Week 13, entry one and two

Entry one
“The Harlem Intelligentsia” and “Cordelia the Crude” and “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade” and the work of Archibald Motley Jr.
McKay’s chapter “The Harlem Intelligentsia” contains arguments for aesthetics and black art. McKay’s aesthetics emphasize authenticity, and that authenticity ought to be preserved, regardless the picture portrayed through the artist’s medium. McKay writes: “I think all people are interesting to write about. It depends on the writer’s ability to bring them out alive” (McKay 159). Within that statement appears some implication that links form and content. The writer’s ability is a very broad term that could encompass potentially much more besides form, but form is definitely under that very large, ambiguous umbrella.
Two selected works: “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” and “Cordelia the Crude” meet McKay’s idea of aesthetics in varying ways. The idea of form makes Nugent’s work, “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade” a problematic piece for McKay’s aesthetics, I think. Nugent’s short story, while vividly capturing the dead-end artist lifestyle, seemingly obfuscates the vitality of the people in the story through its form. The ellipses disjoint the narrative, presenting the readers with flashes of information that can be very difficult to piece together. While the lighter in the story undoubtedly meets McKay’s insistence that words ought to be “pictures conveying color and meaning,” the rest of the short story presents challenges to McKay’s aesthetics. “Cordelia the Crude” seems to meet McKay’s idea of aesthetics. I think McKay would appreciate Thurman’s authentic portrayal of a displaced Southern girl in Harlem who eventually becomes part of the seedy underbelly most everyone ignores. The vividness of Thurman’s account also highlights the authenticity McKay emphasizes. McKay eloquently states: “…[H]arlem did not hold quite the same thrill and glamor as before. Where formerly in saloons and cabarets and along the streets I received impressions like arrows piercing my nerves and distilled poetry from them, now I was often pointed out as an author. I lost the rare feeling of a vagabond feeding upon secret music singing in me” (McKay 161). The reflection on McKay’s part illuminates perhaps his own idea of the narrative voice, that vagabond translating the energies of a place in prose, poetry, or whatever medium the artist chooses.
McKay seems willing to suspend formal definitions often constructed by social forces to evaluate something objectively. His opinion of Walter White seems particularly useful for this. He writes that White “is Negroid simply because he closely identifies himself with the Negro group—just as a Teuton becomes a Moslem if he embraces Islam” (McKay 159). Based on this idea of associations McKay introduces, I wonder if any of this is applicable to forming a definition black art. Would McKay consider something patronized exclusively by white audiences still black if it is firmly associated with a white audience? This potential argument throws the career of someone like Archibald Motley Jr. under tight scrutiny because Motley found success largely with white audiences but yet his content was often portraying jazzy street scenes.


Entry two
From Black No More and “South Park”
The excerpt from Schuyler’s work probably ranks among the most favorite works I’ve read thus far from the course. When the original presentation on Schuyler happened, we talked about science fiction and that genre as a means of examining social constructions, the future, and other things. Yet the plot in Schuyler’s work seems like a useful comparison to the “South Park” episode where Kyle Broflovski undergoes a negroplasty to become black.
The brief excerpt from Schuyler’s work demonstrates the social-commercial ramifications of erasing skin color (and the social baggage that accompanies it). The various “race” leaders are exposed as commercial-minded men who built their comfortable life off a corrupt a system. Ultimately, Dr. Beard, Licorice Santop, Walter Williams, and a host of others, are rendered ludicrous because while they have eloquently stated the problem, racism, they have not really thought of the next step, overcoming racism. The excerpt’s focus on the healthy commercial structure thinking about the race problem has created neglects those black people who went through Dr. Crookman’s machine. Here is where the “South Park” episode enters into the picture.
Kyle Broflovski, a Jewish elementary school student, emerges as South Park’s premier basketball player and representative on the state of Colorado’s team. Kyle discovers the other team members are tall, athletic, but the thing he focuses on is that they are also all black. Kyle consults with a plastic surgeon, who then in turn makes Kyle black after darkening his skin, inserting genitalia into his knee caps to make him taller, and doing other things to re-arrange his face. Part of the episode’s point, I feel, is that outward appearances still do not account for social experiences that truly account for an authentic identity. Kyle preserves his curly red hair, a hallmark of his Jewish identity, and still talks the same—suggesting that little socially has changed for Kyle. While Kyle is black, he is still no better at basketball than when he was a small white kid. This idea makes Schuyler’s title, Black No More, particularly striking.
The idea of blackness rendered in the South Park episode suggests a physical and social identity. Yet for whatever reason, the two seem largely unrelated, perhaps because of the brevity of the time Kyle spent as a black kid. Some interesting questions to ask of Schuyler’s full work is how does the changing of skin color finally alter black’s social identity. The implication is that racism is destroyed, so that suggests blacks can appreciate the full opportunities afforded in the United States. So while the blacks in Schuyler’s work are physically black no more, they also appear to be socially “black” no more.