PODCAST: Addicted to Race

If you missed hearing Minh-Ha co-hosting Racialicious.com's weekly podcast called "Addicted to Race" with Tami Winfrey Harris (of Love Isn't Enough) and Lisa Wade (of Sociological Images) last Sunday afternoon, click here to listen.

FYI: The discussion on the French Vogue blackfacing fiasco we posted on begins at around 39:30 on the time counter. Also, there were a few moments of technical difficulty so expect some dead air.

Blackface, and the Violence of Revulsion

This post is supposed to be about the latest occurrences of blackface in fashion -- specifically, the 14-page editorial featuring Lara Stone, a white Dutch model, painted black and shot by Steven Klein for the October 2009 issue of French Vogue and also Carlos Diez's show at Madrid Fashion Week (September 22, 2009) in which models walked in blackface and, at times, with bared breasts.

There is indeed quite a lot to say about both events. To begin, fashion's seeming ineptness for dealing with race in ways that do not accommodate and/or supplement the already too long histories of racial objectification and commodification. We've discussed much of this history on Threadbared (see especially here, here, here, here, and here) already and will no doubt continue to, as there seems to be an inexhaustible amount of material. Second, these events (and others like it) are revealing of the ways in which multiculturalism and multiracialism --under the guise of postracialism, postmodernism, or just artistic edginess-- enables the continuation of white supremacy. For example, some are defending French Vogue for its provocativeness ("creative images . . . can sometimes [be] off-putting") and for its postracialism (arguing that it is "sort of beautiful in that having a person of one ethnic background look convincingly like she might be of another race shows the interconnectedness of us all"). But what is on display in French Vogue and on Diez's runway is not beautiful black bodies, but what Nirmal Puwar describes as "the universal empty point" that white female bodies are able to occupy precisely because their bodies are racially unmarked: "[Thus] they can play with the assigned particularity of ethnicized dress without suffering the 'violence of revulsion.'"

The "violence of revulsion" that women of color generally, and black women particularly in the cases of this issue of French Vogue and Diez's show, experience is not mediated by these "edgy" acts of "postracialism". In fact, the violence of revulsion is redoubled here. Blackface highlights the privileged universal empty point that white bodies continue to occupy even in this so-called postracial moment, and in so doing, it positions racial difference against whiteness, as the other to whiteness. Moreover, blackface and other performances of racial commodification produce a different kind of "violence of revulsion" -- an everyday violence of revulsion like I experienced when I discovered Klein's editorial and Diez's fashion show.

By this second order of "violence of revulsion," I mean the assault of racism and the assault of colonialism's traces on what was for me, until that moment of violence, a relatively mundane workday at home. Violently interrupting this scene of banality is not simply these images of racial arrogance, but my own visceral response of anger, exasperation, disappointment, and a feeling I can only describe as racism fatigue. Such images and their inevitable postmodern, postracial, freedom-of-artistic-expression discourses and apologists are not only tired, today they are tiring.

The Issue on Black Models

While the much-ballyhooed Italian Vogue's "All Black" issue last July 2008 was an overwhelming disappointment, it apparently succeeded in awakening the fashion industry to the fact that industries of beauty culture produce, circulate, and secure very limited ideas of beauty especially in relation to race and size. Unfortunately, a lot of the response from American Vogue has been of the "some of my best friends are black" variety. Consider, for example, the editorial Vogue ran called, "Is Fashion Racist?" Recounting the hard luck stories of three young (and working) black models, Chanel Iman, Jourdan Dunn, and Arlenis Sosa, the article seems to conclude that the answer to racism is for models to keep a "strenuously positive" attitude. Iman offers this advice: "Nobody likes to work with someone negative." And further, that the real problem in the fashion industry is not racism but the supermodel's fall from power.

