I finally finished Red White and Black. I don't have any new thoughts about this text, simply because Wilderson had already blown me away in the first 100 pages. I never thought about the cinema apparatus as an extention of hegemony...well, I have, but not in the way Wilderson has. He almost makes it sound as if there is no possible way to depict Blackness on screen! Unless it's steeped in politics! To which I say, maybe, but also no(?).
What are we doing here if indeed the cinema and media et. al. are incapable of respectfully depicting Blackness and the complexities of it? Where do we go from here? Even Wilderson doesn't know. Anyway, here are my final notes on the book.
Red White & Black Chapters 10 - End! (12 + Epilogue)
I love it when an author reiterates the thesis of their book as Wilderson does on p. 247 where he reminds us that there is a system of power propagated by violence
This, of course, makes me think of literal violence and thus the idea of the horror genre comes to mind and how my OG thesis has always been how horror films have a particular way of talking about race/Blackness/Otherness that no other genre (well, maybe Sci-fi but of course it has its own set of rules and patterns) does
Humanness essentializes Whiteness
The idea of value (Spivak’s in fact! From Baucom’s second half of Spectres I’m going to finish soon!) appears to set up the fact that value can only be attributed to an included member of Humanity--the Slave is not
Settler/White grammar of suffering is alienation and exploitation, a system of suffering that bears nothing for the grammar of suffering for the Slave
But still hinges or is contingent on the existence of the Black from which to create both Whiteness AND their grammar of suffering (248-50)
White cinema, therefore, uses the relationship of White to this Black to establish both White “normalcy” while also universalize the Settlers grammar of suffering to include Blackness, but fails. Miserably (according to Wilderson, p.251)
I believe the rest of the book is about Monster’s Ball
Wilderson creates an argument around Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Marxist philosophy of the world as a prison and ‘We’ are all apart of the ‘multitude’
Wilderson again reads extradiagetically as well as diegetically
There is one sequence in which the director Marc Foster puts all characters in the same cohesive thought, so to speak
The Execution Walk
In it, the director attempts to frame everyone, the guards escorting the soon to be murdered prisoner, the prisoner’s family and the members of society (Wilderson’s description) into the same prison-like system
The creation of the ‘multitude’ is an event (!!) linked, of course in my head to the Enlightenment from Baucom; the event of the Enlightenment jump-started hegemonic capitalism as we know it
For Wilderson, the filmic exercise does not work, mainly through the use of a voice over
This voice over is the sentencing of the prisoner to death in circular, law-informed logic
The way the voice over functions is of an overbearing, overpowering force that not only controls the prisoner’s fate, but also that of the guards escorting the prisoner to death
Agentcy is taken away from these white guards (both white, father/son); diegetically, the son is visibly bothered by his actions and dips out, his (White) body not going to be apart of the destruction of this Black body…
And so Wilderson posits that the body is the locus of struggle in Monster’s Ball
Because the world is a vampire and we live in a cage, the only thing that we (We) have control over is our body
And the White bodies’ need the Black body to devour, the need of the Black Other because civil society grew hostile to all bodies (Marxist)
So now Black flesh is essential to the creation of White flesh and civil society
The film’s glowing cinematography of the White man’s hands shaving the Black head of the prisoner so that electricity would flow through the prisoner better, killing him more effientically
Wilderson claims the film knows what it’s doing, between framing White hands so graciously all the while the Black man about to be murdered by the state (‘We’re’ all a victim/subjected to) is not treated to the same glowing, lovely lighting
My personal favorite section of chapter 10 is the discussion of the frame, the filmic frame
“Black is never in the frame, only on” (p. 284)
The Black can never be of the revolution (Marxist or otherwise) only outside of it
The Black family must be destroyed so that the figures in the frame “can be composed and recomposed” (p. 282)
Wilderson continues the use of the frame to contextualize how the Black relates to the White in cinema and civil society
The “coherence” of the structural order of things to Humans (though he may have used the word before p. 304, its on that page I notice how it is being used)
Bridging (so to speak) the structural order of things to Humans, is the mulatto/a
Hortense Spillers “argues that the ‘mulatto’ and the ‘mulatta’ ‘heal’ a wound in civil society” (300)
One sexual and the other political
Sexual: White womanhood (and this I remember from a class I took in undergrad about Black and White femininity) has been the pearl of the world since the beginning
In contrast, Black women are so hyper-sexualized we’re asexual beings so the sacredity of our sex never existed
Therefore anything born of a Black woman is property or a thing (quoted from another book by Wilderson) “condition of mindless fertility” (305)
Political: Mulatto/a’s are still bound by the structure of slavery, but in this case, would be defended by her lover because of her property-ness
Wilderson bafflement with Judith Butler gender theory is, well, baffling
However, due to the application of race to this gender theory by Kalpana Seshardi-Crooks, his argument is clarified
“Gender ontology”
An oxymoronic word “marked by analytic imprecision because it collapses and confuses the social and the performative with the structural and positional. In other words, it collapses and confuses the important with the essential” (311)
I understand this as the theory breaks because the house was built before the foundation was set; one can not have a performance without the structures that inform such a performance to take place
Fascinating stuff I’d like to dive into later, I think
The last chapter goes on to reiterate the non-body or flesh of the Slave
Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thorton’s infamous sex scene
One she said was harder to do than the scene in which she beats her cinematic son essentially because he’s fat
The distinction holds significance for Wilderson, for, of course the idea of nudity does not operate the same on Berry’s/Leticia’s body
As stated above, Black flesh transcends power in nudity/sex
Her cinematic son is killed right before that scene
Berry (Wilderson distinguishes) goes off-script ranting about how a Black boy in America can’t also be fat
“The point of the fact, however, it is Tyrell who has just been devoured, eaten alive by the necessity of the (White) body’s drama of value. The extent to which this necrophilic necessity has been devouring Leticia--slowly, for the length of the screenplay, rather than in one spectacular feast--breaks in on Halle Berry, who cannot keep the knowledge of this terror from breaking in on Leticia” (327)
Is this apart of the bridging that half-white/black babies do?
And Halle’s actions toward the little boy who plays Tyrell were of great note to Wilderson
Halle said to counteract all the hateful and mean things she said to his character about his weight, she would hug him and kiss him
The IRL child told Halle, “don’t worry about what you say; it can’t be as bad as how they treat me at school” (330)
Wilderson’s interest is in the boy’s assertion that nothing you say matters, for it doesn’t make or break or move anything outside of those words moving the air
Nothing a Slave says matters
Which brings me to Wilderson’s last point comparing lynching postcards with White people standing next to the mutilated corpses of Black men to cinema
“The lynching, and the scene of lynching preserved in photography and in cinema, is a gift which Whites exchange, libidinally and literally, among themselves” (332)
Wilderson goes on to describe the fungibility of Blackness to be a gift as well, a sentiment that recalls the spread of hip-hop/Black youth culture around the world
I ask, what should we even do at this point?
AND SO DOES HE IN HIS CONCLUSION!
Overall this book is wild. It says a lot of crazy things that I’ve seen sporadically, but not all in one place. Afro-pessimism, I see, is real.
Because of the overall yelling-at-me feeling, I was unable to really generate many questions for my test from this book. Reading other books will help me contextualize the tidal wave of information given to me.