Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-lnqnp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T07:26:50.695Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Symbolic Economies between a Black Mirror and Black Aesthetic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 January 2020

JOSEPH R. SHAFER
JOSEPH R. SHAFER*
Affiliation:
University College Cork. Email: jrs0166@auburn.edu.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

This essay seeks to review the edges of Eric Lott's Black Mirror. But to approach the inner and outer edges of “a black mirror” is to sense the threat that they could become two sides of the same coin. In chapter 1, “Black Mirror: State Fantasy and Symbolic Surplus Value,” Lott writes, “we should explore the dimensions and especially the consequences of the fantasy race is – consequences that suffuse the consciousness of class, sexuality, gender, and other lines of force. Live there a while, in thought as in life. That is what this book tries to do.” To take up this invitation is therefore to first locate that space which readers are asked to live in for a while. However, to near that territory is not to enter the fantasy of race, if only to critique it, for we are already there. Nor is it accessed by abandoning the value of race, Lott contends, especially while the economy of whiteness continues profiting from “black symbolic capital.” Here we encounter the daunting scope of a “black mirror,” where horizon lines become Fata Morganas: an area that covers “the mechanics, dispositions, and effects of the dominant culture's looking at itself always through a fantasized black Other” (xvii). The dimensions of that mirror prove wider still, as any race, gender or class is shown capable of reflecting itself in it. More specifically, Black Mirror questions how signs of racial difference might possibly divest from the dominant symbolic economies in which they are exchanged, except Black Mirror largely does so by demonstrating their reinvestment. When analyzing the fantasies, angles and contradictions of a “black mirror,” readers are compelled to seek its outer edges, a market with real use-value, spaces where gifts are exchanged, or a beyond alluded to as “occupying the tain of the mirror – the mirror's tin backing that allows it to reflect at all” (20).

Type
Review Essay
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 54 , Issue 1 , February 2020 , pp. 241 - 250
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Moten, Fred, The Service Porch (Tucson: Letter Machine Editions, 2016), 17Google Scholar.

2 Lott, Eric, Black Mirror: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 10CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Subsequent page references are given parenthetically in the text.

3 Lott, Eric, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

4 Camus, Marcel, Black Orpheus (Dispat Films, 1959)Google Scholar.

5 Baudrillard, Jean, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (St. Louis, MO: Telos Press Ltd, 1981), 52–53Google Scholar.

6 Hogue, Cynthia, “Interview with Harryette Mullen,” Postmodern Culture, 9, 2 (Jan. 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Beyoncé, “Formation,” 2016 Pepsi Super Bowl 50 Halftime Show (2016).

8 “Beyoncé’s $50 Million Pepsi Deal Takes Creative Cues from Jay Z,” Forbes, 10 Dec. 2012.

9 Beatty, Paul, The Sellout (London: Oneworld Publications, 2016), 34–35Google Scholar.

10 Mayfield, Julian, “You Touch My Black Aesthetic and I'll Touch Yours,” in Gayle, Addison Jr., ed., The Black Aesthetic (New York: Anchor Books, 1971), 23–30Google Scholar, 28–29.

11 Hoyt W. Fuller, “Towards a Black Aesthetic,” in Gayle, 3–11, 3.

12 Derrida, Jacques, Dissemination, trans. Johnson, Barbara (London: The Athlone Press Ltd, 1981), 315CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Baudrillard, Jean, The Mirror of Production, trans. Poster, Mark (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1975), 19Google Scholar, original emphasis.

14 Moten, Fred, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 4Google Scholar.

15 Lacan, Jacques, Book VI: Desire and Its Interpretation, trans. Fink, Bruce (Cambridge: Polity, 2019), p. 19Google Scholar.

16 Fanon, Franz, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Lam, Charles Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 161Google Scholar.

17 Marriott, David, “On Racial Fetishism,” Qui parle, 18, 2 (2010), 215–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 221.

18 Moten, Fred, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 84–99Google Scholar.

19 Spillers, Hortense J., “‘All the Things You Could Be by Now, if Sigmund Freud's Wife Was Your Mother’: Psychoanalysis and Race,” boundary 2, 23, 3 (Fall 1996), 75–141CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 94.

20 Moten, Fred, A Poetics of the Undercommons (New York: Sputnik & Fizzle, 2016), 24Google Scholar

21 Moten, The Service Porch, Dedication.