Yet according to Madonna, there’s no difference between being black or white.
The same sleight of hand credits Dietrich with many of Baker’s innovations, remembers Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers as the world’s greatest dancers, and allows Madonna to further validate whitewashed fantasies as she excludes black performers from her fantasy version of Vogue. Fred Astaire is a household name. We are far less familiar with Astaire’s heroes the Nicholas Brothers. The actor and dancer Gregory Hines said it would be impossible to cast a movie about their lives, as no two dancers exist who could come even close to reproducing their movements. Yet, despite their celebrity in the 1930s and ’40s, the Nicholas Brothers are largely forgotten today. They “did not make the transition on screen from dancers to romantic leads, as Fred Astaire had done the previous decade. Their skin colour was an obvious barrier, although Astaire himself would think nothing of blacking up his face to perform the ‘Mr Bojangles’ number in Swing Time.”12 Likewise, the late and revered (black) tap dancer Charles “Honi” Coles, arguably a far superior dancer to Astaire, remains unknown to most.
Astaire is certainly worth further consideration when discussing the important distinction between appropriation and borrowing, the latter undoubtedly being the basis of evolving culture. The writer Itabari Njeri states that in one sense, like the nation, Astaire could, culturally, be called African American. Sally Sommer says that she prefers to think of what Astaire does as imitation rather than appropriation. “It’s not venal, as with the record industry,” where there’s a long history of appropriation. Elvis Presley was a blatant example of that: “a white man who was promoted because he could copy the black style the nation’s youth hungered for without the social inconvenience of black skin.”13 But it can be a dangerous distinction, at the very least requiring the type of nuance rarely found in the online spaces where these conversations often play out, because deniers of appropriation love to talk about “borrowing.”
Many of them don’t even “see race,” and to such progressive visionaries there is of course nothing sinister at play. To claim otherwise is a facile argument made by those silly blacks who do not understand cultural exchange and want to childishly hoard something they mistakenly believe to be their own.
Njeri expands upon the definition of the black creativity that is at the center of most of American and, by extension, global culture: “Tap dancing is what people think of when they consider the African-American influence on Astaire.” They forget that black culture greatly influenced ballroom dancing.14 As with techno, house, and rock music, black people have created or transformed many genres that don’t fit narrow descriptions of what is allowed to be black.
“Ballroom dancing became a fad in the United States around World War I. And all those trots: fox, turkey, etc., were African American dance forms introduced to Vernon and Irene Castle by black bandleader James Reese Europe. The Castles ‘refined’ these dances and used them to launch an African-based dance craze early in the century that hasn’t let up yet.”15 I remember trying to convince a nice young middle-class white man I was working with that the 1950s swing class his girlfriend attended was a style of dance developed in the black American inner cities, and he just could not get his head around it. It simply did not compute.
It is under the weight of all of this that I recently became incensed by what might seem to some as nothing more than an innocent fashion shoot. It was a beauty feature shot in Dublin. The models’ hair had been done in facsimiles of black styles from canerows to immaculately gelled babyhair, all captioned with hashtags such as “tribal doll realness.” Immediately recognizable styles had been given invented names (of course), as though this was just a lil suttin’ those creative geniuses on the shoot had quickly thrown together rather than the product of many years of black hairstyling culture, often in the face of violent oppression.
When I was growing up, the African aesthetics of babyhair—the neatness, precision, and attention to detail—were a million miles from the tousled wisps that white girls carelessly flicked back and forth across their faces. Never mind the impossibility of finding edge-control products; the inherent blackness of the aesthetic meant that it was certainly one to be avoided at all costs. This is the context that creates the tension I feel when I see these hairstyles being celebrated on white women.
Yet the irony is that this type of policing or possessive ownership of cultural production is far, far from the logic according to which most African cultures operate.
AFROPOLITAN MODERNITY AND CULTURAL EXCHANGE
In a 2007 essay on Afropolitanism, the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe suggested that the enduring insights of Afropolitanism (a term that emerges from the words “Africa” and “cosmopolitanism”) should be its promise of “vacating the seduction of pernicious racialized thinking,”16 its recognition of African identities as fluid, and the notion that the African past is characterized by “mixing, blending and superimposing.” In opposition to custom, Mbembe insists that the idea of “tradition” never really existed and reminds us there is a precolonial African modernity that has not been taken into account in contemporary creativity.17 Boom!
African cultures tend to be syncretic. While all cultures blend, borrow, and adapt, generally it is those of the European tradition—British culture is a key example—that are overly concerned with strict categorization and the illusion of maintaining a sense of cultural purity. Indeed, we see this attitude across the entire globe now, the result of nationalism and rigid binary identity that did not exist in the precolonial African context.
In contrast to the myth of a fixed, unchanging traditional Africa, most African cultures were far more fluid and dynamic than their European counterparts. Let’s take something mistakenly understood as a fixed and foundational concept: ethnic identity. Before the 1884 Scramble for Africa and the following European annexation of the continent, ethnic identity would have been constructed in a very different way from what we imagine today. In “The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa,” Terence Ranger states that, “far from there being a single ‘tribal’ identity, most Africans moved in and out of multiple identities, defining themselves at one moment as subject to this chief, at another moment as a member of that cult, at another moment as part of this clan, and at yet another moment as an initiate in that professional guild.”18
As a result of this, belonging is understood less as “a matter of restrictive labeling, and more of choosing between various semantic classifications dependent on the particular contexts and identities involved.”19 These shifting and contingent relations certainly did not foster the type of environment that leads to a jealous policing of cultural production.
The spiritual traditions of African origin that are diffused throughout the Americas and are currently enjoying a popular resurgence were in many instances banned and often had to be practiced furtively. Religions such as Candomblé in Brazil and Santeria in Cuba celebrated Yoruba orisha under the guise of worshipping Roman Catholic saints. These saints acted as a sort of cover for the African gods. African cultures were remarkably adept at fusing what they brought with them with whatever they were forced to encounter, and from that combination creating something entirely new. Look at the different forms of cultural production that develop wherever there is a significant population of African descent. The African-Caribbean population in the UK has been particularly innovative. Consider the musical forms that have emerged here: jungle, hardcore, garage, grime. These styles could only have been created through the unique cultural fusion that is Britain, molded and shaped by its resident black populations.