Disturbing Pleasures: Learning Popular Culture. - book reviews

Criticism, Spring, 1997 by Jerry Herron

me, his ability to be self-critical and to change his direction an unfailing

sign of integrity and courage. But these two Malcolms need not be

in ultimate, fatal conflict, need not be fractured by the choice between

seeking an empowering racial identity and linking ourselves to the

truth no matter what it looks like, regardless of color, class, gender,

sex, or age. They are both legitimate quests, and Malcolm's career and

memory are enabling agents for both pursuits. His complexity is our

gift. (17)

As this passage suggests, the book is not only about Dyson's personal "meeting" with Malcolm; it is also about what has, and perhaps more urgently, what could occur if a more general, and historically informed, meeting were to take place, inasmuch as Malcolm's "complexity is our gift."

Like Henry Giroux, Michael Dyson comes from a working-class background. Subsequently, both men have been translated by the academy and its culture into an alternate domain of privilege; the work of each is inscribed knowingly and invaluably by that experience of leaving "home," the one a professor of education occupying an endowed chair, the other a professor of communication studies and Director of the Institute of African-American Research at the University of North Carolina. "To comprehend the full sweep of a figure's life and thought," Dyson writes, "it is necessary to place that figure's career in its cultural and historical context and view the trends and twists of thought that mark significant periods of change and development" (63). This procedure, which Dyson terms "trajectory analysis," is one he submits himself to--tellingly--no less so than his subject, Malcolm X, producing a running commentary on the social construction of subject positions, with respect to class and race and--with special relevance--gender.

The longest section of the book, "X Marks the Plots: A Critical Reading of Malcolm's Readers," offers a concise and valuable overview of the various "Malcolms" that readers have constructed, each plotting a different "trajectory," either more or less informed and self critical, with these trajectories being organized generally according to four headings: ". . . Malcolm as hero and saint, Malcolm as a public moralist, Malcolm as victim and vehicle of psychohistorical forces, and Malcolm as revolutionary figure judged by his career trajectory from nationalist to alleged socialist" (24) What follows this summary discussion are four examinations of Malcolm in relation to specific topics: resurgent nationalism and rap; black film; Spike Lee's appropriation of Malcolm (which Dyson largely approves, proposing that "Never before in American cinema has an alternative black spirituality been so intelligently represented" [139]); and contemporary American politics, especially with regard to the dangerous predicament of young African American males. The book concludes with a hopeful, if brief, meditation on "turning the corner" away from racial divisiveness and crude stereotyping. Of particular relevance and value--both for its insights and also for its method--is the discussion of Malcolm's impact on rap music and hip hop culture Here Dyson treats popular texts not as many commentators do--particularly those espousing politically trendy causes--as cultural souvenirs that attest to the collector's hip authenticity, but as legitimate forms of cultural inquiry, concurrent with his own "For the past decade," he writes, "rap artists--who as informal ethnographers of black youth culture translate the inarticulate suffering of poor black masses into articulate anger--have warned of the genocidal consequences of ghetto life for poor blacks" (163) It is a warning we have ignored at our peril, with the ghettoizing of "popular" culture, which both Dyson and Giroux work against, abetting an ignorance as dangerous as it is familiar.