In an attempt to further muddy some conceptual waters, I present you this finnish music video:
Shava are probably the only representatives so far of the genre of Suomibhangra, a Finnish take on the South Asian diaspora dance genre, bhangra. One one level there's a lot to be critical of here, perhaps - the wilful exoticism, the fake Indian dancers, the almost-brownface of someone like the "Finnjabi bad boy" in the video.
On the other hand, though, which I think is perhaps more interesting, there's the reaction in the bhangra community. I actually found the track on a bhangra blog, it's been reposted and become popular on a bhangra youtube channel where it's generated positive comments, the band has toured to desi audiences in Canada and it's played on several bhangra radio stations... The bhangra community is not offended at all, they rather like it. (For as they say: Imitation is...)
So who's right? Us radical critics or the people we think we're defending? Perhaps it's worth thinking about.
I have to admit that my blog entry from last week about extending the blackface concept to other power relations wasn't entirely my own idea. It builds, at least in part, on this article by Renee at Womanist Musings, whose extreme positions on another part of the marginalised-group-imitation matrix intrigues me:
"What is up with the black male fascination of playing black women? We are told that this is done in homage to our great strength. In actuality these women are ridiculous caricatures of black women."
Her argument is persuasive. Yet me and just about everyone I know readily accept drag, the way we wouldn't accept a blackface or yellowface performer. Perhaps, as was suggested to me on twitter, the difference is history, or perhaps it's intent: surely there's a difference between the varied depictions of women in a video like this Eurovision parody?
Sure, there's some extremely positive and loving diva portrayals. But the parody of Kikki Danielsson as overweight and barely able to move is vicious, and hits deeply into some rather nasty intersectional issues, where gay men (like Alexander Bard in this swedish-language video) project body-image hate on women with certain body types, in a patriarchal reversal of oppression.
In general, though, if the intent is positive, Renee's position can appear extreme. For most feminists, drag is not necessarily a bad thing, a performative play with the dichotomy of gender roles. By adapting stereotypically "feminine" characteristics, the drag queen is undermining the idea of a definite, essentialist masculinity. And that's before we get to drag kings!
But there's another group whose perspective on drag artists tends to be much more negative, and that's transpeople. In one way, I guess, it's possible to view drag not as making fun of women, but of male-to-female transsexuals. What's a huge life-changing position for them is reduced to a bit of fun, where cisgendered privilidged males get to play around the imagery of a real sexual reassignment. Transsexuals regularly condemn drag shows and have a strong antipathy towards drag queens...
I guess part of the problem is that transsexual activists and other feminists have conflicting interests when it comes to understanding gender identity. For many transsexual activists, the idea is essential (ha ha) that there are distinct and different "male" and "female" brains and that you can be born into a biologically "wrong" body for your mind. The more fluid sexual identities and socially constructed genders of feminism in general and queer feminism in particular have to be rejected, lest conflicting gender identities be reduced to "just a choice". Drag can be provocative because it introduces precisely the type of fluidity which undermines the essentialism.
What the idea of a "gender blackface" exposes in this case is that there can never be a unified perspective, one ideology that will cover all radical viewpoints in one. I guess that's where the need for diversity comes in. Even in radicalism we've got the archipelagos.
In general Jamaicans are friendly, outgoing and very proud of their nation. [...] Jamaicans keep a positive and care-free attitude toward life, answering many questions or inquiries with a "No Problem Mon" or an "Irie" - believing that it's all going to work out and everything is OK!
Most minstrels projected a greatly romanticized and exaggerated image of black life with cheerful, simple slaves always ready to sing and dance and to please their masters.
The picture I posted on Wednesday depicts two men dressed as stereotypical Jamaicans. They're selling a commodity (pineapple) whose association with Jamaica is a largely colonial one - it's where the fruit is grown for global north consumption. They're largely dehumanised, wearing a generalised-exotic lava-lava in lieu of anything specifically Jamaican. The music is pastoral and rich-world-oriented "roots" reggae, in a fake plastic version... And their proscribed behaviour is carefree and laid back, much like the fake Maori in the last set of Fanta commercials (here, appropriately, in Estonian), and indeed much like both the stereotypes above.
And yet, it seems to still be okay. And I'm kind of wondering why, and discovering the wider implication of various angles on the blackface phenomenon are disturbingly plentiful.
I've nicked the illustration above from an online costume site, where it's advertised as "Rasta Mon Costume. This costume represents the carefree life-style of the Carribean Islands Mon!". I've looked through the site, and although there are plenty of costumes with some sort of parody intent directed at the hip-hop lifestyle, there are none that directly portray African Americans as an ethnic group in this way. Because that, of course, would be blackface.
I realise the historical and activistically racist context to this discrepancy. But surely, at the base of it, the problem is exactly the same. The blackface performer perpetuates an extremely simplified stereotype with strong negative or servile implications. He pretends to be an oppressed person in order to mock. The oppressed people are denied the custody of their own culture and the voice, they are spoken for by a grossly simplified parody of themselves, often for bigoted purposes.
And yet, dressing as a "Jamaican" in this way seems perfectly okay with most people. I've got enough issues, lord knows, with trustafarianism and middle-class white rappers as well, but at least they're trying to be something, not ironically mocking subalterns from a position of privilege. I cringe when I see stuff like this:
(via) What are Diplo and Switch thinking? Seriously? Having Andy Milonakis come in and do a perfectly ridiculous number in a faux-Demarco manner, cynically ridiculing the current style of dancehall and some sort of mystical, generalised-exotic voodoo bullshit? Exaggerating all the negative aspects, the violence and the drugs? Blabbing on about "pussy" in a manner which in the class/racial context comes accross as sexist in the extreme?
I can understand a desire (however warped it is) to want to be Jamaican or to want to act authentically so. But that isn't the case here at all. For me, when it comes to putting down Jamaicans by imitating them stereotypically - whether in costume or in music - there's really only one word for it.
In the next post I'll look at the idea of blackface as extended beyond ethnicity altogether - what happens when people imitate genders and classes, and how does that fit in?
