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

IF 1.8 4区 社会学 Q2 WOMENS STUDIES
A. Reed
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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.
色盲情节剧:泰勒·佩里的《有色女孩》和黑人女权主义的吸收
摘要:Ntozake Shange为考虑过自杀的有色人种女孩创作的《当彩虹出现时》(1975年)自20世纪70年代首次上演并出版以来,已经成为一个关于阅读和重新定义种族主义的斗争场所。本文将泰勒·佩里对这部黑人女权主义经典的改编置于新自由主义多元文化的价值循环中。尚格将两个相互竞争的语域——自杀的绝望和彩虹的希望——配对,突显了文本对集体见证的复杂理论,而佩里的《有色人种女孩》(2010)则将彩虹简化为一个空洞的多元文化象征。佩里备受争议的电影改编可以被理解为新自由主义融合和净化黑人女权主义的一部分。这部电影的新叙事弧线似乎对受人尊敬的政治进行了公正的批判,但这样做是为了规范成功的黑人女性,总体上放弃了尚格的愿景。佩里对尚格舞蹈作品的好莱坞化利用了黑人女性的伤害,而不是代理,同时将创伤从使其长期存在的结构性条件中剥离出来。此外,佩里的彩虹从其团结一致的愿景中消除了怪异。这部电影表明了一种更广泛的文化投资,即以不同的身体为中心,同时清空黑人激进的认识论。黑人女权主义的吸收是由“色盲情节剧”或官方反种族主义的美学促成的,该美学提供了规范例外性和引人注目的可支配性的叙事,以重申新自由主义多元文化下对人类生活的不同评价。
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