Lament

LAMENT

(FOR THE DEATH OF GREAT VOICES)

 

 

 

 

Daily the old trapper

nails our pelts on the wall.

No mystery. No magic.

Only nature.

Only the grace

Loss lends to poverty.

 

 

 

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

March 22, 2013

in torment as in love

in torment as in love

 

time, purple as agony,

ferments by the day

the nights’ purchased joys.

 

expensive toys blash

where  homemade bling

might do as well.

 

who told us space

would read our lips

tilted against the wind?

 

it is not so easy

to do as it is to know.

 

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

March 18, 2013

Black Drama

Black Drama and the Alarm Clock

 

TIME PAST

In the early 1970s, people in what was then the Black Community took some interest in the April issues of Black World, a rich source of cultural information edited by Hoyt W. Fuller. Those issues were devoted to reporting and commentary on Black drama; they satisfied our desire to know what was happening in Black theater.  We had a broad sense of how Black playwrights and directors were dealing with themes and influencing inquiry about the state of Black America.  Two items in the April 1972 issue were typical.

Woodie King’s “A Question of Relevance,” pages 25-29, informed us that he did not see a coming together of educational theater and the Black Community “until they begin to understand each other” (25).  King ended his essay with an opinion about change. “The classics [of Black theater] will be captured on video as they are in books.  Educational institutions must the look for the new, the innovative.  I think the new and the innovative are in Black theater” (29).

Kalamu ya Salaam’s report “BlackArtSouth –New Orleans,” pages 40-45, was less sanguine.  He had “a feeling that B*L*A*C*K   T*H*E*A*T*E*R as we know it is on its way out this year. The serious folks are for getting off into other things and the thespians are showing their true nature and ending up on Broadway, television and Hollywood silver screens ( or at the very least striving for that)” (40). He concluded with the bet “that film is the next wave and that, except for the exceptions that will prove the rule, not much Black-produced Black Theater will surface during 1972.  It’s sad but true.  Check it out for yourself” (45).

Educational theater and the Black Community never reached the stage of understanding each other, and the alarm clock ensured that Salaam won his bet.  Black drama did move with deliberate speed from the traditional stage to the screens, surfing into the World Wide Web on yet another new wave.

TIME PRESENT

The illusion that there is a Black Community which Black drama can and is able to address has evaporated.  A very small number of intimate strangers (the descendents of Afrocentric thinkers who boldly embraced dreams of covenant, community, and solidarity) do occasionally attend revivals of ancient Black drama. You are truly have juice and game if you can find and attend and digest  a performance of work by Alice Childress,  Samm-Art Williams, Ed Bullins, Adrienne Kennedy, Tom Dent, J. B. Franklin, Kalamu ya Salaam, Pearl Cleage,  LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Ntozake Shange, Ishmael Reed and Douglas Turner Ward.  You have to be an aristocrat to enjoy work by Harold Clark and Chakula Cha Jua. You are “normal” if works by Tyler Perry, August Wilson, and T. D. Jakes are sufficient to satisfy your desire. You are even more authentically “normal” if soft-porn music videos and underground DVDs of so-called black films that premiered yesterday make you happy.  You have arrived, transcended the burden of ancestral blackness, and become quintessentially American.

 

TIME FUTURE

The brand of black drama is yet to be determined by Asian cartels and Latino-American corporations.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                                                                           

March 16, 2013

 

Ethical Criticism

Title: “Django Unchained”: Ambiguous Ethical Response and the Principle of Double Effect

 

 

Abstract:

The overwhelming, contentious responses to Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained provide a reason for examining the limits of ethical criticism of modern and contemporary literature. As an anachronistic collage, the film sponsors the illusion that its primary subject is history, the history of American slavery. The film is so open to competing interpretations, however, that it must be viewed as a work of art that brings questions of what is morally permissible to the foreground. Any ethical criticism of the film must deal with the principle of double effect. While Tarantino may have intended to expose undesirable aspects of excessive violence, the film can seduce viewers to embrace excessive violence as a desirable means for achieving justice. Ethical criticism is obligated to endlessly shuttle between propositions about good and bad effects. In this sense, ethical criticism is forced to be self-reflective regarding its own ambiguities and limits.

