Petey Greene: Radicalizing Racial Discourse

I just finished watching the PBS documentary Adjust Your Color, on the life and times of Washington, D.C., radio and TV talk show host Petey Greene (RIP). Greene's story is remarkable: an ex-con and hustler turned community activist and self-proclaimed voice for the black community. Especially notable for me was the overlap between Greene's life story and that of the black pulp fiction icon Donald Goines, whom I wrote about last year. Both men emerged out of prison to take advantage of media opportunities that allowed them to address the ghettos out of which they had emerged. (Tragically, both men died young too.)

Here's a clip of Greene's most famous televised broadcast, in which he talks about the politics of black people eating watermelon. It's at once side-splittingly hilarious and dead-on serious. Above all, Petey Greene didn't like anyone -- black or white -- to "front," and pussyfooting around the issue of eating watermelon only distracted folks from consuming a fine piece of fruit meat.

Petey Greene (1931-1984)
From Petey Greene's Washington, D.C.
"Be Yourself" (1982)

Black Pop I: Tyler Perry, Candy Licker, White Boys on the Down Low

Three recent articles from Slate.com on black cultural politics:

1. Wesley Morris on Tyler Perry's appeal to black moviegoers, and particularly black women. Thoughts on what "niche" audience-marketing enables and forecloses in social relations and media criticism. Perry's revival of 1940s Hollywood melodrama and his refining of what might be called a "self-help" aesthetic: according to Morris, black women tell him "[Perry's] films give them hope for true love and greater success."

2. Benoit Denizet-Lewis on white men's identifying themselves as being on the Down Low. Thoughts on why white men are drawn to the Down Low -- a hypermasculine, possibly misogynist, discourse of homosexual disavowal and male privilege, of having one's cake and eating it too. Another twist to our current understanding of the DL, with white men taking up what Nelson George would call "everything but the burden."

3. Brendan I. Koerner on the history of black pulp fiction and mainstream publishers' current fascination with so-called "street lit." Review of black pulp fiction's rise with the likes of Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines at Holloway House. Review of black pulp fiction's revival in the form of street lit, independently published books of ghetto life, in the 1990s. Analysis of street lit's mainstreaming, beginning with Sister Souljah's The Coldest Winter Ever in 1999 and reaching a new level of notoriety with Noire's Candy Licker in 2006.

Interesting side-story about Koerner's tracking down the "real" identity of Noire, whom he believes to be middle-aged black romance writer Tracy Price-Thompson. Whether or not that's true, the mysterious "urban" pseudonym points up black pulp fiction's/street lit's investment in the idea of keeping it real.

To Be a Problem

My friend Alexis Gumbs is offering a free online course with the support of community and Duke University resources. Riffing on Du Bois and looking forward to the next generation of queer black radicalisms, the course is titled "To Be a Problem: Outcast Subjectivity and Black Literary Production." The syllabus includes readings and related media by Paul Beatty, Michelle Cliff, Toni Morrison, The Roots, Natasha Tretheway, and other artists and dreamers.

Like my own work on black pulp fiction, Alexis is concerned to retrieve the historical and cultural frames that enable what might be called resistance publishing -- creative acts of black radical meaning-making. Where my archive tends toward masculinist stories of life on the street, Alexis's is decidedly feminist, queer, and self-consciously political. Despite these obvious differences, our work has something vital in common: a desire to recover and reinvent radical strands of late-twentieth-century black social imaginaries. Ours is a literary-materialist project of great historical depth and infinite utopian-imaginative potential.

Alexis's decision to offer this course online is an act of radical pedagogy. It's truly the first step we, as scholars, can do to honor what black radicals and activists have always pushed for: bringing knowledge, resources, and opportunities of learning to the people. I encourage you to visit the online version of "To Be a Problem" here. If you'd like to participate in the online discussion of course materials, please read Alexis's introduction (copied below) and get in touch with her ASAP.

