty or in up-to-date service. In addition, Professor B. H. Hawkins owned the New National Hotel and Restaurant.

Cato’s Tavern (or Roadhouse), in New York City, was an early version of a sports bar. Cato’s clientele included numerous horse race fans. Situated midway along the Harlem speedway, on Post Road at what is now 59th Street and 2nd Avenue, this African American barkeeper served “unadulterated brandy,” Cuban cigars (shipped direct), and a woodcock and toast for breakfast.

Whether in the occupation of bartender, cook, caterer, or chef, Blacks in New York dominated most of these positions for generations and were uncontested in their quality of service. Nor was there dispute that the best food that could be procured in New York City was that furnished by “coloured” caterers. During the decades preceding the Civil War, Thomas Jackson, who serviced the most exclusive parties and fashionable weddings, and Henry Scott, who launched one of the most successful pickling establishments in New York, helped to prove the point. Thomas Jackson was considered the arbiter of all things gustatory in New York in his day. Scott and Company, by 1839, was open for business and warehoused a large stock of, among other items, pickles, preserves, and jellies that were in constant demand.

While Cato established himself as the famous purveyor of cocktails and woodcock for breakfast, and the sale of oysters and crabs became the livelihood of Brooklyn’s “outcasts and indigent sons of Africa,” over six million dollars worth of oysters were sold in New York each year by 1850. The 1866 Guide to New York City reports, “The consumption of oysters in New York is immense; it having been computed that the daily consumption is valued at $15,000, and that some 1,500 boats are constantly engaged to obtain the supply for this city alone.”

A settlement of free Black folks living in the area of Staten Island known as Sandy Ground, also referred to as “Little Africa,” and called this country’s oldest existing community of free blacks in the nineteenth century, was a supplier of oysters for New Yorkers. Most of the residents of Sandy Ground were in the oyster business and first occupied the area in the 1830s and 1840s and were known for their high quality of oysters.

Oystering as a trade was all but finished in Sandy Ground by 1916 due to industrial pollution from New Jersey, the town’s inability to compete with corporate-run agriculture and aquaculture, and ultimately, competition with whites. Black residents sought other occupations, such as wrought iron mastery, midwifery, well-digging, and some grew crops for self-consumption and sale, such as strawberries, sweet potatoes, melons, and tomatoes.

The nineteenth century demand for oysters had been a tremendous one and made a fortune for some in the business. In the early 1800s Boston Crummell, father of future African American intellectual leader, Alexander Crummell, was one of many who met the demand, as he was a New York caterer and oysterman who harvested and sold the bivalves.

In the 1830s and 1840s, for the tradesmen and businessmen of the district, oyster cellars provided breakfast, lunch, and dinner. A “Canal Street Plan” was offered, which was an all-you-can-eat for six cents setup. It was said that if the establishment thought that you were getting too much for the money, a bad oyster would turn up to curb a glutton’s appetite. For the proprietor, the bigger the oyster the more servings it would provide. Some oysters could be cut into three or four pieces, depending on size. A plain array of condiments accompanied raw oysters: lemon juice, vinegar, oil, salt, pepper, and mustard. Another fifteen cents added to your bill would purchase a bowl of stew, normally served for dinner, containing at least three dozen oysters, together with a generous slab of bread and butter, salad, and a relish or two.

Now, the menus at most cellars were limited to raw, fried, or stewed oysters. Well, there were cellars, and then there were cellars. Thomas Downing’s oyster cellar on Broad Street was said to be the very model of comfort and prosperity with its mirrored arcades, damask curtains, fine carpet, and chandelier. Oysters were considered an epicurean delight and Downing made them his specialty. His menu established and sealed his reputation by offering unusually elaborate dishes, such as scalloped oysters, oyster pie, fish with oyster sauce, and an especially delectable poached turkey stuffed with oysters. His award winning pickled oysters, together with his boned and jellied turkeys, were particularly popular during the holidays.

Thomas Downing’s restaurant, which occupied the basements of two small buildings, was in the financial and shipping section of the city. There were also three other Black owned eating houses in this same district: Henry Johnson’s, Lawrence Chloe’s, and Stephen Simmons’s. But it was Thomas Downing, George T. Downing’s father, who became and remained the most famous African American caterer and restaurateur in New York between 1830 and 1860.

Thomas Downing’s Oyster Bar, located at 3, 5, and 7 Broad Street at the corner of Wall Street, became famous as one of the best eating establishments in New York. Not only was Downing’s the only house to attract the aristocracy as well as ladies in the company of their husbands or chaperones, it was also the favorite haunt of a regular crowd of distinguished businessmen from the Merchants’ Exchange, nearby banks and custom houses, as well as leading politicians of the day and others who believed in the marked superiority of “colored” cooks.

Downing shipped raw, fried, and pickled oysters to the West Indies and to Europe. In 1847 Downing prepared and shipped a barrel of very lovely pickled oysters to Queen Victoria. The Queen responded to his gift by asking Joseph Comstock to deliver to Mr. Downing a letter accompanied by a gold chronometer watch engraved with her initials.

The American culinary narrative continues to assert that this country’s cooking and cuisine were founded by Americans of European ancestry and are rooted in so-called Western civilization. In doing so it fails to acknowledge the African American contribution, and thereby adheres to the theory of white supremacy. The roles of Downing, Crum, and many other “sons and daughters of Africa” are mere microcosms of the Black cook’s rightful place in the nation’s history.

 

Diane M. Spivey, author of The Peppers, Cracklings, and Knots of Wool Cookbook: The Global Migration of African Cuisine, has also written articles for the Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History and Scribner’s Encyclopedia of World Food and Culture, among others. Born and reared in Chicago, she resides with her family in Palmetto Bay, Florida.

Cover art by Xavier Roache

This issue on Black Queer and Trans* Aesthetics is aimed at collecting avant-garde writing from Black queer trans scholars on the aesthetics of Black everyday life, Black art, and Black critical thought. The essays in this special collection are all focused on 20^th and 21^st century US Black art, frameworks, and aesthetics. The essay topics include archives of Black femme gender, unfinished music demos as sites of Black queerness, the relationship between bafflement and Blackqueer futurity in the work of Ayana Jackson, ethnographic work on Black queer kinship in San Francisco, and a review essay focused on the living archive of Lyle Ashton Harris.

The essays range in their theoretical and linguistic denseness, but all strive for accessibility to a general public in order to build an approachable body of work for, by, and about Black queer trans people across the Black diaspora. These stories of Black queer trans lives and aesthetic work are much-needed additions to the growing body and long history of Black queer trans artists, activists, lovers, scholars, thinkers, and organizers: our bodies, flesh, thoughts, and contributions matter in a world spinning on the axes of anti-blackness, transmisogyny, trans-antagonism, misogynynoir, and queerphobia.

These essays are appropriate for high school, college, and graduate students, as well as the general public interested in the intersection between blackness, queerness, transness, and aesthetic forms. We invite you to hold in-person salons, conversations, social media debates, and invite any of the writers or guest editors to speak with you and your community about the content of this issue.

– Elliott H. Powell and Shanté Paradigm Smalls

__________________________________________________

For a limited time, the introduction by Elliott H. Powell and Shanté Paradigm Smalls and “Play Aunties and Dyke Bitches: Gender, Generation, and the Ethics of Black Queer Kinship” by Savannah Shange are free to download and read.

Support The Black Scholar by subscribing to print and digital issues here.

Upcoming 2019 issues include…

• Black Masculinities and the Matter of Vulnerability
• Black Performance issues 1 & 2

Our 2020 volume, which is also our 50th anniversary volume, is slated to include…

• At the Limits of Desire: Black Radical Pleasure (call for papers can be found here)
• Black Girls and Girlhood (call for papers can be found here)
• Death of Black Studies?
• And more…

We, the undersigned, express our solidarity with Dan-el Padilla Peralta, Assistant Professor of Classics at Princeton University, who was recently the target of a racist verbal attack during the conference of the Society for Classical Studies in San Diego. Born in the Dominican Republic, Professor Padilla Peralta is the author of Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League.

During one of the “Future of the Classics” panel, Mary Frances William, a white scholar, stated that professor Padilla Peralta got his job because he is “black,” according to a report by Inside Higher Ed. In addition to those vitriolic remarks, the conference “was quite the showcase for the enforcement actions of white supremacy,”according to a post by Padilla Peralta in Medium, which recounts another racist incident endured by two students of color at the annual event this year held at the Marriot hotel:

The day before the panel, Djesika Bel Watson and Stefani Echeverría-Fenn, co-founders of The Sportula and recipients of a WCC award at the annual meeting, were racially profiled by hotel security — possibly at the request of other conference-goers who were unsettled by the presence of brown bodies.

As students, scholars and activists, we condemn white supremacy and racism and extend our solidarity to both Djesika Bel Watson and Stefani Echeverría-Fenn.

