In “Negroes Laughing at Themselves? Black Spectatorship and the Performance of Urban Modernity,” Stewart considers how the effects of migration and segregation influence Black spectatorship, revealing unrealistic Hollywood standards as a complementary to society’s oppressive viewpoint on these moviegoers.
Films in the early 1900s are the epitome of racism, whether it is the Hollywood depiction of Blacks and whites, the physical space of the theater, or the undertones that filmmakers suggest by targeting a specific viewer. Chicago’s Black political newspaper Broad Ax is an example of one of the critiques of Black moviegoers, stating that they patronize films that either fail to represent their people or put them in a degrading light for entertainment. The text explores the factors that influence the self-deprecating actions that Black moviegoers partake in within the confines of the theater, as well as the lasting effects that they are subject to in the public sphere.
Stewart argues that Black spectatorship is a reaction to years of oppression, results of urban migration, and the development of the classical cinematic model. With movies catered exclusively to a white audience, privileging the racist and hegemonic values of its perceived viewers, Black spectators are exposed to images and fictional scenes that mock their race in the context of entertainment. Though the Broad Ax critiques the contradictory pleasure of these spectators, Stewart introduces the idea of “reconstructive spectatorship” – not exactly justifying, but explaining these pleasures as African Americans’ ways to cope with post-migration by reconstructing their fragmented individual and collective identities. Assimilation is difficult in a hostile setting of blatant and institutional racism, and the theater is a space for them to find an escape, although consuming mass culture and the classical Hollywood style narrative give the wrong ideas of how to accomplish this. Cinema is seen as a medium of absorption and distraction, but the line between fantasy and reality becomes dangerously blurred and constitutes a loss of self.
Pulling from scenes in Wright’s Native Son and Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Stewart shows examples of individuals as Black spectators and how their fictional lives represent thousands of others like them at the time. Bigger Thomas in Native Son falls victim to the pleasure of Hollywood cinema, but his fantasies about lavish white privilege and refusal to acknowledge the other degrading characters on the screen shows his sense of not belonging as a Black working-class migrant and perceiving whiteness as a sort of paradise outside the confines of his condition. He even openly expresses sexual attraction toward the white female star, something that would otherwise be prohibited where they grew up in the South and outside the premises of the theater. This physical space, enclosing Bigger in the safety of the darkness and offering a measure of privacy, allows him to remove himself from his present life and make light of how he is discriminated against and bound by prejudiced limitations by joking about the depiction of Black people on the screen, rather than facing the truth in real life on the streets.
Pauline’s attempt at styling herself like Jean Harlow in Morrison’s The Bluest Eye depicts the failure and absurdity of trying to escape one’s physical limitations of a working-class Black body and embodying a Hollywood star and spectator. Her migration resulted in an isolation and loneliness, further prompted by her race and gender, that created a vulnerability only satiated by physical and metaphorically removing oneself in the seat of the theater and finding comfort through imagining a better “Hollywood” life. The movie’s unrealistic standards put white beauty and romance on a pedestal, “confirming” her already damaged self-esteem.
Both Bigger and Pauline’s dreams of equal opportunity and upward mobility is manifested with fantasies within the theater walls. Though critics of the Broad Ax claim that Black spectatorship is a resistant or oppositional gaze, these characters depict it more as submission to the false sense of white freedom within the premises of the theater.
I appreciated your discussion of Wright’s Native Son! I am currently reading it for another class. In the scene mentioned, it seems as if Bigger Thomas is addressing whiteness as a performance, a kind of acting which uses money and power to one’s advantage. In an earlier scene, Bigger and his friends “play white,” in a satirical reversal of minstrelsy, they mimic the affects of elite and powerful White society. So it seems like the movie theater is a place not just for the content’s projected message, but also one where societal projections come into play.
I really enjoyed reading your post. I think this is an important issue even in today’s world that is rarely talked about. The damaged self-esteem that pauline feels with the unrealistic standard portrayed in movies which promotes the idea that white is beautiful and superior to all other shades of skin. I think this is still somewhat felt by a lot of minorities where they actually begin to believe this misconception because of what we see in the world and what is perpetuated in the media and movies. In many ways I feel that it was probably way worse a hundred year ago, however, this oppressive viewpoint is still present in a lot of the media we see.