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Welcome! This is the online home of a course entitled To Be A Problem: Outcast Subjectivity and Black Literary Production. As Audre Lorde, June Jordan and Fred Moten teach us, all knowledge belongs to the people. This is an effort to steal the force out of mechanisms through which the private University privileges itself as a site of "knowledge production". Since we all know that learning happens everywhere this FREE online version of a course that will be taught this fall at Duke University invites you to participate in an interactive process of reading and creating. Look for bi-weekly posts on the materials listed and weekly writing assignments. Please read and write along with us. (Take advantage of this opportunity to havethe infinitely-divided attention of a queerblackradical nerd for three months!) If you'd like to participate please send your email address and a sentence about your intention to brokenbeautifulpress@gmail.com.

Introducing Donald Goines

I recently wrote a brief review of Eddie Allen's Low Road: The Life and Legacy of Donald Goines. The book is a solid biography of the man seen by many to be the father of African American pulp fiction, the cheap, mass-market paperbacks whose hard-boiled stories of the street and life in the ghetto were penned by former hustlers, pimps, and "users" themselves. The history of the rise of black pulp fiction in the 1960s and '70s is the subject of my Ph.D. dissertation at Duke University.

National Public Radio host Tony Cox interviewed Allen about his book and Goines's life (and tragic death by shooting) back in 2004. Follow this link to access that interview and to get a taste of the kind of writing Goines spawned in his brief but shockingly productive literary career (16 novels in five years).

The Midwich Cuckoos, or, A Confusion of Thoughts on Reproduction, Evolution, and Reading

I just finished reading a great science fiction book, John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos. Originally published in 1957, the novel was later adapted into the movie Village of the Damned (1960). It tells the story of how a small, sleepy village in England is "invaded" by unwanted "Children," beings who have an enormous capacity for learning and who are intent on dominating their bewildered hosts.

The Children are, we might say, forcibly born to the village's women -- the story begins with a mysterious "Dayout" in which the lives of Midwich's inhabitants are brought to a halt, an invisible forcefield is set up around the village, and the women become pregnant overnight. Wyndham was no feminist, but there are kernels of a radical critique of reproduction (heterosexual or otherwise) in the way he explores the community's reaction to the mass insemination. Mrs. Zellaby notes to her husband, "It's all very well for a man. He doesn't have to go through this sort of thing, and he knows he never will have to. How can he understand? He may mean as well as a saint, but he's always on the outside. He can never know what it's like, even in a normal way -- so what sort of an idea can he have of this? -- Of how it feels to lie awake at night with the humiliating knowledge that one is simply being used? -- As if one were not a person at all, but just a kind of mechanism, a sort of incubator..." (71-72). Mrs. Zellaby's pregnancy was forced upon her, to be sure, and yet the language here is slippery enough, I think, to suggest that she's touching on a more common sentiment, or malaise, or dread, that might be characteristic of "carrying child."

Once the Children are born, the villagers soon realize that they can't escape them -- that these beings exert a pull on them that doesn't allow them to leave Midwich. When people try to leave town by car or foot, there's a point at which they are compelled to turn around and come back to the Children. Even more sinister is the fact that any harm done to the Children, whether intentional or not, is redoubled and thrown back at those who committed the harm. Early in the story, one Mrs. Welt accidentally pricks her baby with a pin. Soon after, "the baby had just looked steadily at her with its golden eyes, and made her start jabbing the pin into herself" (83).

This deliciously sadistic pulsion defines the novel's narrative arc. It also helps explain Wyndham's choice of titles. In one of Mr. Zellaby's many discourses on the Children, he claims that they bear some resemblance to the apparently vicious nature of newly hatched cuckoo birds: "Now, the important thing about the cuckoo is not how the egg got into the nest, nor why that nest was chosen; the real matter for concern comes after it has been hatched -- what, in fact, it will attempt to do next. And that, whatever it may be, will be motivated by its instinct for survival, an instinct characterized chiefly by utter ruthlessness" (89). And indeed once the villagers accept their lot as trapped hosts for these Children, the question becomes, How to get rid of them? This question allows Wyndham to delve into matters of evolutionary theory: he's interested in imagining what humans might resort to when confronted with beings that are paradoxically more advanced (they are highly intelligent creatures) and less mature (they are nonetheless "children") than they are.



