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.11 Newsweek went so far asto venture to compare Mezzrow to Bessie Smith, asserting without re-gard for Smith s own history that whereas she sang the blues, Mez-zrow lived them, brutally. 12In the context of this study s larger themes, what s particularly inter-esting about this aspect of the popular response to Really the Blues is notthe elevation of Mezzrow s text per se, but rather the tacit divestment of voluntary Negro passing of the shamefulness, inauthenticity, or du-plicity often associated with the passing of racially defined subjects.Inpart, of course, this is because Mezzrow s racial and class privilege facili-tated the interpretation of his desire to cross the line as a courageous,sacrificial gesture (as opposed to one of self-aggrandizement, which itundoubtedly also was).Yet following the exhortation of Joan Scott, wemight also take the emergence of such white Negro identities as Mez-zrow exemplified as a historical event in need of explanation. 13 Whatfactors promoted such associations of voluntary Negro passing withmoral heroism, and what role did such factors play in mediating domi-nant discourses of race?James Weldon Johnson author of The Autobiography of an Ex-ColoredMan (from which the Ebony article derives its title), as well as a suc-cessful vaudeville composer and an astute analyst of African Americanmusical traditions once observed that white Americans had long been doing their best to pass for colored, especially where music and danc-14ing were concerned.Yet it was not until the period when jazz first Mezz Mezzrow and the Negro Blues 59began to be incorporated into the cultural and commercial mainstreamthat black musical culture, valued or alternately disparaged for its ap-pearance of being spontaneous, down to earth, and unaffected, wouldacquire a particular symbolic value as the site of individualized white self-discovery or self-mythologization.Whereas previously blackfaceminstrelsy had offered white performers and their working-class audi-ences a set of cultural practices through which to indulge, temporarilyand conditionally, gendered and classed fantasies of crossing the line, minstrel forms of passing were premised on the theatricalized lampoon-ing of black identities and cultural practices, giving rise to a complexdynamic of attraction and aversion that Eric Lott has memorably called love and theft. 15 By contrast, shifts in social and cultural relationsmade it conceivable that by the 1920s, when Mezzrow was first perform-ing, not only would whites find jazz worthy of overt admiration and emu-lation, but marginality itself would become an object of mainstream cultural desire.16 In effect, the nineteenth-century love and theft dy-namic would be not only inverted and transposed but also internalized,such that performers such as Mezzrow could cast off the contrivances ofblackface disguise and pursue fantasies of being black by means ofwhat Ebony refers to as psychological makeup. 17Within what Andrew Ross calls the long transactional history ofwhite responses to black culture, of black counter-responses, and of fur-ther countless and often traceless negotiatings, tradings, raids and com-promises, 18 Mezzrow s own performances of blackness were thus ex-emplary even as they were also audacious and extraordinary.Indeed, itwas the thoroughness of Mezzrow s commitment to a hipster ethic hehelped innovate that made him a readily available model for those post-war white male intellectuals whose romanticized appropriations of blackculture were similarly instrumental to their development of a critiqueof the national social and cultural mainstream. Really the Blues wasread by such writers as Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg,the latter of whom took in Mezzrow s autobiography at a counter atthe Columbia University bookstore, finding in Mezzrow s experiencesa precursor to his own downtown cohort s romance with undergroundblack, hip culture. 19 In Norman Mailer s 1957 White Negro essay,which Really the Blues helped to inspire, one can find reworkings of manyof Mezzrow s conceits, including Mailer s justly infamous notion of jazzas orgasm. 20 Wolfe himself went on to use Mezzrow s autobiography 60 Crossing the Lineto elaborate a critique of what he calls Negrophilia and of black per-formers negotiations of the tryanny of expectancy, through whichthey were expected to act black for white audiences.Originally pub-lished in the French journal Les Temps modernes, Wolfe s essays caughtthe eye of a young Frantz Fanon, who went ontocite themextensivelyin Black Skin, White Masks (1952), especially in the chapter titled TheNegro and Psychopathology. 21This legacy of Really the Blues as a cultural icon for intellectuals andartists alike (Bob Wilber, a student of Bechet s, recalls that Mezzrow sbook was considered a bible among aspiring white jazz musicians ofthe late 1940s) 22 serves as a reminder of the historical link between racialtransgression and various projects of political and ideological critique,not least those that would challenge the elevation of individualism, up-ward mobility, and bourgeois domesticity as cultural ideals. Crossingthe line has in this sense been constitutive of possibilities for rethink-ing alliances and identities in light of their contingency as social forma-tions, not transcendent essences.Yet it would be reckless to attribute toMezzrow s practice of voluntary Negro passing an inherently politi-cally disruptive or subversive agency [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.11 Newsweek went so far asto venture to compare Mezzrow to Bessie Smith, asserting without re-gard for Smith s own history that whereas she sang the blues, Mez-zrow lived them, brutally. 