Exploitation, appropriation, exchange
[Young colleague queried, I replied]
Thanks for getting in touch, and for your question in the presentation. I should clarify something: I do not believe and didn’t suggest that dominant-/subaltern-class exchange was ever “equal” or “egalitarian”—far from it. As I said, I believe that any time there is a power imbalance (mapped as technological, economic, social, gender, or racial inequality), appropriation and exploitation are inevitable; my historical perspective suggests that this imbalance has been present across many kinds of culture contact, especially since the period of colonization.
What I said—and believe—is that cultural exchange is never mono-directional: that is, if two cultural groups in a dominant/subaltern relationship come in contact, there will be exchange—of sound, accent, food, religious belief, movement vocabulary, or other portable forms of cultural capital—and that the exchange will always impact and alter both groups’ experience and expression. Dominant-group members may not believe that the exchange is flowing in both directions, but most often the subaltern groups do recognize this: hence the cakewalk, for example.
To perceive subaltern groups as only acted-upon / appropriated-from passive victims would be to deny their ability to perceive what is happening, and/or their ability to take steps to mitigate and push-back against appropriation/exploitation. In my work as a historian, I have far more often observed subaltern groups who do perceive what is happening to them, often with very considerable acuity, and who do push back against that appropriation/exploitation, often through the medium of subtle or not-so-subtle parody (and lots of other social-resistance techniques).
This is reminiscent of WEB DuBois’s model of “double consciousness,” in this context: black folks needing to adopt/adapt/employ two very different modes of surface conduct and internal consciousness in order to cope with a racist experience. Henry Louis Gates Jr has talked about similar culture-based subaltern strategies in his model of “Signifyin’” (lots of references, but here’s one: https://books.google.com/books?id=KRRUAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA45&lpg=PA45&dq=gates+%22signifyin+monkey%22&source=bl&ots=I2o1wzps7S&sig=CR1PWpZ59eP3hb2Cy3VDAf_-p1c&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiy_PawgZfQAhXEwlQKHUqcDwIQ6AEIPjAG#v=onepage&q=gates%20%22signifyin%20monkey%22&f=false)
So, in a blackface or pre-blackface context (my own Creolization book is really about the pre-blackface era: about where blackface theatrics come from), black or mixed-race originators did in fact understand that minstrel imitators were taking from them, both pushed-back and appropriated-from them, and eventually got in on the act in the post-War period. Louis Chude-Sokei’s The Last Darky, about the great Bert Williams, contains a particularly acute analysis of this, but there are lots of others: I would think of Duke Ellington, Louis Jordan, Bill Bojangles Robinson, and Josephine Baker, just to name a few—artists who understood very precisely the exploitative and subaltern experience to which they were being subjected, but who found ways to make lasting art nevertheless, often by slyly borrowing and “signifyin’ upon” the stereotypes themselves.
Thanks again for your apt questions!
