Book Design: Identity

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THE MADE QUESTION YOU OF LOOK IDENTITY


TABLE OF CONTENTS

1 WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? BY WESLEY MORRIS

NYTIMES MAGAZINE, OCT. 6, 2015

2 “GOING FLAT” AFTER BREAST CANCER

BY RONI CARYN RABIN

NYTIMES WELL, OCT. 31, 2016

3 EKOW ESHUN ON THE BLACK DANDY BY FELIX PEDDY

I-D.VICE.COM, JUL. 14, 2016


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WHO DO YOU

THINK YOU ARE BY WESLEY MORRIS


“WE’RE A VERTICAL NATION”

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A few weeks ago, I sat in a movie theater and grinned. Anne Hathaway was in ‘‘The Intern,’’ perched on a hotel bed in a hotel robe, eating from a can of overpriced nuts, having tea and freaking out. What would happen if she divorced her sweet, selfless stay-at-home dad of a husband? Would she ever meet anybody else? And if she didn’t, she would have no one to be buried next to — she’d be single for all eternity. And weren’t the problems in her marriage a direct result of her being a successful businesswoman — she was there but never quite present? ‘‘The Intern’’ is a Nancy Meyers movie, and these sorts of cute career-woman meltdowns are the Eddie Van Halen guitar solos of her romantic comedies. But what’s funny about that scene — what had me grinning — is the response of the person across the bed from Hathaway. After listening to her tearful rant, this person has had enough: Don’t you dare blame yourself or your career! Actually, the interruption begins, ‘‘I hate to be the feminist, of the two of us. … ’’ Hate to be because the person on the other side of the bed isn’t Judy Greer or Brie Larson. It’s not Meryl Streep or Susan Sarandon. It’s someone not far from the last person who comes to mind when you think ‘‘soul-baring bestie.’’ It’s Robert freaking De Niro, portrayer of psychos, savages and grouches no more.

MOVING HORIZONTALLY”

On that bed with Hathaway, as her 70-year-old intern, he’s not Travis Bickle or the human wall of intolerance from those Focker movies. He’s Lena Dunham. The attentiveness and stern feminism coming out of his mouth are where the comedy is. And while it’s perfectly obvious what Meyers is doing to De Niro — girlfriending him — that doesn’t make the overhaul any less effective. The whole movie is about the subtle and obvious ways in which men have been overly sensitized and women made self-estranged through breadwinning. It’s both a plaint against the present and a pining for the past, but also an acceptance that we are where we are. And where are we? On one hand: in another of Nancy Meyers’s bourgeois pornographies. On the other: in the midst of a great cultural identity migration. Gender roles are merging. Races are being shed. In the last six years or so, but especially in 2015, we’ve been made to see how trans and bi and poly-ambi-omni- we are. If Meyers is clued into this confusion, then you know it really has gone far, wide

and middlebrow. We can see it in the instantly beloved hit ‘‘Transparent,’’ about a family whose patriarch becomes a trans woman whose kids call her Moppa, or in the time we’ve spent this year in televised proximity to Caitlyn Jenner, or in the browning of America’s white founding fathers in the Broadway musical ‘‘Hamilton,’’ or in the proliferating clones that Tatiana Maslany plays on ‘‘Orphan Black,’’ which mock the idea of a true or even original self, or in Amy Schumer’s comedic feminism, which reconsiders gender confusion: Do uncouthness, detachment and promiscuity make her a slut, or a man? We can see it in the recently departed half-hour sketch comedy ‘‘Key & Peele,’’ which took race as a construct that could be reshuffled and remixed until it seemed to lose its meaning. The sitcom ‘‘Black-ish’’ likewise makes weekly farcical discourse out of how much black identity has warped — and how much it hasn’t — over 50 years and across three generations. ‘‘Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’’ turns selfhood into a circus, introducing us to a lower-middle-class Native American teenager who eventually succeeds at becoming a rich white lady, and to other characters who try out new selves every 10 minutes, as if they’re auditioning for ‘‘Snapchat: The Musical.’’ Last month, Ryan Adams released a remake of Taylor Swift’s album ‘‘1989,’’ song for song, as a rock record that combines a male voice with a perspective that still sounds like a woman’s, like Lindsey Buckingham trying on Stevie Nicks’s clothes. Dancing on the fringes of mainstream pop are androgynous black men like Le1f, Stromae and Shamir. What started this flux? For more than a decade, we’ve lived with personal technologies — video games and social-media platforms — that have helped us create alternate or auxiliary personae. We’ve also spent a dozen years in the daily grip of makeover shows, in which a team of experts transforms your personal style, your home, your body, your spouse. There are TV competitions for the best fashion design, body painting, drag queen. Some forms of cosmetic alteration have become perfectly normal, and there are shows for that, too. Our reinventions feel gleeful and liberating — and tied to an essentially American optimism. After centuries of women living alongside men, and of the races living adjacent to one another, even if only notionally, our rigidly enforced gender and racial lines are finally breaking down. There’s a sense of