The latest issue of Teen Vogue, however, presents a much more honest portrayal of the politics of race and beauty in fashion. And again, Iman and Dunn are featured. Rather than glossing over the institutional structures of fashion's racism, they rightly point out that the lack of opportunities for black models reproduces racial alienation. On this issue, a journalist at Jezebel is also astute when she asserts that "black" can be a homogenizing category of identity that misrecognizes the ethnic and racial diversity of non-white models. "Selina Khan is from the French-speaking Caribbean island of Martinique and swears she's not black, but 'Indian, mixed with Arabic and Creole, and Vietnamese.'"

Actually what Khan really says is: "My mom's Indian, mixed with Arabic and Creole, and my dad is Vietnamese. Yep, Indian and Chinese." When the interviewer asks Khan to clarify--"I thought you said Vietnamese"--Khan explains knowingly, "It's ethnically the same thing. Just a different country."

Now, if only we could get Khan to stop misrecognizing all Asians as being the same.

Oops, They Did It Again!

Make Fetch Happen caught this photograph in an editorial for the latest Vogue Italia, months after the much-celebrated Black Issue. In this familiar racial distribution of feminine domesticity, the model is of course unnamed in her role as the archetypical mammy figure (a benignly asexual black caretaker who recognizes her innate inferiority and is dedicated to the care of white children). As her counterpart, the blonde references for me the 19th-century "angel of the house" (a designation reserved for bourgeois white womanhood), and in this case the informal title is made literal through the matched metallic patterns of the gown and the tapestry. (She is part of the expensive decor that marks status.) For all that the blonde is totally unremarkable, she is nonetheless meant to be the focus of our attention and awe (after all, she's wearing the dress and the jewels in this editorial).

I'm just going to reference the entries "Background Color" and "Background Color, Redux" for comparison.

Black Is The New Black

The July Vogue Italia should be arriving on American shores in the next few weeks, and of course New York Times' Cathy Horyn has a sneak peak of, as well as interviews with, some of the models who appear in the “historic” issue. (For the Thursday Fashion and Style section, she also penned an essay called "Conspicuous By Their Presence.") Her column and the comments posted to it include some interesting, and some troubling, insights. Reading these, I want to post some initial thoughts:

1. A commentator noted: "I’m very excited about the Italian Vogue issue, but I also think we need to remember this isn’t the first time an all black issue has appeared on the news stands. An 'all black issue' is not necessarily an innovation or groundbreaking within the context of fashion publishing, so much as it is a rarity. After all most magazines out there are typically 'all-white' issues, while a magazine like Essence has always been 'all-black,' but we don’t make a fuss about those."

I think that’s critically important here. Vogue is a gatekeeper in the industry, so it’s important that its publication of an all-black issue be located in just this power to arbitrate what counts as fashionable, as beautiful. For all these reasons it’s also important to ask about what anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls “the traffic in criteria:” By what criteria does Vogue’s publication of this issue count as “historic” or “groundbreaking”? What does it mean that black aesthetic and commercial practices, such as the rise of magazines like Essence or Jet and their critical importance to the cultivation of black models in the 1950s, are corralled under a different set of criteria?

2. In an e-mail from stylist Edward Enniful on the Steven Meisel shoot with Naomi Campbell, he wrote: "We laughed, ribbed each other, and talked about the old days, but most of all we created a story that reflected black dreams and aspirations. There was no hip-hop gangsterism, no ghetto fabulousness, no bling-bling clichés." Without choosing one sort of fabulousness over another, I think it’s fascinating how contemporary black expressive subcultures –which, let’s face it, have also become global commodities and art forms on a massive scale-- are somehow not located as a site for “black dreams and aspirations” in this statement.

This rhetorical maneuver seems to be happening on two levels. The first implies that hip-hop is either a site for only inappropriate black dreams and aspirations, or that the dreams and aspirations so often expressed through hip-hop are dead ends. The second positions "hip-hop gangsterism, ghetto fabulousness, and bling-bling clichés" in opposition to a presumably more universal standard of glamour, which is imagined to be clearly, discernibly, the proper location of black dreams, et cetera. (And also, by the way, reduces hip-hop to a single dimension.) This standard, however, has never been all that universal– as evidenced by the heralding of this issue as historic, not because it’s the first ever all-black issue of a fashion magazine, but because it’s the first ever all-black issue of Vogue.

