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Richard Iton. In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era. New York Oxford UP, 2008. 416 pp. $29.95.
Africa American Review, Volume 43, Numbers 2-3
© 2009 Robert Butler
This is a fresh, meticulously well researched study of how black popular culture responded to and helped to shape Black Atlaqntic politics from the end of Wodd War II to the present. The book opens by focusing on "a familiar dilemma. How do the excluded engage the apparently dominant order?" (3) Iton provides a rich variety of answers to this question, ranging from muffled protests of the early 1950s to the angry cries of defiance in contemporary rap and hip hop performances.
Throughout the book Iton stresses how the commercial and political pressures exerted on post- World War II artists have profoundly influenced their work. He argues convincingly that because African Americans and other people of color have experienced a "violent exclusion from the realms of formal politics," their popular expression was especially important in molding their informal political life. Black theater, films, and music have provided alternate discourses which are "transgressive" because they destabilize official discourse and thus provide new space for meaningful cultural work which radically challenges "coloniality."
Iton's perspective, while focusing mainly on developments in post-1945 America, is broadly transnational in scope, carefully tracing the relationships between African American life and the black cultures of the...