Disney and Diversity in the 21st Century: Part 1

[By: Dr. Maryemma Graham]

Diversity has become a vexed issue in the 21st century.  Once it was a priority in our corporate and education sectors, with accountability for its implementation built in. Today, it has become that carefully crafted phrase one sees on websites, usually so watered down we pay scarce attention. Even when we were not guided by a principle but by underlying marketing needs, diversity forced us to have many honest, if difficult dialogues.  Now it seems that only members of  “diverse populations” talk about or show concern for diversity.   And we know what that means.  In the last three years, I have been to too many strategy sessions —even at my own university—with the absence of any discussion of diversity.  It seems to bother no one. If we ask questions about it, we are strangely inappropriate. If answers come, they serve to redirect the conversation. So we are often silent or vow to show our protest with our future absence.

If diversity is everybody’s concern, where did it go? When did we start letting the university, our administrators, our CEO’s off the hook?  Was it only the intimidating presence of affirmative action legislation that “made” people do the right thing? Now that the pressure is off, it’s back to business as usual.  While the concept is still with us, there’s no power behind it.

Can we blame social media for this shift, the place where everybody has a voice?  After all, nobody is legally denied access anymore. The catchword “equal” is everywhere; we all expect jobs to say “equal opportunity employer.” Surely this suggests that a major goal of the civil rights movement has been accomplished.
But there’s a downside to the social media. To paraphrase Malcolm Gladwell here, the voices that seem to be the loudest are not those that offer constructive or balanced critique in good faith. Gladwell is correct: those who want to sway public opinion, present a biased point of view, and show disregard for facts, may have more to gain by social media than those who are more fact-driven. Social media can make us feel connected to each other, at the same time it can divide, exclude, and distort the truth.  Our heavy reliance on it confuses us.  We think we see what is not there; we think we know more than we do. We connect with like-minded people, and we assume this to be “most” people. We are, all of us, living in a world of illusions.

No one was better at creating illusions than Walt Disney.  He had the unique ability to appropriate and collapse centuries of historical knowledge from ancient and modern cultures.  He helped to turn entertainment and marketing into the institutions that are the fabric of our lives today.  As he turned his own dreams into reality, creating newly imagined identities for us all to share, he ushered in an era that diminishes the need for any real knowledge while simultaneously clouding our vision of diversity. While Disney is not wholly responsible for the illusions of wealth accumulation that are pervasive, disneyfication is synonymous with the post modernization of America and the world.

Memory and Remembering in Black Writing Revisted

[By Crystal Boson]           

 After exploring the heavier side ofmemory, it is equally as important to look at its decolonizing aspects.  It is evident that in a large body of Black Writing, memory serves as a tie that strengthens both individuals and communities.  This memory can serve as an embodied family lineage, as is evident in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, or as a larger cultural narrative, as represented in Octavia Butler’s Fledgling, and Alex Haley’s Roots. 

Memory and Remembering in Black Writing

[By Crystal Boson]

It is a safe assertion to claim that literature serves as a medium for memory, both personal and cultural.  The narratives and the characters weave their tales, and pull the reader along with them through the jagged field of the past.  While remembering and the telling of stories is often a literary medium through which healing, reconciliation, and cultural bonding is forged, in some cases, memory serves as a curse that binds and ruins communities and individuals. 

Black Women and African American Literature

[By Crystal Boson]

We all know of the Black Matriarch.  She is the engine that drives many of the novels in HBW’s 100 Novels Project, and in the larger body of African American writing.  In literary works, she serves both the ghost of the past, conjured up to impart wisdom, and the tangible hand of the present, ever ready to guide, heal, and correct.  Over one third of the novels in our project focus on Black women; and each feminine body is bound in the language of story telling, memory holding, and legacy.

Bringing Past Practices into the Present

[By Crystal Boson]

As the alliterative title suggests, many of the works in the 100 Novels Project deal with religious and cultural practices that are associated with the distant, slavery mired past, or a romanticized and distant homeland that the protagonists have roots in but may have never seen.  These practices fall under folk faiths and religion, land based practices of herb-lore and root-work, and ties to food and drink created in the “old ways”.  The novels that most easily embody these ideas are Nalo Hopkinson’s, The Salt Roads, Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sowers, Colson Whitehead’s The Intitutionist, and Gloria Naylor’s Momma Day.  While each of these works utilizes elements of folk faith and old cultural practices as mediums of liberation for the protagonists and fall under the genre of speculative fiction, there is something deeper at work within these texts.  The inclusion of these practices combined with present or future landscapes and the use of technology and science does double literary duty; not only does it ground the narrative in a racialized past, but the works insist upon a future where authentic black expression along the lines of faith, practice, and spirituality are viable.