What interests me about these qualities and values we bandy about –style, fashion, glamour, beauty, sophistication, excellence —is their histories. There’s a reason why ghetto fabulousness names both a particular moment for certain (not all) black aesthetic practices and a particular site for their emergence. I think it’s important to acknowledge that in doing so, ghetto fabulousness can manifest a complex and complicitous critique of the hierarchies of differential value (aesthetic and socioeconomic) attached to certain bodies, clothes, accessories, et cetera. These hierarchies are deeply embedded in political, economic, and geographic conditions (deindustrialization, urban underdevelopment, white flight, zoning laws, redlining) and racist discourses (blackness as particular rather than universal, blackness as criminal rather than aspirational). The negative discourse about ghetto fabulousness as a sort of false consciousness, a delusion of superficial glamour, a distinct lack of rational economic or "educated" aesthetic sensibilities, a pretense of living large by black and poor persons who are living beyond their means (as if most Americans aren’t doing so!), is a direct descendant of the Reagan era’s stereotype of the welfare queen collecting checks and cruising in her Cadillac. As such, it bears recognizing that all the judgments of taste, "rational" or "irrational" decision-making, and beauty invoked in negative uses of the term ghetto fabulous are deeply ideological and contentious.

This is not an argument that all images of black aesthetics have to be located in hip-hop or urban spaces (which would be totally problematic because African diasporic aesthetics vary so widely), but an argument for being thoughtful about the uneven distribution of what counts as beautiful --and what is defined as ugly in counterpoint-- and why.

3. I’m excited to see Toccara from America’s Next Top Model in the issue! She was done wrong by the show.

Politics of Fashion or Fashionable Politics?

On the cover of the current issue of Time Out New York (September 13-19, 2007) is a rather undecorous image of a black calf-hair round-toed stiletto stamping out the September issue of Vogue magazine as if it were a stale cigarette butt. The subheading beneath the image reads: “How to master this season’s style without selling your soul to the devils wearing Prada.” For those who venerate this monthly bible of fashion, TONY’s cover will no doubt ignite a probably not so deep seated contempt for the 20 and 30-something hipsters of lower Manhattan and the outer boroughs who are too cool for establishment fashion and who seem to be TONY’s target demographic. But they are in the shrinking majority.

Recent print and online comments regarding the publication of the mammoth September issue of Vogue has described the magazine as “useless,” “a sad joke [with which] the racism and elitist mentality of Vogue is astonishing,” “an old bitch gone in the teeth,” and “a dead magazine.”

While it’s doubtful that the visual and verbal grousing against Vogue will have a real material impact on its reputation in the world of fashion—to the contrary, singling out Vogue reinforces its power as the publication to beat (up on)—such discontent underscores a point made in a previous posting about the increasing attention to and concern for fashion’s democratization. (See “Right to Bare Arms” in the August 2007 archives.)

But picking on Vogue seems unfair—Fashion (with a capital F) has long relied on uneven relationships of power while either ignoring them (by making invisible the circuits of domestic immigrant and transnational cheap labor that produces it) or romanticizing them (by using nostalgic backdrops of colonial fantasies or by appropriating “ethnic” trends and textiles to market a white upper-class metropolitan globe-trotting lifestyle). Before Kate Moss graced Roberto Cavalli’s safari-lite ads and before “The Chronicles of Keira [Knightley]” in which we see her documenting her East African trip in a leather-bound Louis Vuitton journal while wearing a creamy Marc Jacobs ruffled smock dress, there was Donna Karan’s advertising campaign set in Viet Nam.

