Black Women's Writing Revisited

20      It is important that Alexander describes the little girl as "sneaking." It is not that the magazines were hidden exactly, but the way Alexander characterizes their appeal as "sneaking into [her] subconscious" suggests that there was something forbidden yet alluring about them. Twisting a cliché in which a child sneaks peeks at an adult's hidden, forbidden pornographic magazines, Alexander describes herself looking at the pictures in Jet, drawn to images of "a black nation" that lured her into what I imagine as a near-illicit sense of blackness-whole, discernable, essential and bodily-from which integration had distanced, if not alienated her in some ways. She writes, "before I understood the profound difficulties of the enterprise of integration, that low rumble of race-pride was sneaking its way into my subconscious, to the part driven by compulsion, the part that yearned for the world according to Jet" (ibid. 94). It's as if integration was linked to a kind of respectable behavior or false performance while Jet tempted her toward blackness, which was true and raw. Alexander represents her concept of black culture as a pre-linguistic sensuality rather than an intellectual position. But this association does not mean that she views the lure of race-pride as irrational.

21      After recounting her family's interpretation of the time someone threw a brick at their house, Alexander writes:

Jet is somehow a handbook for a logic that understands the primacy of race, the primacy of blackness; Jet understands the way in which some situations are reducible to and explicable by race and the way in which such formulations are not simplistic. This was important for me to understand as I grew up in an era in which the happy rhetoric of integration was gospel (ibid. 95).

Because Jet focused on people-celebrities and black people of note in various fields of endeavor, wherever they appeared on the cultural radar-the blackness that was its appeal to Alexander was an embodied one, linked to living people and how they looked. She holds up integration as its contrast, while recognizing that the magazine's black embodiments might seem outdated today: "[…] I thought about Jet's legacy to me, what I remembered. It was the freaks, freaks whose stories were in Jet's pages merely because they were freaks and black" (ibid. 95). She continues, addressing the reader directly, "why would anyone want to know these stories anymore, you might ask, but in this young millennium there is still something potent about a magazine that says, Your life is important because it is black. You exist […]" (ibid. 96). The way that Alexander emphasizes Jet's affirming role resonates with the basic premise of African American literature since its earliest expressions under slavery: to bear witness to the writer's subjectivity and by extension his or her community. The "I" means "we." Establishing and negotiating personhood through words has been a primary objective in African American writing and this has been the case in black women's prose particularly. In this essay, Alexander appears to negotiate her own personhood as a metonym for discussing issues that affect the larger community. There is a kind of call and response, or at least a call with an expected response, pattern in the essay that comes through most clearly in the last section quoted above where she directly addresses the reader with "you may ask."

22      Alexander represents herself as a little girl who goes through a kind of mirror stage, seeking confirmation of her self through the reflection of others. But she also seeks a sense of "the real" over rhetorical constructions of who she is and what the world is like. The magazine intervenes between acceptable forms of identity, i.e. representatives of integration such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and a more basic desire to feel linked with people whose bodies look like hers and to know their stories. Perhaps her grandfather's copies of Jet were literally hanging on a rack on the back of the bedroom door, as she writes. But Alexander's positioning them there makes an apt metaphor for this magazine's position relative to the wider cultural and social movements of the day. Reading Jet, as figured in the essay, might be like watching Tyler Perry films, UPN, WB or BET, four examples of somewhat questionable but nonetheless celebrated media outlets and products that offer all-black programming marketed at least partly toward black folk, in the age of Barack and Michelle Obama, who are now in the process of the ultimate integration platform, a run for the U.S. presidency.[10]The Obamas have had several Jet or black pop culture moments during the campaign, however, including Barack Obama's shoulder brush gesture (Jay Z) and possibly the fist bump they exchanged after he announced that he would be the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee for the presidency. If you watch that stuff, either you discuss your viewing habits with a sense of irony or criticism or, in certain circles, you don't admit to them at all. Like Jet, however, they fill a fundamental need for identification that is beyond respectability and integration. In conferring a sense of identity and meaning to those folks that appeared in its papers, Jet confers the same to its readers.