Django Unchained: Ambiguous Ethical Response and the Principle of Double Effect

The overwhelming public responses to Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained during the first two months of 2013 provide one reason for examining the limits of ethical criticism of film as literary expression that infrequently transcends its social location.  We might argue that criticism is itself an ethical activity.  We make judgments about what is good or bad both in theory and in the more immediate space of lived experiences, often using multiple rhetorical strategies to conceal the utter subjectivity of judgment.  We want others to accept our constructions of reality as depictions of what is actual. Our strategies enjoy some success in the protected territories of academic space, but in public spaces those strategies are vulnerable. Logic rarely obtains in public discourses.  The public responses to Django Unchained have been passionate rather than coldly reasoned.  They provide evidence that ambiguity or uncertainty is dominant in our immediate viewing of and subsequent commentary on this film.

We can minimize responsive ambiguity by virtue of prolonged negotiations, but we never succeed in eradicating it.  We do not minimize the ideological functions of film by saying cinema is no more than entertainment.  Entertainment imprints memory more than we might want to admit.  It gives birth to value-laden emotions. We may or may not be conscious of the effects, but those emotions deserve to be accounted for as matters of ethics.

 Just as our reading of a poem culminates in our provisionally liking or disliking the accumulated effects of clustered  words, our witnessing of speech, music, and visual images in Django Unchained brings matters of ethical import to the foreground.  Music in Tarantino’s films, for example, can manipulate our sensibilities with subliminal force. “More than mere accompaniment, ironic commentary, or contradiction,” as Lisa Coultard observes, “music in [Tarantino’s] scenes of violence is instrumental and essential in the audiovisual construction of spectatorial enjoyment and engagement”(2).[1]  Such construction allows us to treat Tarantino’s film as a surreal, incendiary poem.  Any ethical criticism of the film as poem must deal with the principle of double effect.

As an anachronistic collage, Django Unchained projects the illusion that its primary subject is the history of American slavery.  Heated arguments about the film have focused on its inaccurate representation of that complex history. Counterarguments have nailed the point that Tarantino never intended to recreate history; he intended to create a spectacular display of ultraviolence as a work of art. In the battle of arguments, the opposing forces are art and history as oppositional forces. In this contested space, concern for intention is not a fallacy but a necessity.

  It is impossible for viewers to dismiss their socialized ideas about history, ideas which encourage seeing things as either/or rather than as both/and. The alternative to a reductive reading (or interpretive viewing) of the film involves realizing that American slavery is a pretext for a subversive treatment of the film’s real subject: the history and “legitimacy” of American bounty hunting. Without special prompting, only a few legal scholars and American historians are predisposed or sufficiently informed to notice this fact.[2] The problematic effects of Django Unchained would be clearly understood by the legal scholar Rebecca B. Fisher.  As she observes, American bounty hunting as “a profession virtually unregulated for hundreds of years, is certainly relevant to understanding how increased privatization in the criminal justice system will impact the least empowered in our society” (233). What she examines is germane to considerations of how the both/and relationship of slavery and criminal justice complicate response and critical commentary on response. Tarantino’s film succeeds, either by accident or intention or both, in reaffirming the Constitutional entitlement of Americans to bear arms and make havoc among themselves and those deemed “fugitive outlaws” in the United States. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, which enforced the Constitution, Article IV, Section 2, “legitimized” bounty hunting, as did the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Thus, slavery and bounty hunting were entangled.

Django Unchained is so overdetermined, so open to competing interpretations, that it must be processed as a work of art which brings questions regarding what is morally permissible to the foreground. While Tarantino may have intended to expose undesirable aspects of excessive violence, his film can equally as well seduce viewers to embrace excessive violence as a desirable means for achieving justice. Ethical criticism navigates between propositions about good and bad effects.[3] In this sense, ethical criticism does not achieve certainty; indeed, it is forced to reflect upon its own ambiguities and limits.

Our interpretation of Django Unchained is largely determined by the angles, prejudices, and ideological luggage we bring to the acts of viewing and talking.  If the film is approached as an effort by a white director to tell a black story, the viewing is shaped by assumed expectations about how a black story of enslavement ought to be written and reconstructed or translated into film. It is more profitable to assume the film is a story about white American historical fantasy that uses dominant black elements to intensify a terminal vision of white power. This assumption makes possible a multiethnic representation of American history circa 1858-1859. Our attention is better drawn to the paradox of violence in the shaping of the United States from 1619 to 1776 to the present.  The indivisible presence of the black story functions as an inner light to reveal what is gross and vulgar on the surface of American democracy’s saga.  The film fails to challenge the exhausted and exhausting black/white binary conventions of America sufficiently, but it does begin to expose a fantasy of oppositional progress.  It is neither good nor accurate history, nor was it meant to be.  It is an exposure of how American entertainment nurtures national pathology. That fantasy undermines or erases fact works against sympathetic reception of the film, but it does not prevent our understanding why violation of the human body and the worship of violence is an innate element in our historical being.  Ultimately, Django Unchained is an anatomy of the imperfections of whiteness, the hypocrisy of Euro-American founding dreams, and America’s violent soul. It is a violent cartoon that magnifies the ironic aesthetics of the spaghetti Western genre and American social history as wife and husband, Broomhilda and Django ride off into the bliss of fugitive darkness.

