[The Montana Professor 15.1, Fall 2004 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]
Linda Williams
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001
401 pp.
Michael Mayer
History
UM-Missoula
Some academic books are good; they claim importance from virtues such as insight, research, and clear presentation. Some academic books are bad but nonetheless important; despite major flaws, they may open new avenues of inquiry or shed new light on a topic. Some academic books are picturesquely bad and inspire reviewers to flights of elegant prose denouncing them. Linda Williams's Playing the Race Card is bad in the most pedestrian manner. The book adds virtually nothing of significance to the existing state of knowledge on American race relations. It does demonstrate, however, that with the right amount of post-modernist obfuscation, one can take some unremarkable observations and torture them into an item on an academic résumé.
Inspired by the trial of O.J. Simpson and accusations that an "overtly raced defense" had "played the race card" (4), Williams attempts to understand the origins and evolution of the notion of a "race card." According to Williams, "the metaphor of the race card attempts to discredit any racialized suffering that can be turned to advantage now that colorblindness is supposedly in effect" (4). This is a loaded definition that attempts to discredit the claim of playing a race card (much as she says that the charge of playing the race card attempts to discredit claims of "racialized suffering"). However, in her discussion of the race card over history, she adjusts this (conveniently) to mean a claim to virtue or innocence based on "racialized suffering." Thus, she argues that Harriet Beecher Stowe "played the first mass-culture version of the race card when she pictured [in Uncle Tom's Cabin] the sufferings of Tom and Eliza at the hands of white masters" (5). Williams then posits that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Thomas Dixon, in his novel, The Clansman, and D.W. Griffith, in his film, The Birth of a Nation, "trumped Stowe's race card by inverting its racial polarities to show white women threatened by emancipated black men" (5). Thus, Williams concludes that "there is no single race card; rather, there is a history of mutually informing, perpetually trumping, race cards animating a long tradition of black and white racial melodrama" (5).
Williams goes on to assert that "melodrama is a fundamental mode by which American culture has dealt with the problem of 'moral legibility'" (43). She rejects the notion that melodrama is "a seemingly archaic excess of sensation and sentiment, a manipulation of the heart strings that exceeds the bounds of good taste" (11). Rather, she argues, melodrama "can be viewed...not as a genre, an excess, or an aberration, but as what most often typifies popular American narrative in literature, stage, film, and televison when it seeks to engage with moral questions" (17). Echoing the work of Peter Brooks, she contends that melodrama is a "quintessentially modern (though not modernist) mode" that arose from a "'post-sacred' world where traditional imperatives of truth and morality had been violently questioned and yet in which there was still a need to forge some semblance of truth and morality" (18). "Melodrama," she concludes, "differs from realism in its will to force the status quo to yield signs of moral legibility within the limits of the 'ideologically permissible,' even as it builds upon genuine social concerns" (19).
Williams then proceeds to trace the career of Stowe's novel, the archetypal American racial melodrama. Although it drew on existing traditions, Uncle Tom's Cabin, through its melodramatic pathos, reached even those not necessarily susceptible to abolitionist politics. Almost immediately, versions of the novel appeared on the stage. In developing her analysis of the novel's transition from the page to the stage, Williams draws on the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century definition of melodrama as a romantic drama with music (melos) in order to establish the importance of black music expropriated by whites in the staging of Stowe's novel. One staging of the play had Tom sing Stephen Foster's "Old Folks at Home." In addition, although Foster did not write "My Old Kentucky Home" for a particular production of the play, he wrote it when Stowe's novel was being serialized in The National Era and wrote it specifically for the character of Uncle Tom.
Initially, the play was staged with happy endings. Some versions in the South even converted the work into a pro-slavery play, replete with kindly masters, loyal slaves, and comic minstrelsy. Various versions of the play encompassed elements of both melodrama, with its resulting sympathy for the suffering victims, and farce, with its sense of distance and ridicule. The first reasonably serious adaptation of the novel followed the pattern of contemporary melodrama and was only three acts long. This production also altered the play to provide a happy ending and shared the bill with a tightrope act, a Neapolitan dance, and a burlesque of Othello. The most important version, as initially produced by George Aiken and George C. Howard, consisted of three acts and covered only the first half of the novel, ending with the death of little Eva. Its popularity led to a sequel, also in three acts, that culminated in the death of Uncle Tom. Howard and Aiken then combined the two plays into a six-act whole and offered it with no other entertainment on the bill. White audiences--and (segregated) black theatergoers, too--wept over the fate of slaves, accompanied by sad plantation melodies. When stripped of its layers of jargon and theory, Williams's unexceptionable point is simply that the play generated sympathy and empathy for black characters.
