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Michele Wallace and Gina Dent, eds. Black Popular Culture. Seattle: Bay P, 1993. 336 pp. $18.95 paper.
Michele Wallace. Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. 1978. New York: Routledge, 1990. 300 pp. $15.95 paper.
Michele Wallace. Invisibility Blues--From Pop to Theory. New York: Routledge, 1990. 278 pp. $15.95 paper.
Reviewed by
Hortense Spillers
Cornell University
One of the blurbs on the cover of Michele Wallace's Black Popular Culture claims that this gathering of voices "comes smoking straight" from today's "best black minds." And so it does (from some of them, anyway), convening about thirty culture workers from the African diaspora in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain, addressing the issues at hand. The book's title is the first one I've seen in a very long time without a handle on it. In other words, there is no colon here with a line of explanation behind it. Ably edited by Gina Dent, a graduate student at Columbia University, this book serves up "black popular culture" in the generic, unmodified by time, place, and circumstance. One relishes the superb self-confidence of this gesture and indeed discovers to her endless delight that this absorbing concoction has some of everything in it, from words on "Afro-kitsch" and the black nude in painting, to meditations on black film, to multiculturalism and the ubiquitous culture of "hip-hop." For those of us who have missed the wonders of "rap," for instance, Black Popular Culture proffers an entree.
Handsomely packaged by Seattle's Bay Press, under the auspices of New York's Dia Center for the Arts, the paperback version of this 1992 miscellany provides liberal margins to scribble in, is smooth and sensuous to the feel in its good-looking black-and-yellow-on-orange semigloss binding, and offers an impressive array of graphics--beautiful black-and-white prints of Detroit's now-dismantled "Heidelberg Project," mixed-media work on urban themes, stills from video and movie footage (including Marlon Riggs's 1991 Tongues Untied, a televisual study of black gay sexuality), and other inscriptions of the moving image.
At least two of these juxtapositions are striking by virtue of their political weightiness: One of them involves a well-known photographic capture of the Hill-Thomas Senate Hearings. Situated on either side of the fold of what would be pages 336-337, in the midst of...