These instances of racist and discriminatory practices in academic spaces are not new. Historically, white supremacists have dominated the Classics field in academia, constructing over time the myth of a so-called civilized and homogeneous ancient Europe by erasing the contributions of Africans, African-descended people, and non-white Europeans.

We call on writers, artists, scholars, scholarly organizations, students, and progressive organizations to express solidarity with Dan-el Padilla Peralta, Djesika Bel Watson, and Stefani Echeverría-Fenn and mobilize against racism in all its forms. Let us turn our discontent into collective action. Our message: Black and Brown academic work matters.

______

Alexander Gil Fuentes, Digital Scholarship Librarian, Columbia University, USA

Amarilys Estrella, PhD Candidate, Anthropology New York University, USA

Amaury Rodriguez, Independent Scholar, USA

Amy M. King, Associate Professor of English, Director of Graduate Studies, St. John’s University, USA

Ana Liberato, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Kentucky, USA

Anthony Stevens-Acevedo, Historian, Higher Education Assistant (ret.), CUNY, USA

Anwar Uhuru, Assistant Professor of English, Harris Stowe State University, USA

April Yoder, Assistant Professor, History & Global Studies, University of New             Haven, USA

Arelis M. Figueroa, Master of Divinity, USA

Cornel West, Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy, Harvard Divinity School, USA

Daniel Huttinot, Activist and Editor, USA

David Marriott, Professor, History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA

DeLisa Brown-Guc, Graduate Student, The Open University, UK

Denise Paiewonsky, Associate Professor, Instituto Tecnológico de Santo Domingo,   Dominican Republic

Dohra Ahmad, Professor of English, St. John’s University, USA

Edwin Rosario Mazara, Host of La Sala and Activist, USA

Elena Machado Sáez, Professor of English, Bucknell University, USA

Elizabeth Manley, Associate Professor of History, Xavier University, USA

Euclides C. Nuel, Activist and Journalist, Dominican Republic

Emmanuel Espinal, Esendom magazine, USA

Erik S. McDuffie, Associate Professor, Department of African American Studies and History, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA   

Gabriel Brownstein, Associate Professor, St. John’s University, USA

Ginetta Candelario, Professor of Sociology, Smith College, USA

Ivette Romero, Professor, Marist College, USA

Jennifer M. Rodríguez, PhD Candidate in the Spanish and Portuguese Department. Princeton University, USA

John Keene, Professor and Chair of African American and African Studies, Professor             of English, Rutgers University, USA

Jomaira Salas Pujols, Graduate Student, Rutgers University, USA

Jordan Rogers, PhD Student, University of Miami, USA

Jossiana Arroyo, Professor, Department of Spanish & Portuguese, Department of     African & African Diaspora Studies, University of Texas, Austin, USA

Juan J. Ponce-Vázquez, Assistant Professor, University of Alabama, USA

Jubi Arriola-Headley, Graduate Student, University of Miami, USA

Kathleen Lubey,Associate Professor of English, St. John’s University, USA

Laura Bass, PhD Student, English, University of Miami, USA

Laura Chrisman, Professor, University of Washington, USA

Laurie Lambert, Assistant Professor, Fordham University, USA

Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, Associate Professor, University of Michigan, Ann      Arbor, USA

Lico Enrique Agustin, Poet and Educator, Dominican Republic

Louis Chude-Sokei, Professor of English, Chair and Director of African American      Studies Program, Editor-in-Chief of The Black Scholar, Boston University,     USA

Mark Anthony Neal, James B. Duke Professor and Chair of African & African American Studies, Professor of English, Duke University, USA

Melissa Mowry, Professor of English, St. John’s University, USA

Michael D. Yates, Editorial Director of Monthly Review Press, Professor Emeritus,    University of Pittsburgh-Johnstown, USA

Michèle Voltaire Marcelin, Artist, USA

Miguel Vasquez, PhD Student, English, University of Miami, USA

Mildred D Mata, B.A. in Social Work, Dominican Republic

Natalie P. Byfield, Associate Professor, St. John’s University, USA

Nelson Ricart-Guerrero, Poet, France

Nelson Santana, Editor, Esendom Magazine, USA

Preston Stone, PhD Student, English, University of Miami, USA

Raj Chetty, Assistant Professor of English, St. John’s University, USA

Ramón A. Victoriano-Martínez (Arturo), Sessional Lecturer, University of   Toronto, Mississauga, Canada

Raphael Dalleo, Professor of English, Bucknell University, USA

Raquel Virginia Cabrera, Writer, USA

Robert (Bobby) Rivera, Assistant Professor of Theology, St. John’s University, USA

Robert Forman, Professor of English and Classics, St. John’s University, USA

Robin Wellington, Associate Professor of Psychology, St. John’s University, USA

Sandy Placido, Assistant Professor of History, CUNY-Queens College, USA

Shannon Hanks-Mackey, Managing Editor, The Black Scholar, Occupied dxʷdəwʔabš (Duwamish) land

Sharon Marshall, Associate Professor, First Year Writing Coordinator, St. John’s        University, USA

Sheridan Wigginton, Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies, California     Lutheran University, USA 

Sophia Blea Nuñez, Postgraduate Research Associate, Department of Spanish and    Portuguese, Princeton University, USA

Sophie Maríñez, Academic, USA

Steve Newman, Associate Professor of English, Temple University, USA

Sydney Hutchinson, Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology, Syracuse University, USA/Germany

Tarika Sankar, Graduate Student, University of Miami, USA

Tony Savino, Photographer, USA

Victor Arcturus Estrella, Artist, Dominican Republic

Wendy D. Roth, Associate Professor of Sociology , University of British Columbia, Canada

William García Medina, PhD Student, University of Kansas, USA

Yomaira C. Figueroa, Assistant Professor of English, Michigan State University, USAZaida Corniel, PhD, Lecturer, Stony Brook University, USA

Our final issue of 2018, “Returnings,” is now available. Featuring cover art by artist and teacher John Jennings, the issue includes an interview with Jennings that was conducted by Stephanie L. Batiste, Mary Anne Boelcskevy, and Shireen K. Lewis. Their discussion focuses on Jennings’s process of co-creating the 2018 Eisner Award-winning graphic novelization of Octavia Butler’s Kindred and includes unused draft panels and alternative covers. Stay tuned for an upcoming blog post of additional unpublished images.

The issue also includes “Revisiting the Gomez Imperative: Exchanging Our Country Marks and the Africana Studies Tradition, ASWAD, 2017” by Monique Bedasse, “Organized Disorder: The New York City Jail Rebellion of 1970” by Orisanmi Burton, “Blackness and Becoming: Édouard Glissant’s Retour” by Louis Chude-Sokei, and “The Political Legacy of Thabo Mbeki” by Sanya Osha. The editor’s note, “Black Studies Post-Janus,” was written by TBS associate editor Jonathan Fenderson.

For a limited time, the editor’s note and the interview with John Jennings are free to download and read.

Support The Black Scholar by subscribing to print and digital issues here.

Upcoming 2019 issues include…

• Black Queer and Trans* Aesthetics
• Black Masculinities and the Matter of Vulnerability
• Black Performance issues 1 & 2

Our 2020 volume, which is also our 50th anniversary volume, is slated to include…

• At the Limits of Desire: Black Radical Pleasure (call for papers can be found here)
• Black Girls and Girlhood (call for papers can be found here)
• Death of Black Studies?
• And more…

 

Jakari Sherman, the former Artistic Director of Step Afrika!, recently finished a two-year tour with The Migration: Reflections on Jacob Lawrence, of which he is also the director. Under Sherman’s guidance, the production brings the kinetic energy of step, tap, and other dance traditions to the famous sixty-piece collection of paintings that Lawrence finished at the age of 25. Engaging the movement of people with the movement of dance, Step Afrika!’s Migration begins by contextualizing Lawrence’s work within a narrative of the African diaspora to America: the talking drum in Africa, the turmoil of slavery and the theft of the drum, and the creation of new artistic traditions in the wake of these traumas. The first half of the production ends with a piece called “Wade Suite,” using “Wade in the Water” to emphasize the importance of the church as a site of Black American culture and spirituality. The second half directly enacts the iconic central images from Lawrence’s collection, including the extraordinary voyage North by train and the separation and reunion of families. Here, the number called “Trane Suite” tells of the journey of three men as they explore the cityscapes of the North along with their wives that join them. The production closes with a piece entitled “Chicago,” highlighting what the program calls the “collective self-transformation of those who made it North.”

Originally a commission from Washington, D.C.’s Phillips Collection, which holds half of Lawrence’s series, The Migration has taken Step Afrika! across the country. The production has received several awards along the way, headlining the Presidential Black History Month Reception in 2016 and appearing at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. The piece is a triumph for Sherman, whose work as a dancer and dance educator—from competitions in his youth to studying ethnochoreology at the University of Limerick—has affirmed step’s vital place in American culture. As Artistic Director for the first professional company devoted to step, Sherman has dedicated his life to educating audiences about its unique history.