As Williams presents it, a major turning point in racial melodrama came with D.W. Griffith's film, The Birth of a Nation, which replaced the suffering of slaves with the suffering of white southerners, particularly white southern women. Indeed, Williams contends that "what The Birth of a Nation did, as a film, was to convert the nation to southern sympathy" (98). Here, Williams claims far too much for Griffith's film and, in the process, reveals a stunning lack of historical knowledge.
In fact, northern enthusiasm for remaking and policing the South had waned by the 1870s, and, beginning in the 1880s, a series of developments contributed to the emergence of a new national consensus on race and the so-called southern question. As the Civil War faded into the realm of memory, the nation experienced a sectional reconciliation. Even partisans in both North and South came to regard the war as a noble struggle fought by heroes on both sides. In the 1880s, the Grand Army of the Republic, an organization of Union veterans, began to invite former Confederate generals to address its meetings (as a rule, organizations of southern veterans did not return the favor). The late nineteenth century also saw an increase of racist thought in the North, inspired in part by the rise of scientific racism and the pseudo-science of eugenics. In addition, waves of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe came to America and settled in the North. Native-born, white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant Americans regarded the newcomers as members of inferior races and were less than enthusiastic about having them as neighbors. This, too, contributed to a reconsideration of the southern question. Many concluded that perhaps the South had been right all along or at least that it would be wise to allow the South to structure its own society. Reflecting these and other concerns, the Supreme Court handed down a series of decisions beginning in the 1870s limiting the scope of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments.
In the South, segregation had not sprung up full-blown immediately after the Civil War. The war abruptly ended the social system of slavery, and it took a generation for a new system of white supremacy to evolve fully. Beginning in the 1890s, southern states adopted new constitutions that disfranchised African Americans and established an elaborate system of legal segregation, which the Supreme Court ruled constitutional in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Further, the last decade of the nineteenth century marked the peak of racist violence in the South, as whites imposed the new system of segregation and disfranchisement.
The novels of Thomas Dixon, Jr., on which Griffith drew for The Birth of a Nation, did not begin to appear until 1902, well after the establishment of the new structure of white supremacy in the South and its endorsement by the nation's highest court. Dixon condensed two of his novels, The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden and The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, into a play, The Clansman, in 1905. Griffith's film, which was based on the play, did not appear in theaters until 1915.
Thus, to assert, as Williams does, that Griffith's film "solidified North and South into a new national feeling of racial antipathy" (99) at the very least overstates the case. Because Williams lacks a basic understanding of the historical context that produced these cultural works, she assumes that Dixon's novels and his play as well as Griffith's movie altered consciousness (rather than reflected it). In fact, the works of Dixon and Griffith both reflected emerging ideas about race and helped to shape them.
If Williams overstates the influence of The Birth of a Nation on national racial attitudes, by demonstrating the influence of Griffith's film on a two-million dollar film version of Uncle Tom's Cabin released by Universal in 1927, she does make a plausible case that The Birth of a Nation played a role in reshaping popular entertainment. As Williams puts it, "the negrophilia of the Tom melodrama was overturned by the negrophobia of anti-Tom" (135). Moreover, she demonstrates that the "two traditions, so antithetical in their racial sympathies, are deeply implicated in one another" (135).
Williams sees another shift in 1927 with the release of the film, The Jazz Singer, and the Broadway musical, Showboat. She writes that "in these two groundbreaking works that forever altered the medium in which they appeared, white characters acquire virtue by musically expressing a suffering that is recognizable as 'black'" (137). The Jewish character played by Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer literally dons blackface to sing "black" songs. Blackface becomes a means of assimilation for the Jewish lead character. In Showboat, Magnolia Hawks establishes a link with blackness by singing "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man" (without blackface). Williams contends that with these two works, "the melodramatic 'space of innocence' swung away from the anti-Tom negrophobia that had dominated the Progressive Era and returned toward the crossracial identification of the Tom story" (138).