In March 2001, Donna Karan introduced her Spring 2001 Donna Karan Collection line with a series of photographs depicting a love story between Jeremy Irons and Milla Jovovich set in Ho Chi Minh City. Karan described the narrative as “an adventurous, romantic journey where East meets West.” But the “meeting” comes across as more of an “occupation.” The steely-jawed Irons and the doe-eyed Jovovich, (along with their heterosexual entanglements, idealized White bodies, and melancholic love story) occupy the foreground of each photograph while the people and landscape of Ho Chi Minh City blur together to form one indiscernible backdrop, there only to buttress the fantasy Karan’s Spring 2001 line is meant to embody. Nearly identical versions of this fantasy have been rehearsed in Western cultural productions like Out of Africa (1985) an adaptation of Isak Dinesen’s book by the same name published in 1937, in the 1885 publication of Joseph Thomson’s Through Maasailand, and throughout American history beginning with the founding fathers’ desire for Chinese tea, porcelain, and the genteel culture these “Oriental” products conveyed.

Given this long and expansive history, why bash Vogue and why now? As previously mentioned in “Right to Bare Arms,” the fashion industry’s heightened concerns for democratizing its industry which, in a post 9/11 reality, was at risk of seeming hopelessly out of touch with the more immediate concerns of everyday people has everything to do with the heightened awareness of Americans’ collective vulnerability in relation to our national (in)security. Today, the superficial elitism that Vogue represents and reproduces (but certainly does not own) and which was once taken for granted as intrinsic to haute couture registers as highhanded and outdated. Sartorial icons like Sarah Jessica Parker have declared fashion “not a luxury but a right” and iconic designers like Vera Wang and Karl Lagerfeld are selling their wares at price points that are affordable even on a mall rat’s allowance. What has been conventionally perceived as the province of moneyed skinny girls who were about as deep as their Vincent Longo Lip and Cheek Gel Stain and other like-minded trustafarians is today being refigured as every(wo)man’s domain. Miuccia Prada explains, “Even when people don’t have anything, they have their bodies and their clothes.”

Rather than jump on the Vogue haters’ bandwagon (I look forward to reading the elegant prose of André Leon Talley’s “Life with André” too much to give up my subscription), I want to draw attention to the many semantic sleights of hand that are undergirding Fashion’s emergent humanitarianism. In the above quote, when asked about fashion, Miuccia Prada, the matriarch of Italian fashion and one of the most respected designers in the world, dresses it down by calling it “clothes”; once polarized and polarizing, “fashion” and “clothes” are conflated as if they were synonymous terms.

This conflation, though, elides and distracts from the discursive and material differences that constitute the fashion industry and a socially stratified society like ours. The fashion industry depends on change and difference. The planned obsolescence inherent in trends guarantees that consumers continue to rid their closets of “(unfashionable) clothes” and replenish them with the latest “fashions”. If fashion and clothes were actually synonymous terms—in other words, if all clothes were equally fashionable (in that all sartorial choices fashion identities equally)—a multibillion dollar industry which includes apparel and textile manufacturers, advertising agencies, modeling agencies, cosmetics companies, and printers would grind to a halt because status would no longer be conferred through fashion and therefore fashion would be meaningless. And not even the most egalitarian of fashionistas want that.

On the other hand, the rigid distinction or polarization between The Fashionable and The Clothed often produces egregiously classist and racist notions of human value. A person wearing a Chanel suit inhabits a kinder world than a person wearing “Mom jeans” and an ill-fitting rugby shirt. Likewise, the ao dai that the faceless Vietnamese woman carting the languorous Jovovich around is wearing and the red robes of the Maasai men who are symbolically and literally positioned below Knightley, in the Western imaginary that is reflected in Karan’s ads, is not “fashion” but “traditional garb” or worse, “ethnic costume.”

Slogans that universalize fashion as everyone’s right and sound bites that rhapsodize clothing as a collective ritual of humanity has done very little to disrupt the neocolonial relationship that haute monde fantasies are still built on. At the same time, I worry that the increased conscientiousness of consumers to the politics of fashion is little more than the posturing of fashionable politics.

Let’s hope that “Save Darfur” doesn’t go the way of “Free Tibet.”