I talked with Sherman at a café in Washington, D.C., right as the current run of The Migration had ended.

. . . .

You’ve been traveling with The Migration for a while now. But you are based out of both Houston and D.C.?

Yeah, I’ve been going back and forth throughout this Migration tour, in town or on the road, traveling for the show. But Houston is my home.

And you just finished a run here in D.C.?

We did. We were at the Hartke Theater, which is on the campus of Catholic University. We were there for a two-week run, and it was amazing. We’ve been touring now for two years. We started in DC and we finished the run in DC. This is the end of The Migration for now, which is kind of bittersweet.

Now that you’re at the end of this run, would you mind walking us through where step began for you?

Growing up, I was into music and the sciences. Art through music essentially was my thing. I found my way into stepping via percussion. I was in marching band, and I found a love for stepping because of its rhythm. In Houston, competitive stepping during the early nineties was really big. I started off competing with my school step team and just found a love for it. Then I stepped when I went to college. During and after college, I went back and worked with children and the step team I had been in. They got noticed by the Houston Rockets and they asked me to form the first NBA Step Team. So that was the beginning of my professional stepping career.

I came to Step Afrika! in 2005, after joining them for a trip to South Africa in 2004. I really liked their work and it felt like I could contribute to what they were doing artistically. So, I came into the company in 2005, and by 2007, I was tapped to be Artistic Director of the company, and I did that for seven years until I went to Ireland for my Master’s degree. Shortly after I came back from Ireland, we began the Migration run.

That’s quite a journey. So many people get into step in college, but you were already well versed by the time you got there.

I think that discovering step in college has traditionally been the pathway. But at this point the youth stepping world has really grown, and there are stepping leagues now with a lot more people getting into step earlier in life. They are given access by members of fraternities and sororities who, because of their missions related to community service, were going out teaching stepping, like I did, in their high school or maybe their church or other community centers. So now there’s much more access to the form than there was.

What was it like getting your Masters in Ethnochoreology at the University of Limerick?

Going to Ireland and doing ethnochoreology was an important step in my own need to understand the tradition and art form of stepping in a greater way, as well as to lay the foundation for scholarly research connected to the form. In seeking to do graduate work here in the States, there was the challenge of not having formal dance training because most programs are based in classical ballet or modern dance. I didn’t come up through dance, I came up through drums and percussion and inheriting the tradition of stepping, so that was a challenge for me. I went to Ireland in part because of their tradition of percussive dance and in part because it was a welcoming place. I discovered a lot of similarities in Irish step dance culture and stepping culture, especially as it relates to competition, which has been the basis of the form.

Did you find it illuminating to study the ethnographic elements of choreography in an academic institution?

The folks who are really passionate about stepping, they’re really seeking to understand the art form more. They’re seeking a sense of legitimacy. I’ve always been seeking that, and one of the ways I did this was trying to get people to see stepping as an art form. Going to Ireland really helped me to problematize the idea of stepping as an art form, because doing so seeks to elevate it to a point where it’s just something that is done for entertainment. Going to Ireland helped me to recognize step for the tradition that it is, as a folk tradition beyond just being an art form. Because I think we try to elevate things to art to legitimize them.

What similarities or differences did you find in how ethnochoreology approaches dance relative to what you learned in Houston?

In our culture, stepping isn’t seen as something on par with the other legitimate art forms, so we seek to compare it to ballet. Going to Ireland really strengthened me to accept step for what it is, to present it for what it is, and to teach people about the parts of the tradition that are beyond the performative—and to use that to educate people about the form and why it’s meaningful to people. That sort of work is not even about establishing the legitimacy of step anymore, but as a byproduct of these efforts, the legitimation ends up happening.

Where are your studies taking you now?

I found Ireland to be a nurturing environment, and it really helped me to develop a greater sense of compassion for people as I’m studying everything that relates to dance. So now my research involves diving into the history of stepping, and I have a theoretical basis and framework through which to view that. It has given me a great position to now speak to people about the form and bring greater understanding—even for myself—about why we do what we do. It has helped me to explain where step comes from, and to dispel a lot of myths about stepping and its history.

What makes Step Afrika! unique as a dance company?

Step Afrika! was created to share the culture of stepping and to expose people to the art form, because early on the only people exposed to stepping were those in a fraternity or who were on a college campus where this was happening. Step Afrika!’s aesthetic is a blend of the whole of stepping rather than specific to one fraternity or one sorority. It’s evident when people come into the company—they come in with a particular style. Even when folks are not Greek, they maybe only stepped in high school or with their dorm, but they still have a very distinct style. When they join Step Afrika!, they have to break that and learn to engage with a lot of different step aesthetics. We are trying to represent all of stepping to the fullest extent possible.

Then there’s another layer of using step for narrative or even experimentally, like blending stepping with rock music or classical music or jazz, as you saw in Migration. And now we’re taking other forms, like visual art, and creating stories with all of these artistic mashups.

One of the things that was amazing about The Migration was that it involved step, tap, soft shoe, and European traditional dance. It was this amazing amalgam of recognizable Black dance, but it was also in conversation with European dance traditions.

We have so many different artists in the company, so many different talents. When we initially created the Migration in 2011, we ran it for a few weeks here in DC, building the show around the talents of the artists that we had at the time. We had tap dancers, we had modern dancers, we had a few West African dancers—and of course, stepping is the backbone of it all. So we built The Migration with those wide-ranging skill sets. We decided not to create everything based in stepping, forcing the whole company to learn and adapt to that, but instead asked how we could create work for the people that we have in the company to showcase their talents, and that’s how the show came to be.

But now that The Migration is established, you now recruit to fill specific roles?

Exactly. I think the development of Migration was an interesting process, a bit of growth and experimentation that landed really well with the company. Because we have so many people in the company, you don’t often get people who come into Step Afrika! who are really refined steppers. Most people do step for a couple years in college and that’s the extent of their stepping career. At most, someone would do it for three years, or maybe they learned in high school, but it’s not something they’re necessarily engaged in or practicing every day.

When you learn to step, it’s not like you start after school at 5.

Yeah, while modern dancers start when they’re three and then when they go to college there’s a whole curriculum available to them. There’s a learning and refining process that we go through in the company so we are able to incorporate these skill sets that people have honed over a long time and blend those with the stepping.

How did the production process of The Migration begin?

Brian Williams is the founder and executive director of Step Afrika! The Phillips Collection, here in D.C., was interested in doing something around the Jacob Lawrence series, and they had some conversations with Brian. They commissioned us to come up with something to connect with Jacob Lawrence’s work. It launched a period of research for me to just learn as much as I could about Jacob Lawrence and about The Migration, and that was the beginning of our work.

What proved to be the most valuable research for the production?

What was most valuable for me early on was spending a lot of time at the Schomburg in Harlem. There were some reference books that I used to study the series. But the first thing was just going there and reviewing archival material from the time period: some of the letters that were written from the people in the South to the people in the North, or the job postings calling people to come to the North. Those sources gave me texture, just looking at these old papers, they gave me a sense of the time period and allowed me to begin to create something that was—I hate using the word “authentic,” that’s such a problematic word—but something that I felt could connect to the texture of that time period. We knew that the through-line was Jacob Lawrence’s work and we knew what the narrative was, but how do we tie in the visual art with the stepping, with the music, with all these different dance styles? I think that early research really helped those elements to gel.

I was amazed by the ways your interpretation seemed to be responsive to Jacob Lawrence, the history of Black dance, and the existing repertoire of Step Afrika!

It was sort of kismet the way it all came down from the Phillips Collection. “Trane,” for example, was a piece that we already had been working on for a while, and “Wade in the Water” was part of Step Afrika!’s repertoire for a long time, and they just all fit together in the piece. We start with the drum on what we imagine is the west coast of Africa and then the Middle Passage section. And then all of the scenes lead up to the drums being taken away, and what that meant not only for art but for spiritual traditions. Drums and music were such a big part of spiritual traditions, as we see through “Wade in the Water” and the messages that were passed through African American spirituals, and this narrative was woven into the Migration story.

How do you interact with audiences that have never seen step?

We want people to know about the history of stepping, a dance form created by African American students. It’s percussive, it involves using our hands and our feet to make music. I think it’s important for people to understand that making sound, making music, and making gesture are equally important in the form. We are the music, essentially. These are just some of the identifying features about stepping that people see but maybe don’t always recognize. So we want to have people understand the tradition and that it comes out of fraternity and sorority culture.

One of the misunderstandings is when people try to connect stepping directly to Africa. A lot of people say stepping comes from Africa, whereas we would recognize the lineage of stepping in forms that originate in African culture or in the culture of Africans who were brought here. Stepping was created here in America, in part as a response to drums being taken away and the forms that evolved because of that. Those are some of the aspects of step that people don’t necessarily know about.

Do you get a lot of people who confuse step for tap?

Yeah, they look at tap dance and they’re curious about the connection. There’s a need to talk about the grammar and the language of stepping and what we call it. For the most part, people are very open to receiving knowledge about what stepping is.