While Williams does acknowledge the role of "modernity" in this transformation, much more could be said about the social and cultural transformations that underlay changing American attitudes about race. It seems truly astonishing that one could discuss Showboat and The Jazz Singer without considering the impact of World War I (and military service by African Americans), the black migration to the North, the economic and political opportunities resulting from that migration, race riots during and after the war, the re-emergence of the Ku Klux Klan, the Harlem Renaissance, and the nationalization of culture (including mass produced goods, name brands, advertising, chain stores, syndicated newspaper columns, national magazines, and radio). By limiting her notion of context to the development of her category of racial melodrama, Williams misses powerful forces that contributed to the shaping of racial attitudes in America and thereby to her mode of racial melodrama.
By the 1930s, Williams maintains, the pendulum swing between "Tom" and "anti-Tom" had begun to move back the other way. Margaret Mitchell's novel, Gone with the Wind, and David O. Selznick's film of the book waxed "nostalgic over the traditional virtues of the agrarian southern home...to the point of reviving its most controversial symbol of white mastery: the plantation" (187). "Even Dixon and Griffith's Progressive Era paean to the virtue of the old South," observes Williams, "had not ventured such an apparently unapologetic celebration of the economic system of chattel slavery" (188). At the same time, in the one of the least persuasive sections of the book, Williams attempts to remake Gone With the Wind into something other than a racist delusion. Williams argues that "the central paradox of Gone With the Wind is its linking of two contradictory nostalgias: an overt nostalgia for the aristocratic, agrarian ways of the "old South" and a more covert nostalgia for the strength, virtue, and endurance of oppressed races (Irish and black)" (214). Indeed, she goes further, contending that "the covert source of Scarlett's virtue" is its "link to black suffering" (215). One might well accept Williams's argument that, as in Dixon's The Clansman, Gone With the Wind transfers the virtue conferred by suffering from black slaves to white southerners, and particularly to white southern women. However, to argue that Scarlett's virtue derives from her identification with black suffering does violence to Mitchell's novel.
In her discussion of racial melodrama of the thirties, Williams once again ignores the powerful social, political, and cultural forces that shaped racial attitudes in America. The return of the Democrats to power and the resulting increased political influence of the South had a profound effect on racial politics. For example, New Deal programs discriminated against African Americans in the South and sometimes excluded them. Hard times and the resulting economic competition lent themselves to a search for scapegoats. In addition, the Depression contributed to nostalgic longing for a past not scarred by economic distress.
Williams skips over the civil rights era in two paragraphs, observing that "the civil rights movement was nothing if not a black and white racial melodrama whose nonviolent tone of 'moral supremacy' represented a significant reworking of the Christian values of the original Tom story" (218). She then turns her attention to Alex Haley's book, Roots, and its adaptation for television, which "told the story of slavery from an African-American, post-civil rights perspective" (221). As Williams sees it, in Haley's supposedly nonfiction account, Kunta Kinte suffers beatings as did Uncle Tom, but, as a slave who resists and repeatedly runs away, the character freed African American manhood from "the now-dreaded passivity and femininity" of the Uncle Tom character (229). In one of her strongest arguments, Williams contends that "What Roots did for its African-American readers and viewers is thus not unlike what blackface and a song about 'Mammy' in The Jazz Singer did for Jews: it offered identification with an exoticized blackness, ennobled through suffering, whose actual purpose, however, was ultimately to forge an assimilated American identity" (230). By "identifying with an exotic Africanness that was precisely what they were not," African Americans "in the post-civil rights era assumed their own distinctive American identity" (230).
While at its best in dealing with the intersection of the medium of television and the message of Haley's work, Williams's book remains crippled by the lack of historical context. Her analysis of Roots proceeds blissfully unaware of the scholarly debate over the nature of slavery that began with Stanley Elkins's Slavery (1959) and attracted the attention of the national media with the publication of Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman's Time on the Cross (1974). That debate informed both Haley's book and its reception.
Finally, Williams turns her attention to the trial of the officers accused of beating Rodney King and the trial of O.J. Simpson for the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. "I want," Williams informs her readers, "to claim the deepest possible ritual connections between these trials and the entire trajectory of the American melodrama of black and white" (274). Toward that end, she approvingly cites John Fiske to the effect that "televised media events are distinctly postmodern, hyper-real phenomena in which there is no longer a clear distinction between a 'real' event and its mediated representation" (260). This point clearly demonstrates the lack of clarity and precision in Williams's thought. Does she really mean that there is no difference between reality and media presentation? Almost anyone who has ever taken part in an event covered by the media can attest to the contrary. Does she mean that the representation becomes reality for those whose only exposure to the event is through that representation? In her subsequent discussion, it is impossible to tell whether she refers to the actual events, the representations of them in the media, or the perception of them by consumers of media representations.
