Core Post #3

Katie Gavin

3/31/15

Paul Robeson, Black Masculinities + Popular Culture

The other day, I was hanging out in the garden next to the Roski School of Art and I stumbled into the garden that commemorates Americans brought to trial at the House of Un-American Activities Committee. I knew that Robeson was one American charged with being a communist, and sure enough, I found his stone and a quote next to it. At the time, Robeson was angry, but un-ashamed to speak out as a communist. I don’t feel like I know enough on the subject to say definitively, but I can imply from Dyer’s reading that it was Robeson’s overt position as a communist, anti-imperialist, and anti-racist to which we can attribute his irrelevancy amongst the youth of America.

The Standing committee for the House of Un-American Activities existed from 1945-1975, which is the period directly after that which Dyer covers in his chapter on Robeson. During the period that Dyer covered, which was roughly from 1924-1945, Robeson was a major star; in fact, he was considered by many to be the “first major black star” and one of the first “crossover artists”, or artist who is grounded in a subculture but who appeals to an audience beyond the confines of said subculture.

I am interested in analyzing, to a certain degree, the ways in which Dyer’s discussion of white views on Robeson might be interpreted. In the chapter, Dyer posits that “Robeson represent[ed] the idea of blackness as a positive quality, often explicitly set over against whiteness and its inadequacies” (78). More specifically, there is a discussion of blackness as being associated with naturalness or “animal vitality” and whiteness being associated with constrained emotions or unnaturalness.

This concept is really intriguing, but if one views it through the lens of Robeson’s eventual turn away from capitalism and towards communism, I would like to think about the ways in which white audiences might have believed in the possibility of acquiring or attaining the desirable qualities that Robeson “embodied” through economic transfer. In other words, I am speaking about the notion that white people might be able to gain access to the internal life of “Negroes” through the consumption of the all-encompassing performances of Robeson.

I think this question is extremely relevant today when one thinks about hip-hop music, particularly the fact that the number one demographic of hip-hop consumers is adolescent white males. Could this be part of the way in which subversive ideologies embodied by powerful Black celebrities are robbed of their revolutionary potency?