I picked up this book from my hostel in Huaráz. I began reading it there and finished it here, a month later, in Lima. I'm writing about it in this blog to register some of the themes (reproduction, evolution) that piqued my interest as a reader. But just what kind of reader am I? Under what circumstances do I read? Why this book, in Peru, over the Easter weekend, and not another? Are the comments above of an academic nature, or are they things someone who reads The Midwich Cuckoos for "fun," while backpacking, might reflect on as well? Who "owned" this British edition of the book (a handsome trade paperback whose cover features the haunting stare of a baby set above the gray bar that signals it to be part of the Penguin Classics series) before leaving it at the Benkiwasi hostel? Did he or she retrieve it from some other traveler, from some other hostel or book exchange, in South America? Is English even the first language of this imaginary traveler? And what will happen to this book now? Who will read it next as I leave it somewhere in Lima, sometime next week, when I pack up my things and return to my "grad student" life back in the States?

Reading and experience, reproduction and evolution, dry British humor and quiet British terror. The other day, a fellow traveler from Seattle, Emily Jump, and I had a wonderful conversation over Mediterranean food about reading both within and outside academic contexts. We talked about the pleasures of reading for "fun" -- that is, reading for experience, reading as an exercise of the imagination, and not reading as a means of reducing literature to hyper-specialized academic prose. But Emily also took care to recognize that we possess the education and wherewithal ($) to "enjoy" literature of a certain type. Which is to say that even our leisurely enjoyment of literature is always already conditioned by a certain educational background and a certain privileged interest in reading as a practice. And so ultimately we, Emily and I, move between the desire to read beyond what we already know and the acknowledgment that our reading practices will always bear the trace of a certain privileged "appreciation" of what literature can do -- how reading books can take us beyond what we already know.

A classic double-bind? Not necessarily so. I, for one, have come to appreciate deeply the possibility of reading with an eye toward experience and understanding rather than as a means of confirming what I think I already know. Yes, Emily and I are both highly educated people. We enjoy good books. We read some books that academics read. But we resist (and here she's got a head start on me) processing what we read through a self-defined "intellectual" lens -- reducing what we read to a preconstituted "theory." We don't (like to) read as professionals, in other words. Or, at least in my case, being an academic isn't mutually exclusive (I hope!) with one's appreciation for experiential reading. The issue I have with the academy is that most professional literary critics will never admit to the inherent hermeticism of their profession (though they like to claim that all other professions are hyper-specialized).

So there's a profound difference, a valuable difference, between ways of reading among highly educated subjects. Where acknowledging one's position of privilege becomes important is precisely at the point where it's most tempting to judge the way "other people" read. These "others" could include educated people who critique academic professionalism, but they more often encompass the wide swath of readers who don't read books, or who read romances and crime fiction exclusively, or who (worst of all, in some circles) read "middlebrow" books usually associated with sentimental femininity and (therefore?) a complete lack of "taste." While attesting to her own tastes (for good books that a college graduate like her can appreciate), Emily took care to point out that her preferences didn't at all imply judgment of what other people read. People read for different reasons, and these reasons are conditioned by factors such as educational background, disposible income, access to literary resources, and so forth. Thus, to dismiss or even condemn (see certain critics' shrill responses to Oprah's Book Club) certain forms of reading on the grounds of taste confuses a personal "choice" for the divergent and variable social conditions of reading.

Small wonder that Emily has been my best dissertation-interlocutor (even considering the brevity of our conversation over late-lunch!) during my time in Peru. After giving her a layman's rundown of my topic, Emily basically said, "So you're arguing that black pulp fiction made (the practice of) reading a book interesting, worthwhile, and affordable for a community of traditionally overlooked readers." The ethical and political implication of which is: we bracket judging the content of these books in order to understand that their popularity suggests profound truths about racial and economic inequality in the United States.

Emily stated her interpretation of my "point" in such a clear and efficient way that I felt embarrassed revealing how long it's been taking me to finish writing my dissertation. What good reason did I have for taking so much time when the elements of my thinking were so easily communicated over kebabs that afternoon in Parque Kennedy? Was my block a matter of laziness, confusion, needing to read more, needing to research more, or simply being unable to write "academically" about books, people, and themes of the "street," those arguably at the furthest remove from the ivory tower?

One thing I do know is that my craving for new experiences, experiences beyond what I think I already know, is incentive enough for me to commit to finishing my doctoral degree by March of next year. The question remains whether and how I will manage to write the Experience of black pulp fiction in an academic dissertation.