Are there people who were originators or progenitors of stepping that you’d like audiences to be aware of?

It’s less about individuals and more about groups of people. We look at folks who were instrumental to the Civil Rights movement on their college campuses, and how their activism gave form to a lot of the fraternity and sorority culture. The way that they moved, the sense of militancy, gave form to a lot of the rituals and activities of fraternities and sororities. Those forms found their way into stepping. There’s a clear delineation when those movements started and how they changed the aesthetic of stepping.

There were folks who came around in the nineties in California who brought stepping to television. You have shows like School Daze and A Different World on television. You have these people who brought stepping to the forefront, but then there were all these folks who are sort of nameless, who were creating steps, who were the early choreographers who didn’t call themselves choreographers but maybe were step masters, who created a culture from which School Daze and A Different World could draw. Those are the real forebears of the form. We may never know their names, but I think it’s about honoring their legacy by sharing the stories and the lifestyles and the lives that they had to lead in order for us to have this tradition and this art form that we call stepping.

Where is your current research headed? What’s next for you?

I’m currently engaged in a project called Who Are the Step Masters? I am seeking to understand the history and the form of stepping through a search for the people who are important to the development of the form. I’m touring the country interviewing people of various ages. Right now, I’m focused on the older generations, those who would have been in college during the 1940s and 50s, who maybe were a part of sororities or fraternities and can tell me about the early days of the movement that evolved into stepping. I’m working on a photobook as part of that project, and a documentary play and documentary film. That’s where my time and energy are going.

What’s next for Step Afrika!?

Step Afrika! is engaged in figuring out the follow up to Migration. We’re asking what it is that we want to say at this point, how much we want to spin off from The Migration. We are interested in the story of the drum and the drum folk and how the drums were lost, but also how we have reclaimed the drum, whether it be through hip hop music or through other forms like the turntables or beat boxing. We’re looking at these as some of the starting points of the next production after Migration.

Thank you for talking the time to sit with me to discuss your work.

It was my pleasure.

 

Paul J. Edwards is a Lecturer in History and Literature at Harvard University and the book reviews editor for The Black Scholar.

This article originally appeared in ASAP/Journal.

I’ve always thought that the problem with the literary and cultural politics of the Anglophone world was that we’ve never had an actual, formal surrealist movement. Yes, there are writers and thinkers in the English-speaking world that are verifiably surreal (though not members of the official movement) and many that are described as surrealist, for example the writer who is the focus of this essay, the recently deceased Guyanese novelist, critic, and visionary, Wilson Harris, who passed away in March of this year. And yes, the impact of the Surrealist International was global. As I will discuss, it had a significant impact in the Caribbean, which is partly what justifies discussing Wilson Harris in this context. Though seen as a minor or cult figure, or an example of “art brut,” I’d like to help make clear his standing in a richer tradition of thinking and writing than previously acknowledged. I’d like to also suggest ways that his legacy can and should make a difference.

I’m also not ignoring the final impact and commodification of Surrealism as it made its way first to New York City and then to Hollywood only to become as much a feature of advertising and cinema as it would become a tool of now mundane representations of the human mind. Surrealism as an artistic and literary style, and a mode of psychological inquiry, was present in England as early as 1935 and its influence was felt in American art in the 1940s in advance of the arrival of actual surrealists as refugees from World War II. However, as an open and ongoing critical tendency with specific habits and practices, it hasn’t gone as far politically in English as in other linguistic worlds. This is particularly the case in its fetish for wild juxtapositions and radical combinations meant to jar or shock the viewer/reader into new perceptions of reality, in which differences and oppositions seemed less alien to each other and their hierarchies questioned if not suspended. It is also the case in the movement’s assumption that “reality” was itself constituted by radical juxtapositions and wild combinations—which is to say, as post-structuralist thinkers later would, an endless play of differences. These techniques have become fundamental to artistic and media practice; but the political assumptions behind them have not translated widely. Because it is the surrealist politics of cultural difference that matters here and its implications for power relationships. Though the impact of surrealism on the wider Caribbean or the black world in general is woefully understudied, it is this awareness of poetics and power that will manifest most strongly in the colonial Caribbean, and the broader archipelagic context that introduces Wilson Harris to the Anglophone world.

The surrealist commitment to juxtaposition and difference is best articulated by the movement’s foundational notion of beauty as produced by “the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table,” sourced from Les Chants de Maldoror by Uruguayan-French poet (and innovative plagiarist) Isidore Lucien Ducasse (Compte de Lautréamont). The founders of surrealism would hail him as prophet. This fact of their methodology has been much discussed and researched, but that scrutiny has focused on the relationship between metaphor or metonym (the former suppressive and the latter combinatory, as Jacques Lacan would have it), the role of the unconscious in making object relationships, and the implications of a radical decentering of knowledge that is made possible by juxtaposition and collage. What has been missed are the implications of Lautremont’s definition—of decontextualized mixture—for cultural politics in a world made by colonialism and slavery.

That surrealist founder André Breton would be so inspired by the work of Martinquan poet, Aimé Césaire, presaged the movement’s increasing interest in the broader cultural productions and cosmologies of native and indigenous peoples in Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Oceania. This “exotic” material enabled their leveling of cultural value by juxtaposing a seemingly random display of items, images, and artifacts—a process emboldened by new technologies such as photography, film, and to a lesser extent sound. This reminds us that the surrealists saw race and colonialism as central to their logic and poetics of difference; and they would manifest through these techniques a critique one could legitimately describe as “cross-cultural” (it’s not clear that those neo-surrealist movements in England or those influenced by surrealism in America fully grasped that aspect of the ideology, just as it’s not clear that the generation of Structuralist bricolage—from Levi-Strauss to Derrida to Deleuze and Guattari and British Cultural Studies—could make much of the racial implications of this mode of production or see in it alternative methods of social arrangement or definitions of cultural identity).

Race as central to surrealist method may have veered deeply into racial romanticism or romantic racism—examples of this are legion, so much so that it’s no surprise to encounter those who will describe much of the movement as actually racist, especially since it was flagrantly primitivist; but anti-colonialism at least was firmly and openly doctrine, as was a desire to problematize the European subject or psyche as the “center” of knowing if not power. Describing the intent of the work as “cross-cultural” is in no way to neglect the fact that it did privilege European subjectivity while attempting to decenter it, and its fascination for non-Western or non-White cultures were manifestly patronizing, paternalistic and from our vantage point cringeworthy.

Aimé Césaire and the Negritude movement of which he was a signal part would share that primitivism and that racial romanticism. It would also not be without a similar degree of cringe when compatriots of his like Léopold Sédar Senghor dug too deeply into an alleged racial essence. Despite his own considerable essentialism, Césaire would seize on cross-cultural juxtaposition as a fully realized anti-colonial poetics from the perspective of the colonized. Juxtaposition or blending or contrast in this work was deployed against the racial modes of knowing and racist social arrangements established by French colonialism and white supremacy.

Forms of Negritude continue to be primary fallback positions for much of the Anglophone black world; but in the Francophone world it would eventually become an obstacle for the generation of Caribbean writers and thinkers after Césaire. This is truly important. The rejection of Negritude needs more attention beyond the Francophone Caribbean because it enabled possibilities we are sorely in need of exploring. Harris himself spoke of such a need when he argued that juxtaposition could or would transform racial essentialism: “the rubbing together which we may visualize between endemic malaise and Surreal vessels of the imagination provides a residue in depth which becomes I think the potential seed and branch and tree of a black creativity beyond negritude to deepen resources of memory and imagination in a plagued humanity.”

The “rubbing together” of Negritude and Surrealism would allow the Caribbean to transform both into something else—a distinct conceptual space that will clear the way for, most notably, an Édouard Glissant in the Francophone world but also a Wilson Harris in the Anglophone. The work of these two writers and critics manifests—or perhaps straddles—both Surrealism and its transcendence; and given that Negritude was a movement rooted also in anti-colonial racial nationalism, both writers would side-step that as well whilst continually reminding us of its perils.

But to the rejection of Negritude: famously it was manifest in the manifesto, Éloge de la Créolité (In Praise of Creoleness) by Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau, Jean Bernabé, and Raphaël Confiant in 1989. It dared challenge Negritude (and Césaire), partly for a racial romanticism that would edify Africa and thereby anchor Caribbean identity in a singular root. In philosophical terms current with the manifesto, Negritude prioritized an essential being over a far more dynamic becoming. “Africa” became a barrier, and the identity claims necessary for anti-colonial resistance became the burden of political independence, particularly in composite societies in the New World.

The race-consciousness of Negritude may have emerged from dehumanization, racial violence, and the deracination of slavery, and it may have led to an overwhelming desire to return to or reconstruct a fixed past; but for the Créolistes it occluded and prevented the necessary embracing of an already transformed and multiply rooted present, one present in their creole language. Though he may have been the great poet of neologism, of creating novelty in language, Césaire remained committed to French. And as an elected official, that commitment was viewed in line with his support for the departmentalization of Martinique rather than independence from its colonial power.