We have been trying, without much success, to have a conversation about what it means to be an American since the nineteenth-century publication of Alex de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.  Although any awakening of consciousness occasioned by Django Unchained will be somewhat limited, the grounds for a crucial conversation have been “immortalized” as a richly satiric cartoon, a cinematic allegory that divides spectators into pro-Django, anti-Django, and disingenuous neutral camps.  Since mid-2012, the Django conversation snowballed. It has now melted. We are left, at least for the anticipated future, to make judgments about the ethical problems the film brought into being.

These ethical problems are dramatic.  We are troubled to remember that the philosophical principle of double effect asserts that it is sometimes morally permissible to do what is ordinarily forbidden by natural law. I borrow an example of the principle from the textbook Ethics: Theory and Contemporary Issues (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1995) by Barbara MacKinnon.  The example refers to the violence of killing in wartime.  A pilot who bombs an enemy’s munitions facility does risk killing innocent civilians. The pilot may intend the good end or effect of minimizing the enemy’s ability to cause massive destruction and thus facilitating the saving of lives.  The bad effect is the killing of innocent people. Under the rules of Western ethics, the pilot must not intend to kill the innocent.  Moreover, the act of bombing must contribute to a positive outcome of the war, and this good end “must outweigh any harm that is done.  The principle of double effect requires that three conditions be met: 1) the act itself must be morally permissible; 2) the good end must be the intended goal; 3) the good end must outweigh the bad end (MacKinnon 87-88).

What frustrates the application of ethical criticism to Django Unchained is the dealing with an imagined literary artifact, the making of normative (evaluative) judgments.  We are really applying descriptive (empirical) judgments to reaction and response as factual matters.  The film at once escapes the three justifying requirements even as it invites their application.  It magnifies a viewer’s relatively primitive ideas about justice and revenge. Viewers who make vested historical or ancestral identifications with the enslaved characters in the film may gleefully embrace violence as a good means of achieving a good end. Viewers who have no such identifications may just as gleefully fail to critique how excessive representation of violence assaults moral judgment.  Under these circumstances, ethical criticism must question whether catharsis (release of psychological resentments) outweighs the damage of intensifying the “love” of violence. The answers can never be conclusive.  Ethical criticism comes to recognize its own ambiguity, its own philosophical limits.  It figuratively bashes its head against the brick wall of audience response, because it is complicit in not divorced from that response.  Ethical critics realize they are not objective instruments of judgment.  They are bound by human subjectivity and cultural relativity in the very act of making judgments.  Django Unchained as a provocative poem invites us to engage the principle of double effect, but it leaves the trained critic and the ordinary viewer/reader treading the treacherous waters of human uncertainty.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

Central China Normal University

 

 

 

 

 

 

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[1] Coulthard, Lisa. “Torture Tunes: Tarantino, Popular Music, and New Hollywood Ultraviolence.” Music and the Moving Image 2.2 (2009): 1-6.

[2] See Fisher, Rebecca B. “The History of American Bounty Hunting As a Study in Stunted Legal Growth.” N.Y.U. Review of Law and Social Change 33.199: 199-233.

[3] In philosophy, the principle or doctrine of double effect pertains to conditions that allow us to justify actions which on the surface appear to be dubious cases in the frames of morality and ethics

Title: “Django Unchained”: Ambiguous Ethical Response and the Principle of Double Effect

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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[1] Coulthard, Lisa. “Torture Tunes: Tarantino, Popular Music, and New Hollywood Ultraviolence.” Music and the Moving Image 2.2 (2009): 1-6.

[2] See Fisher, Rebecca B. “The History of American Bounty Hunting As a Study in Stunted Legal Growth.” N.Y.U. Review of Law and Social Change 33.199: 199-233.

