Colorblind Melodrama: Tyler Perry's For Colored Girls and the Absorption of Black Feminism

Abstract

Abstract:Ntozake Shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf (1975) has become a site of struggle over the reading and redefinition of racism since its original performance and publication in the 1970s. This article situates Tyler Perry's adaptation of this Black feminist classic within neoliberal multiculturalism's circuits of value. While Shange's pairing of two competing registers—the hopelessness of suicide and hopefulness of the rainbow—underlines the text's complex theorization of collective witnessing, Perry's For Colored Girls (2010) reduces the rainbow to an empty multicultural symbol. Perry's controversial cinematic adaptation can be understood as part of the neoliberal incorporation and sanitization of Black feminism. The film's new narrative arc seemingly offers a righteous critique of the politics of respectability, but does so in order to discipline normatively successful Black women, and overall largely abandons Shange's vision. Turning up the original's drama and watering down its social impact, Perry's Hollywoodization of Shange's choreopoem capitalizes on the injury, not agency, of Black women, while decontextualizing traumas from the structural conditions that perpetuate them. Moreover, Perry's rainbow expels queerness from its vision of solidarity and cohesiveness. The film indicates a broader cultural investment in centering diverse bodies while emptying out the Black radical epistemologies such representations make possible. The absorption of Black feminism is enabled by "colorblind melodrama," or the aesthetics of an official antiracism that offers up narratives of normative exceptionality and spectacularized disposability in order to reaffirm the differential valuation of human life under neoliberal multiculturalism.