It is through Édouard Glissant, however, that we’ve come to discuss if not embrace the poetics and politics of creolization in the literary and cultural politics of the Anglophone world in the wake of Negritude. It is through him that we can then make sense of Wilson Harris in an Anglophone world that is without the historical superstructure or intellectual continuum to support or acknowledge him, save for post-colonial notions of “hybridity” fashionable a decade or two ago. Harris was of the same generation as Glissant but produced his work on the margins of the literary and cultural history sketched above. He was clearly aware of Negritude and was a critical but enthusiastic reader of the work of André Breton, Michel Leiris, and other surrealists who he engaged first from the intellectual distance of a colonial Guyana and then from the heart of empire itself, England. Just as the landscape of the Guyanese rainforests utterly dominate much of his fiction—he was a government surveyor for some years—it’s hard to ignore the cultural politics of his country. After all, despite its postcolonial history of inter-ethnic tension, Guyana lacks the cultural resources or raw numbers to be ultimately defined by any of its specific ethnic groupings. That he himself was radically mixed—indigenous Caribbean/South Asian/Black/European—perhaps also made a “consolidation of identity,” to use his words, difficult to politically achieve.

Creolization and what Harris would call “the cross cultural” are deeply related. They address the process by which oppositions allow for juxtaposition, collage, and bricolage but then inevitably blend and blur while reshaping the very memory or intentions of what initially brought them together. In Harris’s words, oppositions and differences enact a cross-cultural dialogue in which they consume their own biases, because within them —in a phrase that should be tattooed and spray painted everywhere—is “a curious half-blind groping” towards alternate modes of community and/or modes of being or knowing “beyond static cultural imperatives.” Because self and other are twins not oppositions—“carnival twinships” as he once put it—because they are performances not identities, they are each other’s destiny, hence the endless mirrors, rivers, streams and reflective surfaces that suffuse his fiction rendering reality much like as through a prism. The goal was to explore and enact a model of cultural difference in which elements were not negatively opposed as was/is the case in colonial and racist modes of apprehension and social arrangement.

This is what lies beyond Negritude. As both Glissant and Harris note, Negritude merely consolidated and reified those modes of apprehension and social arrangement, even if it reversed their value or position. This is at the root of my initial complaint that the Anglophone world has yet to produce a politically valid (not self-hating) anti-Negritudist movement or a legitimately black anti-essentialist or ultimately anti-identitarian sensibility. Yes, we critique essentialism, problematize identity, and reject totalizing racial assessments; yet we ever revert to a blackness that cannot function without endless defense and justification and is rooted in totalizing racial assessments of our own. However, that endless defense might be its own justification. It’s clearly the engine behind the commodification of blackness that proliferates in our knowledge industries.

An Anglophone surrealism and a post-Negritude response would likely have helped free racial thinking from the endless and oftentimes narcissistic thickets of this extreme identitarianism and would have impelled us to reimagine fundamental notions of community. Because of this lack, those attending to racial transformation and cultural becoming have Wilson Harris to represent such a break. And in a moment when whiteness, capital, and colonial power have furiously retrenched and “consolidated,” the temptation for us to respond with consolidations of our own—the Negritude response—can only be avoided with effort and legitimately radical alternatives. Harris’s attempt to narrate a world without centers or borders or identities was therefore prescient, far more so than Glissant, who despite his hostility to nationalism and colonial power dynamics has been easily recuperated by critics who ignore or evade his hostility to notions of fixed identity, historical “roots,” or conventional notions of resistance.

Harris, however, is patently and gloriously irrecuperable, at least so far. Though his work does allow for the same amount of “post-colonial” critique as Glissant’s, it is also explicitly focused on the complex process of renewing and reimagining community across cultural, racial, and historical barriers. Our notions of resistance aren’t enough here. They are radically challenged in that they can feed the consolidation of identity, that “conquistadorial habit,” he’s called it. And his decentering of subjectivity—all subjectivity, not just that of the colonizer—was not just an attack on the hierarchies of European knowledge as it was with surrealism. It was a necessary prologue to enabling that “curious half-blind groping” mentioned earlier.

Now the consensus is that Harris’s irrecuperability and his minor or cult status is largely due to his prose. It’s true that its complexity and density, whether fiction or non-fiction, regularly ban him from course syllabi and the rituals of literary culture, even in the Caribbean. But considering that he was first introduced to many of us at the high point of post-structuralist theory when we were also introduced to Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault, and then via postcolonial thought, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, and given that we would then engage Judith Butler and now Sylvia Wynter and Edouard Glissant, it’s hard to merit his critical prose with such intractability. And in the wake of radical modernism his fiction isn’t any more challenging than Faulkner’s, Woolf’s, or Joyce’s. It really is that assault on identity, that challenge, one that goes so far in his work that the very environment as well as myth, dream, fantasy, and artistic creation are all given an equality of perspective and sentience, and therefore render knowledge, history, and resistance difficult to fathom much less claim. And his habit of rendering the other as partial self, or seeing the self partially in the other; in his civilizational perspective that renders our struggles against the staggering vistas of History; these work against the narcissism of those who comb his work for specific evidence against specific oppressions.

But it’s really all about the admittedly inelegant term, “groping,” which is hard to articulate in our contemporary cultural and political climate, without its suggestion of impropriety and unwelcome sexual advances. This only emphasizes just how rooted creolization is in the notion of unwelcome physical and cultural border crossings and also how such transgressions have regularly been policed or exploited.  In Harris’s mythopoeia, as a historical and metaphysical process this “groping” must be “half-blind” and uncertain since knowledge, like subjectivity, is endlessly partial yet forever seeks its own reinvention. That dynamic process is central to the work, so much so that the term is arguably the most notable word in his oeuvre, possibly second only to “quantum” in its frequency. The latter is similar in that it implies probability, chance, and uncertainty, Werner Heisenberg—he of the “uncertainty principle” in physics—being an influence. But that restlessness characterizes his prose, and is what makes it difficult to settle on a specific character or setting or to fetishize specific situations or power dynamics. It’s all partial, shifting, and evanescent and difficult to appropriate for specific political ends, particularly those rooted in race or identity.

Or, again, in the “rubbing together” of sex. As others have argued (Robert J.C. Young most prominently), metaphors of blending like creolization or hybridity are always rooted in sex—heterosexual sex to be clear. Speaking in metaphorical terms, cross-racial sex and desire have long been narrative clichés for cross-cultural intimacy and of course the “birth” of something different from foundational elements. The torrid plantation soft-core melodramas of Edgar Mittelholzer, the other major postcolonial Guyanese author, are far from Harris’s vision. Harris is the least sexual writer one can imagine, unless one describes the sensual excess of his landscapes and language as pornographic, or argues that his ontology was libidinal in its promiscuous drive towards fecundity in both the natural world and the infinite, possible worlds of cross-culturality.

There is, though, a radicalism in that ontological promiscuity, in submitting to its breathless uncertainty. It was perhaps too quiet for the nationalism that initially surrounded Harris’s work and the anti-colonial fervor that continues to feed much of the cultural and literary work of the Anglophone Caribbean; it certainly can seem a hyper-mystical or quasi-religious quietism. But when we realize that reducing meaning to binaries is not enough, and that rejecting them has largely led to reversing not transcending them; when the relationship between humans and the environment demands to be replaced by a greater mutuality, a distinctly non-human centered one; or when we realize that cultures themselves do hunger for otherness and transformation and intimacy, and that there are ways to encourage those heretical or even perverse movements that reject the inhuman logic of centralized power; when the old rhetoric of self and other has once again failed, perhaps then we will be truly ready for the Palace of the Peacock.

 

Louis Chude-Sokei is the Editor in Chief of The Black Scholar.

Given our momentous political turmoil and a still unclear sense of what is to be done, our current issue “Pragmatic Utopias” features “Get in Formation: Black Women’s Participation in the Women’s March on Washington as an Act of Pragmatic Utopianism,” a thoughtful and deeply informative essay by Tehama Lopez Bunyasi & Candis Watts Smith. After all, if anything points the way forward—or orients us towards movement—it is clearly Black women’s thought and activism. This issue also includes Erik Gleibermann’s “Challenging the Stigma of an All-Black School: The Selma High Story,” a reflection on the legacy and possibilities of all-Black education in the wake of the failure of the “post-racial” and, arguably, of state-sanctioned multiculturalism. “We Are Not an Organically City People”: Black Modernity and the Afterimages of Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust” is an innovative essay by Pacharee Sudhinaraset that returns to the work of filmmaker Julie Dash through a post-Lemonade lens. Finally, the issue features Bernie Lombardi’s pointed interview with acclaimed queer Nigerian writer, Chinelo Okparanta.