[3] In philosophy, the principle or doctrine of double effect pertains to conditions that allow us to justify actions which on the surface appear to be dubious cases in the frames of morality and ethics

 

Critical Memory

Houston A. Baker, Jr.’s Critical Memory

 

 

 

Houston Baker’s Critical Memory (University of Georgia Press, 2001) is a meditation on how, why and where his values are grounded.  A few students of African American intellectual history may genuinely admire Baker’s indebtedness to Richard Wright’s racial wisdom, his gratitude to his parents for modeling civic virtues in the pressure cooker of segregation, and his critique of race as “the ruling idea that conjures and pronounces sentences of guilt or innocence…on we who are black by choice…or due to inescapable circumstances” (10). Transcendentalists who fed on denial, thin air and mental narcotics will not admire, I suspect, Baker’s Old Testament forthrightness.  He is too much like Fred Daniels, the man who lived underground.  His truth-telling brings discomfort.  Despite potential threats of minority condemnation, Baker has written an eloquent testimony on the power of autobiographical examination.  Critical Memory is a thick description of historicity.

 

Richard Wright is the tutelary spirit of the book, modified versions of the 1997 Averitt Lectures at Georgia State University.  His presence influenced Baker’s angles of vision regarding the topics of “Black Modernity,” “Failed Memory,” and “Words for Black Fathers and Sons in America.”  That Baker chose not to mention Wright’s The Long Dream (1958) in the third lecture on fathers and sons is a slight surprise.  The more delightful surprise is Baker’s treatment of the word like as verb and preposition in the first lecture, a strong way of illuminating why neither Wright nor he are “likeable” in the eyes of those who champion America’s War on Decency. The second lecture delivers a shock of recognition about Ralph Ellison’s beloved American novel Invisible Man. Baker’s is an elegant rendition of James Brown’s “The Big Payback,” contrasting Wright’s active critique of capitalism with Ellison’s aesthetic hibernation in “a colorblind, literarily allusive prison of language” (30).  The acidic exposure of Ellison’s failure of critical memory is sharp and unsettling; it is an effective use of Baker’s version of critical memory in the service of iconoclasm.  It is a concise precursor of the sustained iconoclasm in Arnold Rampersad’s biography of Ellison.  Baker’s example of stern honesty may be one reason he is not mentioned in William M. Banks’s Black Intellectuals: Race and Responsibility in American Life (1996), a book authenticated by the very likeable John Hope Franklin. Critical memory cuts both ways.

 

From Singers of Daybreak (1974) to Betrayal (2008), Baker has provided many iterations of critical memory.  His manipulations of theoretical postures constitute a body of work that merits scrutiny. It can be argued, without exaggeration, that his work casts a long shadow over men who “have gladly accepted the affirmative action benefits bestowed by race in America while writing fiercely and with studied hypocrisy that there is no such thing in America as race” (39). Even the hypothetical village idiot in the United States knows that race matters, that American literary and cultural criticism is indelibly marked by “race.”  Critical Memory is, in just this sense, a mirror for critics in need of self-assessment.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                                                           

March 13, 2013

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oprah Winfrey Network

I am annoyed by how irresponsible the Oprah Winfrey Network ( OWN )has been in producing unbalanced episodes of "Blackboard Wars." Since 2005, media carpetbaggers have legitimately raped the new New Orleans and have treated our many agonizing problems as targets for entertainment. I foolishly thought OWN would provide the United States with intelligent forms of investigation, because I failed to remember that media is media is media. Capitalism is more popular than God in America. So be it. Tolerance for letting the good times roll in a city that care has so carefully forgot , however, does not minimize my resentment.

I.

Audacity of Contradictions

AUDACITY OF CONTRADICTIONS

 

This morning a well-known writer asked for advice.  After indicating he would give a major speech on Barack Obama’s presidency and American democracy, he said “I need to tell the truth.  And be balanced.  What do you advise?

 

Summoning moral courage, I wrote to him:

 

You should speak a balanced truth, although your message will be bittersweet.

 

A.       Barack Obama the man, the husband, the father is a person we can admire without reservations.  He has a good heart; he possesses the virtues of faith, love, charity, and hope; he is a good American citizen.  He is a candidate for earned rewards when he dies.

B.      President Barack Obama is a different person, a different case.  In his second term, he has swiftly learned to project himself as a master of Machiavellian politics and as a superb servant of the hypocrisy that does dirty work behind the mask of angelic democracy.  He is obedient.  He willingly stains his hands in blood and does all the reprehensible things that anyone who occupies the Office of the President is required to do by the global cartels that call the shots. Like all Presidents of the 20^th century, he spits on virtues and does what is pragmatic and effective by any means necessary. His rhetorical postures do not match his disguised activities.

 

Tell your audience that each individual is condemned to deal with this glaring contradiction between A and B.

 

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

March 8, 2013