11 - A Fox in the Wild: Ramar of the Jungle and the Crisis of Representation

Summary

“You get the lion, or the lion gets you”

Robert Ruark

When it comes to representing minority cultures, whether expressed in linguistically challenged utterances of fragmented English or in moments of stereotypically déclassé behavior, the postwar media frequently displayed a qualified perspective, an ontological image of race, class, and gender; various representations were calculated, affective factors sustaining the plot and overall continuity of illusion in countless comedic or dramatic narratives, and many were recurrent images of sociological others as entertainment spectacles. Those productions, in particular, director Wallace Fox’s episodes of television’s jungle-fantasy, Ramar of the Jungle (1953–1954), are potentially classified as ideologically circumscribed narratives. It is my contention that Fox’s Ramar episodes are not markedly racist and merit reassessment. National and international media productions from the postwar era invite intergeneric, alternative readings of the socio-political matter, while acknowledging obvious controversies. These are problematic, not superficial, narratives. The postwar media was ripe with such illustrative material, and this chapter examines, in an intertextual capacity, the eleven episodes of Ramar of the Jungle directed by Wallace Fox, especially as they recall and renew Western narratives in the sustained imaginative framing of Africa-African images.

One notably transgressive practice involves the recycled racial images and representative patterns of social alterity produced as entertainment spectacles in the postwar American and European media, especially in film and television productions which depict Africa, Africans, and related Western cultural myths associated with progress and civilization. Despite the preponderant number of these media spectacles, many significant exceptions to the culture of misrepresentation did exist, albeit on the edges of industrial marketing, as “B” productions. Multiple literary and film productions, produced during the rise of the postwar, nuclear era, reveal substantial issues associated with the eroticized, demeaned, or ignored sociological other; these racially charged images saturate popular national and international cultures as signifying spectacles, in notable dialogue with a controlling ideology.

Commenting on this postwar trend in media narrative, and specifically referring to Ramar of the Jungle, Wheeler Winston Dixon has concluded that, “The world of Ramar of the Jungle is a dark and complicated social terrain, marked on the one side by the dying inequities of colonialism and on the other, by the rule of violence and reprisal.”