fluidity and permissiveness and a smashing of binaries. We’re all becoming one another. Well, we are. And we’re not. In June, the story of a woman named Rachel Dolezal began its viral spread through the news. She had recently been appointed president of the local chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. in Spokane, Wash. She had been married to a black man, had two black sons and was, by most accounts, a black woman. Her white biological parents begged to differ. The ensuing scandal resurrected questions about the nature of identity — what compelled Dolezal to darken her skin, perm her hair and pass in reverse? She might not have been biologically black, but she seemed well past feeling spiritually white. Some people called her ‘‘transracial.’’ Others found insult in her masquerade, particularly when the country’s attention was being drawn, day after day, to how dangerous it can be to have black skin. The identities of the black men and women killed by white police officers and civilians, under an assortment of violent circumstances, remain fixed. But there was something oddly compelling about Dolezal, too. She represented — dementedly but also earnestly — a longing to transcend our historical past and racialized present. This is a country founded on independence and yet comfortable with racial domination, a country that has forever been trying to legislate the lines between whiteness and nonwhiteness, between borrowing and genocidal theft. We’ve wanted to think we’re better than a history we can’t seem to stop repeating. Dolezal’s unwavering certainty that she was black was a measure of how seriously she believed in integration: It was as if she had arrived in a future that hadn’t yet caught up to her. It wasn’t so long ago that many Americans felt they were living in that future. Barack Obama’s election was the dynamite that broke open the country. It was a moment. It was the moment. Obama was biological proof of some kind of progress — the product of an interracial relationship, the kind that was outlawed in some states as recently as 1967 but was normalized. He seemed to absolve us of original sin and take us past this stupid, dangerous race stuff. What if suddenly anything was possible? What if we could be and do whatever and whoever we wanted? In that moment, the country was changing. We were changing.

the dream melts away and we’re back with the guy being arrested, passed out on the ground

# matter

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IDENTITY FREAKOUTS OF 2015 Before Obama ran for president, when we tended to talk about racial identity, we did so as the defense of a settlement. Black was understood to be black, nontransferably. Negro intellectuals — Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray and James Baldwin, for starters — debated strategies for equality and tolerance. Some of them asserted that to be black was also to be American, even if America begged to differ. For most of those many decades, blackness stood in opposition to whiteness, which folded its arms and said that was black people’s problem. But Obama became everybody’s problem. He was black. He was white. He was hope. He was apocalypse. And he brought a lot of anxiety into weird relief. We had never really had a white president until we had a black one. This radical hope, triggered by Obama, ushered in a period of bi- and transracial art — art that probed the possibility that we really had transcended race, but also ridiculed this hope with an acid humor. During Obama’s past year in office, those works of art have taken on an even darker, more troubled tone as we keep looking around and seeing how little has really changed. When the Dolezal story broke, I was partway through Nell Zink’s ‘‘Mislaid,’’ one of the four new satirical novels of race I read this year — Jess Row’s ‘‘Your Face in Mine,’’ Paul Beatty’s ‘‘The Sellout’’ and Mat Johnson’s ‘‘Loving Day’’ were the others. (I also read Fran Ross’s long-lost, recently reissued ‘‘Oreo.’’) But Zink’s was the only one that felt like an energy reading of Dolezal. Zink’s white heroine, Peggy, has run off with her daughter, Mireille, and decided to take the birth certificate of a dead black girl named Karen Brown and use it for Mireille, while changing her own name to Meg. The next year, Karen was 4 years old going on 5 and still blond. Nonetheless registering her for first grade as a black 6-year-old was easy as pie. Maybe you have to be from the South to get your head around blond black people. Virginia was settled before slavery began, and it was diverse. There were tawny black people with hazel eyes. Black people with auburn hair, skin like butter and eyes of deep blue-green. Blond, blue-eyed black people resembling a recent chairman of the N.A.A.C.P. Zink’s marveling description of what blackness looks like