For a limited time, we are offering free access to download and read the introduction by senior editor, Shireen Lewis, here. Readers can also download and read “Get in Formation: Black Women’s Participation in the Women’s March on Washington as an Act of Pragmatic Utopianism.”

Please join our growing community of online and print readers by following us on Facebook and Twitter, and certainly by subscribing.

Upcoming issues include:

• Our final issue of 2018. Projected content includes the following:
  • Organized Disorder: The New York City Jail Rebellion of 1970, by Orisanmi Burton
  • An interview with Eisner Award winning artist, professor, and frequent TBS cover art contributor John Jennings about his graphic novel adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Kindred
  • The Political Legacy of Thabo Mbeki, by Sanya Osha
  • Blackness and Becoming: Edouard Glissant’s Retour, by TBS editor-in-chief, Louis Chude-Sokei
  • And, as always, more book reviews!
• Black Queer and Trans Aesthetics
• Black Masculinities and the Matter of Vulnerability
• Black Performance
• At the Limits of Desire: Black Radical Pleasure
• Black Girlhood
• And more exciting content to celebrate our 50th anniversary in 2020!

John “Bushmaster” McIver (Mustafa Shakir) and Luke Cage (Mike Colter) in a scene from Marvel’s Luke Cage (2018). Available on Netflix June 22, 2018

Since its premiere in 2016, the Marvel series, Luke Cage has used the comic book genre of storytelling to examine the impact of interlocking systems of racial, gender and economic oppression on Black Americans’ relationships to each other. In season one the show focused on the conflict between the heroes, Luke Cage and Detective Misty Knight and the villains, Cornel “Cottonmouth” Stokes, Mariah Dillard née Stokes and Cage’s estranged brother, Willis “Diamondback” Stryker. In season two, American-Jamaican antihero, John “Bushmaster” McIver enters the fray and disrupts what was previously an exclusively Black American battle to dominate Harlem.

Most reviewers have only briefly discussed this season’s subplot around intra-racial Black American-Black Jamaican conflict. However, the ethnic/national conflict in the storyline is one of its most crucial contributions to the series’ ongoing interrogations of Black diasporic experiences.  In an interview with Angelica Bastién of Vulture, showrunner, Cheo Hodari Coker stated that he pursued this storyline because he saw it as an opportunity to recognize Jamaican contributions to the development of U.S. Black popular culture (in particular, hip hop music) and explore different forms of race consciousness among Black Americans and Black Jamaicans. The fact that Luke Cage became a popular topic of discussion this summer among Jamaicans, is testament to the importance of exploring these transnational Black connections, including conflicts.

The show has received widespread praise for featuring the most Jamaican characters ever seen on a U.S. television show, as well as criticism from Jamaicans and non-Jamaicans for the clearly uneven accents among the Black American actors who played Jamaicans. Many viewers, like me, enjoyed season two, while agreeing that it would have been stronger aesthetically with better accent work and subtitling that accurately reflected Jamaican language. For others, the accents were completely unrepresentative of Jamaican speech and inexcusable. The discourses around intra-Black conflicts and hierarchies therefore operate within the storyline as well as the space of public opinion about the show’s Jamaican accents and limited casting of Jamaicans.

Critics of Luke Cage’s casting decisions have mostly focused on the producers’ oversights, without a larger effort to probe the mostly white-controlled U.S. television industry as a whole. As in the fictional storyline where Black people battle to dominate Harlem, white supremacy looms in the background as the initiator of intra-Black creative hierarchies in U.S. television and film. Some critics of Luke Cage have argued that the series has not focused enough on white anti-Black racism. I agree that there is room for stories that more closely examine structural racism in the U.S., such as gentrification in Harlem. However, the series’ current focus on intra-racial conflicts is also crucial to an understanding of anti-Black racism. I therefore want to offer the following insights:  First, Luke Cage contains important commentary about white supremacy’s fundamental role in the characters’ intra-racial tensions. This is discernible in the backstory of the McIver/Stokes-Dillard feud, which involved the American Stokes’ collusion with white people to betray the Jamaican McIvers. In order to analyze the effects of anti-Black racism, we must not only examine its direct manifestations through white and Black conflicts, but also its latent impact on intra-Black relationships. Second, to engender a deeper conversation about the accent/casting controversy, we should assess the broader context of creative hierarchies in the U.S. television and film industries. This includes examining the historical misrepresentations of Jamaicans/Caribbeans, including by Black Americans. These misrepresentations are the root of the cynicism which many Jamaicans have for American producers. Here, the opinions of Jamaicans in the film and TV industries can add a crucial insight into their positioning within these industries globally. Both the series’ juxtaposing of Black American and Black Jamaican racial experiences; as well as the conversations about flawed accents and casting are important to assessing Luke Cage’s contribution to candidly highlighting ethnic/national conflicts among Black people. This is unprecedented on U.S. television. Luke Cage season two could therefore serve as a useful popular cultural reference for Black studies’ ongoing project to deconstruct Blackness in all of its manifestations, and question the limits of the discipline’s current emphasis on U.S. Black experiences.[1]

The turf war that defines most of Luke Cage season two is very similar to the civil war that takes place in its Marvel movie counterpart, Black Panther (2018). In both cases, the intra-racial battle to control physical space and military and socio-economic power indexes wider struggles for Black self-determination that have existed since the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans. Harlem is an excellent place in which to explore these contentions given its centrality in Black/African Diasporic history as a main site for internal U.S. and global Black immigration during the twentieth century. Though its historical title, “The Black Mecca” is not often used today, Harlem remains significant to studies of Black diasporic mobilities.

Each of the show’s major characters have staked a claim on Harlem in different ways. Following her murder of her cousin, Cottonmouth (Mahershala Ali) in season one, Mariah Dillard née Stokes (Alfre Woodard), has asserted that she is queen of Harlem and is on a mission to “keep Harlem Black,” while John “Bushmaster” McIver (Mustafa Shakir) sees the control of Harlem as his birthright, which was stolen by Mariah’s family. Detective Misty Knight (Simone Missick) and Luke Cage (Mike Colter) endeavor to keep Harlem safe from the criminals who would destroy it, namely Dillard and McIver. The main personal conflicts are between Dillard, McIver, and Cage,[2] with control of the nightclub, Harlem’s Paradise, serving as a prerequisite for control of Harlem. Bushmaster—a moniker taken from his family’s brand of rum[3]—is a U.S.-born, Jamaican-raised don who heads Jamaica’s main gang with plans to conquer the Black criminal enterprise in New York as well. Like Cage, he has superhuman abilities of strength and regeneration. He harnesses his power through a fictional herbal mixture called nightshade, and practices the Afro-Brazilian martial art of capoeira. The producers’ choices to make McIver Jamaican (and not from an unnamed Caribbean country as in the comics), credit Afro-Caribbean naturopathy as the harnesser of his strength, and designate capoeira as his characteristic fighting genre indicates a conscious engagement with Black culture that is limited in the comics.[4] These creative choices also underscore McIver’s assertion of a Black identity that is very reflective of continental African influences in the Americas and a Black radical tradition forged within a Black majority context. As I discuss later, the different forms of Black consciousness articulated by the Jamaican and American characters are key to how their conflicts unfold.

Harlem’s Paradise, Bushmaster Rum and the Stokes-Dillard wealth are John McIver’s birthright since the Jamaican McIver and American Stokes patriarchs founded the businesses decades ago, before the Stokes family colluded with Irish and Italian gangsters to murder John’s parents. McIver is not a classic villain; he mostly kills characters the viewers dislike, and his major objective is to enact vengeance on Dillard. Most accurately, he is the antagonist to Cage’s protagonist, and the only character who can beat Cage in a fair fight. Unsurprisingly, he sees an affinity between himself and Cage, uttering more than once, “We cudda been bredren (brothers/friends),” and suggests that they join forces. Cage’s humiliation at being bested by McIver and his obsession with distancing himself from him, ultimately leads him to almost strangle his antagonist in the final episode.

Eventually, Dillard is murdered by her own daughter and Cage becomes the new owner of Harlem’s Paradise, which she has cunningly willed to him. He is about to meet with the Italian crime family and attempting to reconcile between his need to be Harlem’s law-abiding hero and traversing the criminal enterprise that is linked to that place’s power hierarchies.  Meanwhile, McIver is back in Jamaica recovering from his defeat. His tragic flaw was that he underestimated his outsider status. Though he is American by birth, his Jamaican parentage and upbringing mark him as an alien. This is represented mostly in hilarious comments made by the Black American characters about Jamaicans, but this hilarity is accompanied by a more pernicious animosity. Essentially, McIver and his family become symbols for the othering of Jamaicans by U.S-born and raised Blacks, and in effect un-American Blackness. They also forcefully resist this othering.