23      Cooper makes an analogy between herself and the young post-Emancipation black American community, and so too does Alexander seem to makean analogy between herself and the people, undefined beyond her family who embody a black interior. Through the figure of the little girl Alexander suggests to me that the civil rights community was in some ways disembodying itself in order to fit into an integration model. It was leaving behind its need to feel important as black people whether it was fantastical, odd, or terrible. Not that the civil rights movement was unconcerned about the body. I do not think that this is her point. There are ways in which the black body was undeniably in crisis, through lynching, attacks at demonstrations and in other violent, brutal ways. The civil rights movement was in many ways a movement to protect the black body, not just in an abstract political way, rather in a direct, literal way. Jet is known for having published the gruesome images of the murdered boy Emmett Till. Thus the magazine actually seems to represent bodily identification that is more gut-level and spectacular, though not necessarily pleasant. Who can be sure that this is what Alexander means since being suggestive without being strictly definitive is a most productive hallmark of her prose, but what my readings of her work makes me wonder about is whetherit is the case that the movement for integration brought many gifts while that sense of psychic pleasure, comfort with one's own skin was perhaps not among them. And perhaps there are ways in which one actually needs to depart from the larger social movements, through somewhat essentialist, irreducibly and basic constructions of blackness like Jet in order to satisfy the ways in which they touch cords of basic desire in us for connection and recognition, particularly recognition, that make us uncomfortable because they make us vulnerable to our core, lower frequencies.

24      What is perhaps more certain is that Jet functioned as an instrument of "imagined community"that is formed apart from the imposed ideas of a group that would have been sociologically or fantastically defined by forces outside of or hostile to the group.[11]Imagined Community" is a concept established by Benedict Anderson, which states that a nation is a community socially constructed or imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of that group. Furthermore, the distribution of publications across distances great and small automatically construct community but they can also be seized upon to deliberately create community through shared images with which readers and viewers identify. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. New York: Verso, 2006, 6-7. Segregation created an imagination of the black community to be sure but "imagined community" is a different kind of affirmation of collective identification from within. Jet facilitated these links to some degree. As a publication, it acknowledged with every issue, the reality of a black public, especially a reading black public, even if it is the pictures that stand out most. In Alexander's critique of Jet, she shifts from attention to writing style, which concerned her in Coopers work to the magazine's visual archive. Jet's content metaphorically and literally presumed, then articulated a black readership tuned to its "low rumble of race pride" because it addressed them directly through pictures of black people. It reflected and created its imagined community because its weekly publication demonstrated and affirmed the fact that the readers were out there and would return week after week. But what I am most struck by is the "low" in the phrase "low rumble of race-pride." It is a reference to volume, most straightforwardly, but surely it also refers the place of race-pride on the cultural hierarchy relative to higher rumbles - magazines might be lower than books; Jet possibly lower than its counterpart Ebony; both of them lower than a feature on a black person in Life magazine. In any event, Alexander's portrayal of Jet in the essay shows its potential to offer a clearly defined black presence and race-pride in it amid the both social and psychological aspects of integration. But, with a mixture of regret and relief that perhaps after book-learning, this sensual pull to identity is less of a pull, Alexander's persona, no longer the little girl reading her grandfather's magazines, ends her Jet essay sayng:

My problems with Jet are myriad but I'm still a reader. With each instance in which the violation of a black person is made public in its pages, I am able to think about whether it is violence, or its ever-present possibility, that unites us a people. And I still revel in straight-up celebration of black glory. However tacky, however ephemeral those photos of black celebrities outside Ebony-Jet headquarters may be, I still hold onto them as to an idea that this thing called black culture and these people called black people can both be productively, complexly understood as nuanced entities whose acts and practices we hold to the challenge of criticism (ibid. 98).

Here we find the real knot in Alexander's concept of black culture: how to be both embodied in ahistorically defined blackness and be "complexly understood as nuanced entities." She expresses the desire to "still hold on" to this thing called black culture while questioning and theorizing while yet being drawn toward its "low rumble" expressions. The attractions of the world according to Jet - that blackness is glorious, curious, and constitutes a world-complicates matters for Alexander's essay persona and we see changes from the beginning to the last paragraphs. Alexander's essay on Jet makes this magazine available to us in a time when "we still haven't 'overcome' (ibid. 98) and it enables us to envision the cultural conundrums that mark this post-Civil Rights era.

25      In "'Can You be BLACK and Look at This?': Reading the Rodney King Video(s)," Alexander addresses the specter and reality of present-day violence in late-twentieth century America decades after the height of the Civil Rights movement. She directly addresses the reader to whom she presents a collage or anthology of cases that describe witnessed, recorded violence. Evident in the title is her emphasis on racial identity through the capital letters that she uses to mark the word black. Once again she pays homage to Cooper who used "large, bold, capital letters, its body standing taller and stronger than anything else in the sentence, asserting its right to space" to write "BLACK WOMAN" in her essay (ibid. 125). More than an abstract notion of racial memory, Alexander grounds her ideas in the history of physical, bodily torture that is part of the collective history of people of African descent. However, rather than a notion of "glory" which guided her ideas about community and connection in Jet, in the King videos she unpacks a complex relationship between bearing witness to violence and the urgencies of community formation. Originally published during the 1990s, when it was becoming more common to place the term race into quotations, in order perhaps to illustrate its constructed nature, Alexander's thinking about an irreducible blackness was a significant departure.