implies that it could welcome anyone. She draws a phenotypic loophole through which a sympathetic impostor or a straight-up cynic can pass. Each of these books wrestles with the fact of race while trying to present it as mutable, constructed, obscuring. In Beatty’s novel, a young black farmer in modern Los Angeles reluctantly takes on a vulgar former TV minstrel star as his slave. Blackness, according to this book, is as much a scam as it is a cultural identity; the undercurrents of tragedy keep lapping at the harbor of farce. Row’s novel is also a satire, but an eerily calm one in which a white man has ‘‘racial reassignment’’ surgery and becomes black. Row, who like Zink is white, takes guilt to an astounding allegorical extreme: The surest cure for white oppression is to eliminate whiteness. Whatever else is going on with Dolezal psychologically, you can read into her proud reassignment a sense of shame. But racial transgression works the other way too. ‘‘Hamilton’’ is a musical biography about the very white, very dead Alexander Hamilton, in which most of the cast is ‘‘other,’’ including Lin-Manuel Miranda, the show’s Nuyorican creator and star. Some of its audacity stems from the baldness of its political project: In changing the races of the founding fathers from white to brown, it pushes back against the currents of racial appropriation. It also infuses the traditional melodies of the American musical with so many genres of hip-hop and R & B, sometimes in a single number, that the songs themselves become something new. Political debates are staged as rap battles. Daveed Diggs’s Thomas Jefferson becomes the best good thing that never happened at the Source Awards. Artistically, Miranda has created a great night out. Racially, the show tags the entertainment industry status quo with color. It’s obviously musical theater. But damn if it’s not graffiti too. Naturally, this new era has also agitated a segment of the populace that is determined to scrub the walls. That, presumably, is where Donald Trump comes in: as the presidential candidate for anyone freaked out by the idea of a show like ‘‘Hamilton.’’ Trump is the pathogenic version of Obama, filling his supporters with hope based on a promise to rid the country of change. This incarnation of Trump appeared not long after Obama’s election, determined to disprove the new president’s American citizenship. On Trump’s behalf, an entire wing of conservatism — the so-called birthers — devoted itself to the


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THERE’S A SENSE OF

FLUIDITY

AND PERMISSIVENESS AND A

SMASHING

OF BINARIES.


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removal of a mask that Obama was never wearing. Part of Trump’s appeal is his illusion of authenticity. His blustering candor has currency in a landscape of android candidates. Yet his magnetism resides in paranoia, the fear that since Obama’s election ushered in this shifting, unstable climate of identity, the country has been falling apart. It’s a paranoia that pop culture captured first: In the last six years, Hollywood has provided a glut of disaster spectacles, armageddon scenarios and White House sackings. But the USA Network’s ‘‘Mr. Robot,’’ which ended its first season last month, might have gotten at that sense of social collapse best. Created by Sam Esmail, an Egyptian-American, the show pits technology against the economy and its unstable protagonist against himself. The plot concerns a group of anarchist hackers conspiring to topple a corporation; with it go the stability of world markets and everybody’s financial debt. But it’s also a mystery about the identity of its protagonist, a mentally ill, morphine-addicted hacker named Elliot. We think he’s obeying the commands of the show’s title character, the head of a hacktivist outfit, but it turns out that he has been commanding himself all along. Significant parts of this world are figments of his delusion. Elliot is at least two people. Some of the dark excitement of this show is that he might be even more. ‘‘Mr. Robot’’ is worst-of-times TV, reflecting a mood of menacing instability. Over the course of its 10 episodes, almost no one was who they appeared to be. A straight married man seemed to think nothing of his sleeping with a gay work underling (and neither did his wife). A character who seemed, to my eyes at least, to be a transgender woman at some point appeared as a conventional man. Was that a coming out? A going in? Both? This isn’t a show I watched for what was going to happen but for who people were going to turn into, or who they wanted to turn out to be. It’s a show about the way your online profile can diverge from your real-life identity, yes, but also the way you can choose a self or a self can choose you. There’s also the choice to ignore the matter of identity — until, of course, it starts to aggravate your complacency. Not far into the flap over Dolezal, another alarming story took over the news, a story that challenged the myths white America tells itself about progress. This story was about Atticus Finch, the protagonist of Harper Lee’s 1960 classic,