In episode ten, the conflict between Jamaican immigrants and native-born Black Americans get articulated in an argument between Paul “Anansi” Mackintosh (Sahr Ngaujah), John McIver’s uncle, and Mariah Dillard. Referencing the Stokes family’s betrayal of his own, he declares that Black Americans are “lazy” and complicit in white imperialism. This is an insult commonly used by Africans and Caribbeans against Black Americans. Dillard hits back: “Every Jamaican likes to talk that maroon shit!” and states that the country got “enslaved by the World Bank.” This is essentially a debate about which Black person is more liberated. Caribbeans’ history of Black radicalism was forged through resistance to slavery and British colonialism. Within this Black majority context, self-government is a major source of pride. McIver asserts several times his admiration for Jamaican historical icons like global Black nationalist leader, Marcus Garvey and Ashanti/Jamaican warrior queen, Nanny of the Maroons. The fact that he is incapable of distinguishing between his quest for vengeance on the Stokes-Dillard family and Jamaican anti-colonial activism, underscores that he considers his Black enemies to be tools of the larger white power structure.

Dillard, like Luke Cage and the other Black American characters, assert a Black consciousness borne from survival of direct domination in a white majority country, including slavery, Jim Crow segregation and current manifestations of anti-Black racism. Cage struggles between being a respectable Black man in America and releasing his anger at systemic racism, while Dillard’s experiences with colorism, sexism, and racism become key motivators in her mission to rule Harlem. She has chosen to cooperate with whites in order to accumulate wealth and power while “keeping Harlem Black”. Of course, the characters’ choices are not bound by their different expressions of race consciousness, and Black radicalism in Jamaica and the United States is far more nuanced than what is portrayed on the show. However, the Stokes’ betrayal of the McIvers in collusion with white people, is amplified because of the two families’ different ethnicities/nationalities. Dillard continues this racial betrayal when she conspires with Asian gangsters to frame John McIver for producing a deadly strain of heroin as part of her plan to get rid of him. Similarly, the feuds between McIver’s hero, Marcus Garvey, and other Black leaders went beyond ideology; it was also a contention between a native-born U.S. Black leadership and the influence of a foreigner, though not all of Garvey’s Black detractors were American. The “Garvey Must Go” campaign formed by prominent Black American men in the 1920s and the Black spies that infiltrated the Universal Negro Improvement Association worked parallel to and with the white U.S. government to have him imprisoned then deported – exploiting his foreign status.

Fans will likely sympathize with McIver, and many, including me want the character to return in season three. This might indicate the show’s successful exploration of the intersections of race, ethnicity, and nationality in Black people’s marginalization.  However, the producers may not have expected that they would be accused of marginalizing Jamaicans through their casting choices and representations of the accent.

Luke Cage has inadvertently added another dimension to an ongoing debate about creative hierarchies among Black people in the U.S. television and film industries. An example of this is the 2017 controversy following Samuel L. Jackson’s critique of the casting of Black British actor, Daniel Kaluuya as the star of the American film, Get Out (2017), and Hollywood’s purported privileging of Black British actors over Black American ones. Jackson was called out by Kaluuya and others for being ethnocentric. For some commentators, his statement was also oblivious to the representational advantages Black American actors have, and the numerous chances they get to depict African and Caribbean people.

As an American TV show, it follows logically that most of Luke Cage’s actors would be American, and for the scenes filmed in Jamaica, Jamaicans  were cast in speaking roles. However, the central Jamaican characters, most supporting roles and limited-speaking roles were played by Americans, and there were obvious inconsistencies in their accents. I disagree with the broad critical position some people have taken in scrutinizing all of the non-Jamaican actors; and some of these criticisms border on cultural policing.[5] My own opinion is that while some accents were appalling, others like those of the actors playing McIver and his aunt and uncle (Mustafa Shakir, Sahr Ngaujah, and Heather Alicia Simms) were satisfactory or very good. Having had my Jamaican play produced in the U.S. with mostly American actors I know how difficult it is for Americans to sound Jamaican. I have also had to do foreign accents a few times as an actor. It is grueling, which is why the ideal is to cast native speakers.

There were open auditions for the speaking roles, including for the lead Jamaican character, John “Bushmaster” McIver. However, filming takes place in New York where there are many Jamaicans and Jamaican-descended actors, raising questions – particularly regarding the casting of speaking extras like the members of the Brooklyn-based Stylers posse. The presumed oversight generated a Twitter thread between disgruntled viewers, showrunner, Cheo Hodari Coker and Mustafa Shakir, who plays John “Bushmaster” McIver. This thread adds an important dimension to the controversy by displaying how viewers/fans spoke back to the producers and got responses. The viewers asked why the producers did not work harder to develop the accents and/or cast more Jamaicans. In their responses, Coker and Shakir emphasized the positive visibilities that Luke Cage has provided around Jamaica’s history of Black radicalism, including its discussions of historical figures like Nanny of the Maroons and Marcus Garvey. These responses appeared dismissive and were called out as such. Shakir and Coker subsequently apologized for the unintentional offense in their previous responses and emphasized their love and respect for Jamaicans. Consequently, each side seemed to be using different notions of what constituted proper Jamaican representation.

Many shows have been critiqued for flawed accents. However, there are racial-national implications when people of color are being depicted. For a long time, Hollywood and the TV industry have reinforced exotic notions of Caribbean people,[6] which the region’s tourism industry has also reproduced. This exoticism has roots in transatlantic slavery and colonialism, and Europeans’ racist obsession with consuming the Caribbean Other for economic gain, sexual pleasure and entertainment. The development of modern theatre and film throughout the Americas is marked by these racialized legacies that were most clearly manifested in blackface minstrelsy, and carnivalesque and popular theatre traditions that both subverted and reinforced stereotypes. The influences of historical racial caricaturing even appear in some Caribbean plays, films, and TV shows.

Most criticisms of Caribbean exoticism in the media have been directed at Hollywood.[7] However, the TV industry has arguably been more offensive. The random Jamaican characters on U.S. television, including shows produced by Black people, have usually bordered on, or displayed explicit caricaturing. This includes the character, Russell Montego on the Black sitcom, Living Single and the famous parody of Jamaican dancehall artiste, Shabba Ranks on the Wayans’ In Living Color. Jamaica also occasionally emerges as a punchline in standup comedy, like Chris Rock’s Netflix special, Tamborine (2018). The character of Lester Tibideaux on The Cosby Show, played by Jamaican actor/director/writer, Dennis Scott, is an exception to the rule because he was not the butt of the joke and Scott’s real accent added another layer of complexity to the role. Within this historical context, authentic-sounding accents come to serve as criteria on which to measure producers’ interest in the country’s complexities. Even actors who try but fail to develop good accents might be equated unfairly with those who intentionally distort it.

In the above-cited Twitter discussion, Shakir stated that the producers put significant thought into the Jamaican representations including trying not to “play into past stereotypes.” This wasn’t entirely successful, particularly in a scene where McIver misuses what seems to be an obeah ritual. However, in many ways Luke Cage subverts the norm of other American TV shows by creating fascinating Jamaican characters. The character of John McIver, despite the violence he commits, is emotionally layered and this nuance is accentuated by Shakir’s performance. Additionally, the show’s juxtaposition of McIver’s criminality with the respectability of his law-abiding aunt and uncle introduces a story of Jamaican immigrant ingenuity which is not usually visible in mainstream U.S. media. Coker is correct that the show also provides a glimpse into Jamaican history, with which most Americans are unfamiliar. Luke Cage also engages Jamaican language. The Jamaican characters’ code-switching between English and Patwa and use of distinctly Jamaican/Caribbean terms, indicates to me that the producers aimed to connect affectively with Jamaican/Caribbean viewers. But these transnational connections are fraught with tensions, buoyed by Americans’ relative cultural, economic and other privileges in global mass media. If they further explore the Jamaican element of the storyline in season three, this might provide an opportunity for Luke Cage’s producers to engage more profoundly with Jamaica, including through accent work and casting.

With the aim of obtaining a Jamaican actor’s perspective on the accent/ casting controversy, I spoke with Karl O’Brien Williams, a New York-based Jamaican actor and playwright who began his career in Jamaican theatre and film. Williams cannot represent the entire Jamaican acting community in the U.S., but his experiential insights are important. He didn’t audition for any of the roles in Luke Cage because he had another job. He is also unperturbed by the show’s accent/casting issues, because the Jamaican accent is hard to master, and he thinks by fixating on it critics risk reducing Jamaicanness to speech. We discussed structural factors that determine Jamaican actors’ visibilities globally, including casting networks, actors’ unions and color/racial typecasting; and the need for more opportunities for Caribbean writers, producers and casting agents in regional and global film and TV industries. He also stated that in the white-controlled Marvel Cinematic Universe, Cheo Coker may not be as powerful as his critics believe him to be. The conflict about creative authority is therefore fundamentally a clash about which Black people have the most real or imagined proximity to predominantly white-controlled power structures. It is the root of the McIver/Stokes feud in Luke Cage and of ongoing intra-racial ethnic/national/economic tensions throughout the world.