12In the context of this study s larger themes, what s particularly inter-esting about this aspect of the popular response to Really the Blues is notthe elevation of Mezzrow s text per se, but rather the tacit divestment of voluntary Negro passing of the shamefulness, inauthenticity, or du-plicity often associated with the passing of racially defined subjects.Inpart, of course, this is because Mezzrow s racial and class privilege facili-tated the interpretation of his desire to cross the line as a courageous,sacrificial gesture (as opposed to one of self-aggrandizement, which itundoubtedly also was).Yet following the exhortation of Joan Scott, wemight also take the emergence of such white Negro identities as Mez-zrow exemplified as a historical event in need of explanation. 13 Whatfactors promoted such associations of voluntary Negro passing withmoral heroism, and what role did such factors play in mediating domi-nant discourses of race?James Weldon Johnson author of The Autobiography of an Ex-ColoredMan (from which the Ebony article derives its title), as well as a suc-cessful vaudeville composer and an astute analyst of African Americanmusical traditions once observed that white Americans had long been doing their best to pass for colored, especially where music and danc-14ing were concerned.Yet it was not until the period when jazz first Mezz Mezzrow and the Negro Blues 59began to be incorporated into the cultural and commercial mainstreamthat black musical culture, valued or alternately disparaged for its ap-pearance of being spontaneous, down to earth, and unaffected, wouldacquire a particular symbolic value as the site of individualized white self-discovery or self-mythologization.Whereas previously blackfaceminstrelsy had offered white performers and their working-class audi-ences a set of cultural practices through which to indulge, temporarilyand conditionally, gendered and classed fantasies of crossing the line, minstrel forms of passing were premised on the theatricalized lampoon-ing of black identities and cultural practices, giving rise to a complexdynamic of attraction and aversion that Eric Lott has memorably called love and theft. 15 By contrast, shifts in social and cultural relationsmade it conceivable that by the 1920s, when Mezzrow was first perform-ing, not only would whites find jazz worthy of overt admiration and emu-lation, but marginality itself would become an object of mainstream cultural desire.16 In effect, the nineteenth-century love and theft dy-namic would be not only inverted and transposed but also internalized,such that performers such as Mezzrow could cast off the contrivances ofblackface disguise and pursue fantasies of being black by means ofwhat Ebony refers to as psychological makeup. 17Within what Andrew Ross calls the long transactional history ofwhite responses to black culture, of black counter-responses, and of fur-ther countless and often traceless negotiatings, tradings, raids and com-promises, 18 Mezzrow s own performances of blackness were thus ex-emplary even as they were also audacious and extraordinary.Indeed, itwas the thoroughness of Mezzrow s commitment to a hipster ethic hehelped innovate that made him a readily available model for those post-war white male intellectuals whose romanticized appropriations of blackculture were similarly instrumental to their development of a critiqueof the national social and cultural mainstream. Really the Blues wasread by such writers as Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg,the latter of whom took in Mezzrow s autobiography at a counter atthe Columbia University bookstore, finding in Mezzrow s experiencesa precursor to his own downtown cohort s romance with undergroundblack, hip culture. 19 In Norman Mailer s 1957 White Negro essay,which Really the Blues helped to inspire, one can find reworkings of manyof Mezzrow s conceits, including Mailer s justly infamous notion of jazzas orgasm. 20 Wolfe himself went on to use Mezzrow s autobiography 60 Crossing the Lineto elaborate a critique of what he calls Negrophilia and of black per-formers negotiations of the tryanny of expectancy, through whichthey were expected to act black for white audiences.Originally pub-lished in the French journal Les Temps modernes, Wolfe s essays caughtthe eye of a young Frantz Fanon, who went ontocite themextensivelyin Black Skin, White Masks (1952), especially in the chapter titled TheNegro and Psychopathology. 21This legacy of Really the Blues as a cultural icon for intellectuals andartists alike (Bob Wilber, a student of Bechet s, recalls that Mezzrow sbook was considered a bible among aspiring white jazz musicians ofthe late 1940s) 22 serves as a reminder of the historical link between racialtransgression and various projects of political and ideological critique,not least those that would challenge the elevation of individualism, up-ward mobility, and bourgeois domesticity as cultural ideals. Crossingthe line has in this sense been constitutive of possibilities for rethink-ing alliances and identities in light of their contingency as social forma-tions, not transcendent essences.Yet it would be reckless to attribute toMezzrow s practice of voluntary Negro passing an inherently politi-cally disruptive or subversive agency [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]