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E. Patrick Johnson

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""Appropriating Blackness" is a wonderful study that makes important and timely contributions across many fields. E. Patrick Johnson is a skilled reader of texts and offers useful introductions to complex theories of race, sexuality, and culture."--David Roman, author of" Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS"

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Appropriating Blackness

Duke University Press

Chapter One

Marlon Riggs's Black Is ... Black Ain't

There has been a history of excluding other black folk from community to the detriment of our overall empowerment.-Marlon Riggs

Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, black gay poet and filmmaker Marlon Riggs committed his life to chronicling black American life. His early works, Ethnic Notions (1986) and Color Adjustment (1991), for example, documented the history of the images of blacks in art, artifacts, television, theater, and film. His most controversial work, Tongues Untied, however, debuted on the PBS Point of View series in 1990, and it chronicles Riggs's personal struggles with coming to terms with his racial and sexual identities, and with homophobia in black communities and racism in white communities. In one of the more poignant moments of Tongues Untied, a collage of obituaries of black gay men who have died of AIDS flashes on the screen while the sound of a heartbeat thumps in the background. This series of pictures is preceded by Essex Hemphill performing his poem "Now We Think," which emblematizes the paranoia of contracting HIV/AIDS experienced by gay men: "Now we think / as we fuck / this nut / might kill us. / There might be / a pin-sized hole / in the condom. / A lethal leak." Echoing the poem's angst-ridden tone, Riggs announces that "a time bomb is ticking in my blood." The newspaper clippings of those who have fallen victim to aids appear in succession, appearing more rapidly as they proceed, over which Riggs narrates: "I listen for my own quiet implosion, but while I wait, older, stronger rhythms resonate within me, sustain my spirit, silencing the clock." The last image of this series of pictures is that of Riggs himself, as if foreshadowing his own death that would come four years later. The "older, stronger rhythms" that "resonate" within him and "sustain his spirit" are represented in the collage of images following the series of obituaries, the first picture being one of Harriet Tubman who, for Riggs, is an emblem of the struggle for black freedom and equality, and who Riggs invokes even more prominently in his film Black Is ... Black Ain't.

In some ways Black Is ... Black Ain't is the sequel to Tongues Untied in that although it broadens its scope to examine black identity in all of its contradictions and contingencies, the focus of the film is Riggs's battle with aids, which he apparently knew he had contracted when he filmed Tongues Untied. Riggs thus stages the fight for his life against AIDS within the broader context of black identity politics. For Riggs, the processes by which we fight deadly diseases such as aids and those by which we fight over the embattled status of blackness circumscribe the process by which we come into our humanity. In other words, when we "fix" and confine our identity asmonolithic, we inhibit our road both to recovery from the diseases that plague our communities and to discovering our humanity. Taking the "fact" of the diseased and "black" body as givens, Riggs, according to Martin Favor, "refuses to delineate the boundaries of blackness even as [the film's title] invokes the category as truly experienced and, indeed, necessary." Resonating the queer theory critique of identity as ontological, the film also allows for the subject's agency and authority by visually privileging Riggs's AIDS experience narrative. Indeed, the film's documentation of Riggs's declining health, highlighted by the reiteration of his declining T-cell count coupled with his own narration, suggests an identity and a body in the process of "being" and "becoming," of identity as performance and performativity.

Insofar as identity is performed and experienced as real, it constitutes a legitimate way through which subjects maintain control over their lives and their image. But performance does not foreclose the discursive signifiers that undergird the terms of its production. Through my reading of the film, then, I will focus on the dialectic created between performance and performativity, demonstrating why one critical trope necessarily depends on the other in the process of identity formation. Black Is ... Black Ain't demonstrates just how over-determined black identity and authenticity are by elaborating on the ways in which skin color alone is simultaneously an inadequate yet sometimes a socially, culturally, and politically necessary signifier of blackness.

In the first half of this chapter I will elaborate the process by which the film engages performativity to underscore the problematic pursuit of authentic identity claims. Although theories of performativity focus primarily on the performativity of gender, I engage a discussion about the performativity of race. One of the ways in which the film engages this critique is by pointing out how, at the very least, gender, class, sexuality, and region all impact the construction of blackness. Indeed, the title of the film-Black Is ... Black Ain't-itself embodies how race defines, as well as confines, black Americans. The running trope used by Riggs to illuminate the multiplicity of blackness is gumbo, a dish whose ingredients consist of whatever the cook wishes. It has, Riggs remarks, "everything you can imagine in it." This trope also underscores the multiplicity of blackness insofar as gumbo is a dish associated with New Orleans, a city confounded by its mixed raced progeny and the identity politics that mixing creates. The gumbo trope is apropos because, like "blackness," gumbo is a site of possibilities. The film argues that when black Americans attempt to define what it means to be black, they delimit the possibilities of what blackness can be. At times, this process of demarcating blackness may be counterproductive to the flavor of the roux that acts as the base of the gumbo that is "blackness."

But Riggs's film does more than just stir things up. In many ways it reduces the heat of the pot to a simmer, allowing everything in the gumbo to mix and mesh yet maintain a distinct flavor; for after all, chicken is distinct from andouille sausage, rice from peas, bay leaf from thyme, cayenne from paprika. Thus, Riggs's film suggests that black Americans cannot begin to ask the dominant culture to accept their difference as Others nor accept their humanity until black Americans accept the differences that exist among themselves. Riggs's film does the work that Dwight McBride calls for: "[To] create new and more inclusive ways of speaking about race that do not cause even good, thorough thinkers ... to compromise their/our own critical veracity by participating in the form of race discourse that has been hegemonic for so long." Indeed, as I demonstrate below, Riggs's "critical veracity" is relenting in his critique of race-privileging antiracist discourse such that gender, sexuality, and class constitute subject positions from which one may "speak" about race oppression.

The second half of this chapter focuses on the black body as a site of performance. Here I provide a rejoinder to racial performativity in order to intervene in what I see as some scholars' eclipsing of corporeality and materiality. Specifically, I construe Marlon Riggs's black body in the film as a site of discursivity and...