I’ve been thinking about Edouard Glissant’s theory about oppressed peoples’ “right to opacity”, black performance as commodity, and how these points are in conversation with Aria Dean’s piece about black social media. Dean writes:
“One of the greatest tasks of blackness as collective being has been to hold itself together in something like cohesion, to exhibit some legible character. This cohesion only becomes necessary, perhaps, as the collective being is made visible to nonblack society. When considered on its own, in what to some are the shadows, this collective being is allowed to expand and contract at will. But when society shines a light on it, what is atomized and multiplicitous hardens into the Black.” (pp. 6-7)
This contradicts the “we are not a monolith” fight, yet makes sense because black people have always been deciding what the “party line” or “official word” is as nonblack society looks at us. So there is a brand of blackness that we may not all relate to individually, but still understand as “black” or under the umbrella of blackness. Twitter has been a primary place for that sort of black performance, with so-called relatable memes showcasing a type of black upbringing that overlaps with being from a working class background. Occasionally an indignant person from another marginalized ethnic or economic group will insert themselves in it, demanding to know what makes the situation or opinion put forth in said meme “black” because they can also relate to it on some level. Forgive the metaphor, but these critics are attempting to tear down the stage by building a bridge.
In Poetics of Relation, Glissant argued that oppressed people — historically cast as the “Other” by the hegemonic power structure — have a “right to opacity”, rather, the right to not make themselves legible to the forces of power who demand legibility from the oppressed. According to Glissant, there is great potential to subvert systems of power in this opacity. Connecting this to black performance for and in front of nonblack audiences, I think about the concept of “playing to the balcony”. The joke works on one level for the outsiders/colonizers/dominant culture, but works on another level for “us”. Yes, the cakewalking slave is funny, as is the acerbic black comedian commenting on cultural differences. But even if we’re both laughing, are we laughing for the same reasons? Dave Chappelle famously walked away from his Comedy Central show presumably asking himself the same question. Speaking of memes, Dean echoes a similar hope for articulation or revolution when she says that “perhaps we can render ourselves opaque, through our own serial, iterative excess,” (19). What can be hidden in plain sight on Black Twitter as black people are continually expected to be of service via creative production?
Politics of Media 