In this chapter, Williams's penchant for arguing beyond her evidence and generalizing from a very narrow base become most apparent. Did the Simpson trial, and in particular the eventual sale and destruction of Simpson's home, really "symbolize the end of white good will toward" assimilation (289)? If so, Williams certainly offers no evidence to support it. Moreover, on the next page, Williams backs off of that claim. "I do not mean to argue that the overcharged destruction of Rockingham spelled the end of actual African-American assimilation and upward mobility in American culture" (290). So what does she mean? Taking another stab at it, she writes: "I do mean to argue, however, that the Simpson trial now seems permanently linked in the public imagination with a bitter legacy of white ressentiment against the perceived 'advantages' won by blacks or by any racial or ethnic category of peoples" (290). Is it linked or does it only seem to be linked? How is it linked? The best Williams can do is contend that the trial and the demolition of the house "coincided significantly with an ethos sanctioning the dismantling of affirmative action" (290). The words "coincided significantly" evade hard questions of cause and effect. Herein lies a major defect in the book: Williams can, at times, be clever, but she is not substantial.
Further, she often displays a shameful ignorance of history and an equally shameful scholarly carelessness. For example, she misstates the facts and the ruling of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case. According to Williams, the Court held that Scott, "whose master had moved [him] to free states, could not be free" (281). What the Court actually ruled was that the status of a slave whose master took him to a free state, held him there as a slave, and returned with him to a slave state was determined by the state to which they had returned./1/
Throughout the book, Williams engages in what the art critic Robert Hughes calls the "therapeutic fallacy." By this, Hughes means the idea that art should be judged on whether it is "good for you" (i.e., whether it instills moral uplift or performs some therapeutic function). Hughes dismisses this with the observation that "the fact that a work of art is about AIDS or bigotry no more endows it with aesthetic merit than the fact that it's about mermaids and palm trees."/2/ Williams herself acknowledges, in her discussion of Showboat, that "it would be a mistake...to judge the power of the song on a quantitive measurement of degrees of militancy in its staging and delivery" (171), but she proceeds to do precisely that. Moreover, such judgments pervade her discussion of works from Uncle Tom's Cabin to Alex Haley's Roots.
Finally, there is the matter of Williams's clotted academic prose, which sometimes defies comprehension. Consider the following example from page 70: "If it is necessary to disparage the expropriation of one culture by another, more dominant one, it is also important to recognize that it is also by stepping outside of their 'skin' that members of different cultures and races sometimes find the power to resolve conflicts within the subject positions constructed by the 'skin' that has been evaded." The passage in which that "sentence" occurs seems to make the point that the sympathy and even empathy for black victims evoked by melodrama are preferable to the ridicule of black characters evoked by farce. If so, the English language is perfectly capable of conveying that modest observation. Similarly, Williams traces the popularity of melodrama to "the search for moral legibility in an American context that was increasingly unattainable in the belief system of Calvinist election" (19). Parse the sentence. Surely Williams does not mean that the "American context" was "increasingly unattainable." One cannot help but wonder about the editors at Princeton University Press who let this pass.
The book depends heavily on postmodern jargon. Jargon claims to specify, but in fact it obscures. Perhaps even worse, it attempts to make mundane observations "important." Williams posits that the turning point of a melodrama comes when the victim of a plot by the villain exposes the guilty villain, thus leading to a public recognition of the victim's virtue and the villain's wickedness. She follows Peter Brooks in calling this moment "nomination" (32). By that, she and Brooks simply mean that the victim names the villain. They could, of course, call this "naming," but naming is a five-cent word, and nomination is a twenty-five cent word; the use of the latter results in two-bit academic writing. Further, recognition is a long-established literary term for such a moment, and it remains a perfectly comprehensible English word. One might dismiss the overabundance of jargon as foolish pretentiousness or window dressing, but too often it substitutes for a lack of thought.
Throughout this jargon-laden book, Williams explains repeatedly how claims to virtue derive from suffering. If so, reading this book is one hell of a claim to virtue.
Notes
Scott v. Sanford, 19 Howard 393, 452-3.[Back]
Robert Hughes, The Culture of Complaint (New York: Oxford UP, 1993), 185-86.[Back]
[The Montana Professor 15.1, Fall 2004 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]