Black Writing and Hoodoo

[By Crystal Boson]

It is no rhetorical stretch to say that there has been a strong presence of religion in Black writing.  Internal genres spanning from uplift literature to contemporary fiction have deep ties with the church and its various attachments to worship.   However, Christianity is not the only faith system featured within the pages; there is also a strong presence of Hoodoo.

Erasure and the state of black writing

[By Crystal Boson] 

           Percival Everett’s Erasure functions both as a skillful meta-narrative, and as a postmodern critique on the state of Black writing.  The work is reflexive of Everett’s own experience trying to break into the writing game and with the cultural and popular Powers That Be, those who could either grease his passage into the literary imagination or leave him stagnating in obscurity.  The novel’s protagonist, Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, is often criticized for his isolation within the intellectual ivory tower, and his distance from “authentic” black writing.  He attempts to write from his personal experience and challenge the notion that black writing, or blackness in and of itself, functions as a monolith; his approach, however, is overwhelmingly ignored by publishers, peers and the public.  Books that represent the seemingly authentic black experience, ones that offer cliché and stereotype, are propelled to the top of the public imagination by celebrity book clubs and literary hype men.  In frustration, disgust, and revolt, Ellison pens a sharply satirical novel with includes a protagonist that is a disenfranchised, degraded, and dehumanized amalgamation of several other “authentically” black texts.  Of course, the public loves it.

Black Speculative Fiction and Octavia Butler

[By Crystal Boson]

          

  Octavia Butler’s 1979 novel, Kindred is a skillful combination of several literary genres; it serves as a superb entre into the realm of Black Speculative Fiction and functions as a postmodern, inverse slave narrative.   Her characters’ 20^th century experiencing of slavery places the work within the long tradition of slaves narratives, where individuals speak to their own experiences of direct oppression and liberation, and presents the oppositional gaze, forcing Kevin to examine racialized and gendered privilege and the impact that slavery has upon the contemporary moment.

            As a work of speculative fiction, Kindred takes place both in the past and a present moment.  It also explores in this layered setting the strength in which seemingly disenfranchised characters hold against the dominant discourse.  The temporal and spatial shifting of the work make it a difficult one to nail down.

            Butler’s decision to force Kevin, a white male, to witness first hand the dehumanizing impact of slavery both upon those who enforce the practice, and the people suffering under the system sets in visceral proximity its damaging psychological and emotional effects.  The work acknowledges the defenses the dominant discourse has constructed to distance itself from slavery, through the rewriting of literary and cultural history, and works against those constructs.  Dana is physically dragged back to the past to keep her present moment from being rewritten; when Kevin does not place belief in her statement of travel, he is flung into the past as well, but without much of the knowledge that Dana possessed about the system of slavery and its degrading force.

            The work presents interesting depictions of agency.  Dana is not in control of her acts of time travel; she is summoned by some unexplained power of Rufus, and dismissed only by a tremendous fear for her life, created by circumstances beyond her control.  Despite her lack of direct control over her temporal jumps, she has both symbolic and overt power over Rufus.  Kevin is also vastly dependent upon her, both for his emotional wellbeing and his safe return to his present.

Remixing Literary History With Paul Beatty

[By Crystal Boson]

Paul Beatty’s White Boy Shuffle often serves as a poignant satire about the modern role of the cultural mulatto and the destination of the search for communal bonding and self-identification. The novel blends elements of literary theory’s latest darling, postmodern theory, cultural displacement, alternative African American religion, and popular culture.

Post-modernism and Ishmael Reed

[By Crystal Boson]

Utilizing a database of 100 novels reveals useful ways of considering the importance of literary postmodernism in African American literature. Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo can be considered to be Black Postmodernism’s torchbearer. It provides the reader with a highly complex narrative that blends genre and theme.

Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo blends elements of the classic detective novel with African American Folklore, iconography, racial identity, music and language, and does not lack venues for interpretation. It has been examined as a work of folklore, pure and imaginative fiction, a reversed detective novel, under postmodernism. It does not, however, lend itself solely to any of these interpretations.

Mumbo Jumbo lacks the literary schizophrenia and binary constructs necessary for a deconstructive, modern reading; the presence of a partial bibliography alone indicates the deliberate nature of Reed’s text. Furthermore, within the traditional detective novel, the plot revolves around decoding a mystery, and the story ends as the villain is reprimanded and clearly punished; here these roles are reversed, and there is no concrete ending to the work.


A complete reading of Mumbo Jumbo necessitates a new form of criticism and teaching, one that takes into account all of the disparate elements within the work. In the past, the apparent overproduction of artifacts and of assumed escapism has led Reed’s text to be examined in several different modes. Its combination of the detective genre, the elements of racial identity, folklore, religion, and iconography makes it one of the most identifiable Black Postmodern texts.