The previously discussed argument between Luke Cage’s characters, Mariah Dillard and Paul Mackintosh offers a glimpse into how unpacking ethnic/national conflicts, instead of ignoring them, can ultimately enable a more penetrating view of white supremacy as a global superstructure. When Dillard disparages Jamaica’s anti-colonial project in response to Mackintosh’s disparaging of America’s racial integration project it is primarily a retort to his efforts to shame her. However, at its core the insult asserts that no Black community/ethnicity is immune to white hegemony. As I write this, Jamaicans and other Caribbean people are confronting the rapid privatization of our beaches and sale of beachfront property to European hoteliers; in cities worldwide, gentrification is displacing mostly people of color; and the abuse of Black people in penal systems is globally normalized. There are emotional, psychic, and material stakes involved in a transnational understanding of Black experiences. This is why our intellectual project within Black studies to deconstruct intra-racial ethnic/ national conflicts and hierarchies is so urgent.

 

Notes

[1] As part of this project, the 4^th Symposium of the Dakar Institute of African Studies held in Senegal this year, had as its first objective, the need to “consider the limits of the U.S.-centered Black studies model” and its geographic, and epistemological constraints.

[2] Misty Knight (Simone Missick) has outgrown the series in my opinion and needs her own show. Not only do we need a Black woman protagonist in a superhero TV show, she is one of the most compelling characters and often upstages Cage. The writers are obviously aware of this and poked fun of it in a hilarious dialogue between the two characters in one episode where they debated who was whose sidekick.

[3] I am aware that Bushmaster is the name of a type of gun, and has connotations within the rudeboy/gangster culture of the late 1970s to early 1980s in Jamaica. However, I don’t know whether this influenced the moniker, Bushmaster, which originated in the comics.

[4] They also do this through the character of Tilda Johnson, Mariah Dillard’s estranged daughter and owner of a herbal pharmacy.

[5] One of these is the notion that it is implausible for McIver to be a capoeira practitioner, which is of African/Brazilian origin, and that this is an indication of the producers’ lack of research into Jamaican culture. This undermines the work of the capoeira community in Jamaica and the character’s trait as a man who consciously grounds himself in transnational Black culture.

[6] Jamaica is sometimes conflated with the rest of the Caribbean in U.S. films.

[7] For a critical discussion on Jamaican representations in Hollywood, see Tanya Batson-Savage, “Through the Eyes of Hollywood: Reading Representations of Jamaicans in American Cinema” Small Axe (2010) 14 (2 (32): 42-55; Kevin Frank, “‘Whether Beast or Human’: The Cultural Legacies of Dread, Locks, and Dystopia.” Small Axe 11 No. 2 (2007): 46-62.

 

Nicosia Shakes is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Africana Studies at The College of Wooster, Ohio. She earned her PhD in Africana Studies in 2017 from Brown University. Her book manuscript, Gender, Race and Performance Space won the 2017 National Women’s Studies Association/University of Illinois Press First Book Prize and is under contract with UIP. www.nicosiashakes.com

 

Best-selling author, acclaimed psychiatrist, visionary management consultant, and noted civil rights leader, Dr. Price M. Cobbs died on June 25, 2018 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, of complications related to a heart procedure. He was eighty-nine years old.

Born in Los Angeles on November 2, 1928, Dr. Cobbs was the son of Dr. Peter Price Cobbs and Rosa Mashaw Cobbs. The elder Dr. Cobbs was one of the first practicing Black physicians in Los Angeles, and Mrs. Cobbs was a school teacher. After attending UCLA, son Price received his bachelor’s degree in English literature from the University of California, Berkeley. After a two-year stint in the U.S. Army, he received his medical degree from Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee in 1958, and was board certified as a psychiatrist in 1966.

In private practice in northern California later in the 1960s, Dr. Cobbs made the acquaintance of another Black psychiatrist, Dr. William H. Grier, and they discussed the fact that there had been no serious study of the plight of Black people in the United States from a trained psychiatric point of view.

The memory of slavery was palpable throughout the Black community. Anti-Black Jim Crow laws were still much in place. It was true that significant changes had been made. President Harry Truman had integrated the armed forces in 1948. The Civil Rights Movement led by Black people themselves had resulted in the landmark Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the equally potent Voting Rights Act of 1965 that prohibited race-based voting restrictions nationwide. Black people were moving into the work force and other areas of endeavor in ways never before seen.

Nonetheless, Drs. Cobbs and Grier recognized that the realities of the previous 350 years of racist mistreatment had affected the psyches of most Black people. The two physicians set out to write a book that would articulate what those effects were.

The result was Black Rage, published by Basic Books in 1968.

What they intended as “a clinical handbook spelling out in the clearest possible language certain special aspects of the psychiatric treatment of blacks” became an immediate national bestseller. It was the clearest explanation so far of what the authors described as “the essence of what it [means] to be a black American in a nation that [has] reserved…a uniquely disfavored place for its black citizens.” The many individual stories in Black Rage come from every level of Black society, and are uniquely personal and finely written. The psychiatric analysis of each story as provided by Drs. Cobbs and Grier is equally memorable. A follow-up book titled The Jesus Bag was soon on bookstore shelves.

But what about real solutions?

While co-writing Black Rage, Dr. Cobbs had noted the usual call for “a conversation about race” whenever a violent outbreak of racial conflict occurred in some American city. He thought of such “conversations” between Black and white notables as generally quiet and polite. A panel would be named. Some suggestions for the end of racial strife would be made. A few new study groups or panels would be suggested. And in the end, little that led to the resolution of such strife would be accomplished.

Drs. Cobbs and Grier felt that a more direct process was needed. They determined that combative, noisy, and even very aggressive argument about each other between whites and Blacks, in a controlled environment in which physical violence was not permitted, could lead to long-term positive results in the racial divide. The idea was revolutionary and deemed by some critics as literally dangerous. The two physicians, though, believed they were on to something truly important. While in a conference at the Esalen Institute in California in 1967, they developed the structure of racial confrontation groups, a plan that, when implemented and pursued, in fact led to real understanding and what would be lifetime commitments to each other among the groups’ participants.

Dr. Cobbs described one of the breakthroughs that, among many, became routine in such groups.

“The whites, who were almost all professionals, would have a black work partner or two who were also professionals, and who, the whites understood, had clearly faced some kind of discrimination. But surely, they felt, these black people would not have suffered the kinds of anger and rage that a common black man on the street, having come from poverty and Jim Crow, might routinely feel. For the whites in our groups, the understanding that personal rage among black people was universal was eye opening, and very helpful to what we were trying to get to. Such anger is across the board with black people. Everyone.”

Dr. Cobbs formed a company, Pacific Management Systems, that would train white and Black practitioners in the metal health professions to implement such confrontation groups throughout the United States.

Dr. Cobbs became a senior consultant to the Executive Leadership Council, an organization of Black U.S. corporate business executives and entrepreneurs. He recognized that “without executives, managers and employees who can cope with the critical new demands of a diverse workforce, productivity is reduced by tension, polarization, high turnover, litigation, and untapped potential. Productivity is increased in an environment where each employee’s skills and potential are being fully utilized.” With this in mind, Dr. Cobbs set out with the essential purpose of introducing Black people to the middle- and senior-management levels of American corporations, and vice versa. He remained directly active in the endeavor until his passing. In the meantime, Dr. Cobbs also co-authored, with Judith L. Turnock, Cracking The Corporate Code, which details the experiences up the corporate ladder of thirty-two Black executives.

His biographical memoir, My American Life: From Rage to Entitlement, was published in 2005 by Atria Books.

Dr. Cobbs was a member of the National Medical Association and a Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. He was a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of The World Academy of Art and Science, as well as a founder of the African American Leadership Institute at the Anderson School of Business at the University of California at Los Angeles. He was a Charter Member of the Urban League, a Life Member of the NAACP, on the Advisory Board of The Black Scholar, and a former member of the Board of Directors of Shared Interest.

Dr. Cobbs is survived by his wife of thirty-three years, Frederica Maxwell Cobbs of San Francisco; his children Renata Cobbs-Fletcher of Philadelphia, and Price Priester Cobbs of San Francisco (whose mother was the late Evadne Priester Cobbs); and his grandchildren Kendall, Kristopher, and David.

***

Terence Clarke was the lead developmental editor of Dr. Price M. Cobbs’s My American Life: From Rage to Entitlement. His most recent book, the story collection New York, was published in 2017.

 

Arguably there is no African American writer who is currently as influential as the late Octavia Butler. Working from within the once-marginalized genre of science fiction and with a perspective rooted in the historical experiences of Black people and women, her visionary work has become so central to contemporary thinking on science fiction, feminism, African American literature, and Afrofuturism. And it is no secret that her work will soon be appearing on the big screen (though one desperately hopes they don’t mess that up). In 1985, just as her work was beginning to spread beyond the science fiction ghetto, The Black Scholar conducted this interview. We present it as a summer gift to our readers, old and new.

Click on the green PDF button for the option to download or read interactive PDF.