>
>Just what is this "black community" anyway? African Americans are divided
>by class, generation, and region; there are black Communists and free
>marketeers; black atheists, protestants, Catholics, and Moslems; black
>feminists and black patriarchs; etc. There's a common interest between
>racists and nationalists in effacing these differences - and not only
>racists of the Klan variety, but of the more tepid establishmentarian sort,
>who annoint certain "leaders" as the "authentic" voices of the "black
>community," who recognize them as members of what Adolph Reed calls a race
>management elite. Or have I fallen too much under Adolph's spell to think
>this way?
Wise reminders here.... Id say that in so far as we need to use such phrases -- the Black, the Latino, etc "community" -- it needs scare-quotes.
The notion of community is I think based on some notion of organic solidarity and face-to-face contact, and is therefore suspect in its own terms, and also when it would be applied to various social phenomena of the late bourgeois world. My own fav misuse of the term at the gossip level: a prof here recently bought a baby from China (i.e., adopted one), partly on the grounds that she couldnt adopt a black or brown, etc one from here, b/c a/c to her "the black community" thinks this is a bad idea. Some Black folks do, I'm sure, but..... And of course, there is no such thing as the Chinese "community" then?
I'm not sure how what Malcolm X did or said, or didn't do or
>say, in 1963, bears on politics right now.
>
>Doug
I agree that this is the real question, but I am not sure if you are suggesting that it has no, or couldnt have a relation to the politics of race and culture today. As you noted, "Malcolm X" is a floating signifier these days, and it is only important "icons" that can achieve this status in the first place. So, in other words, there is a de facto "political struggle" going on over the meanings and effects of this floatable icon/signifier. We could point to the commodification of it, and of the "X" itself, as well as Lee's film, the damn postage stamp, etc., as signs of this "struggle" or deployment. This kind of phenomenon is exactly what at least Hall's notion of articulation is about: the political and cultural processes by which certain "signifiers" are made to take on certain meanings, and have certain effects. Such as the de=politicization of Malcolm X, and how popular or collective memory and history gets *produced*; this is also why I say that "getting the facts right" is only the beginning.... This kind of thing is not the most important struggle/relation of Malcolm X to the 1990s, but still it is significant.
Dan
---------------------------------------------------- Daniel Vukovich English; Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory University of Illinois Urbana, IL 61801 vukovich at uiuc.edu ph. 217-344-7843 ----------------------------------------------------