...UNDERCURRENTS OF TRAGEDY


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‘‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’’ Atticus single-handedly fought racism in the fictitious Alabama town of Maycomb, and he became a window through which we could see a version of tolerance, someone holy enough to put on stained glass or money. But in ‘‘Go Set a Watchman,’’ the sequel to ‘‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’’ published in July, Atticus was given a scandalous status update: He had been aged into a racist. I can’t recall the last time the attitudes of a single fictional character led the national news. But there was bigoted old Atticus, on the front pages, being discussed on cable. One of the most iconic white antiracists had grown fond of white supremacy. It raised an uncomfortable question: If you had identified with the original Atticus Finch, did his Archie Bunkerization make a racist out of you too? The public hand-wringing was a perverse refreshment because, even if only for a few days, it left white people dwelling on race as intensely as nonwhite people. This new Atticus was a betrayal of white liberal idealism, feeding a suspicion that that idealism was less than absolute — that it could suddenly, randomly turn against the people it purported to help. Gender roles are merging. Races are being shed. In the last six years or so, but especially in 2015, we’ve been made to see how trans and bi and poly-ambi-omni- we are. It was almost as if Lee knew, in 1957, about the mood of the country in 2015 — about the way a series of dead black men and women would further cleave apart the country; about the massacre of nine black churchgoers by a young white supremacist in a South Carolina church, and the ensuing debate over the Confederate flag; about the fear of inevitable, inexorable racial, gender and sexual evolution; about the perceived threats to straight-white-male primacy by Latino immigrants, proliferating Spanish, same-sex marriage, female bosses and a black president. The yearning to transcend race keeps coming up againsts the bedrock cultural matter of separateness. But the tectonic plates of the culture keep pushing against one another with greater, earthquaking force. The best show in our era about that quake — about the instability of identity and the choosing of a self — has been ‘‘Key & Peele.’’ For five seasons, in scores of sketches, two biracial men, Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, became different women and different

men of different ethnicities, personalities and body types. They were two of the best actors on television, hailing from somewhere between the lawlessness of improv comedy and the high-impact emotionalism of Anna Deavere Smith’s one-woman, zillion-character plays. ‘‘Key & Peele’’ granted nearly every caricature a soul. The show started as a commentary on the hilarious absurdity of race, but it never fully escaped the pernicious reality of racism. The longer it ran, the more melancholy it became, the more it seethed. In the final episode, its anger caught up with its fancifulness and cheek, exploding in an old-timey musical number called ‘‘Negrotown,’’ which opens with a black man (Key) being arrested by a white cop one night while walking down a dark alleyway. He says he’s innocent of any wrongdoing and asks why he’s being arrested, intensifying the cop’s anger. Entering the police cruiser, he hits his head on the car door. Suddenly, a homeless man (Peele) arrives on the scene and offers to take the black guy off the cop’s hands. The cop gratefully acquiesces.

gender roles are merging races are being shed Taking the disoriented man by the hand, the homeless guy leads him through an alley door. They find themselves on the threshold of a sunny neighborhood. The homeless guy is now dressed in a three-piece suit the color of pink grapefruit meat, and he begins to sing in a camped-up, zero-calorie Paul Robeson baritone about this new place, ‘‘where there ain’t no pain, ain’t no sorrow.’’ Black people in bright clothes are dancing in the streets, singing in giddy verse about the special virtues of their town: You can get a cab to pick you up, have a loan application approved, even wear a hoodie without getting shot.

“I HATE TO BE THE FEMINIST”


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HE WAS APOCALYPSE


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Plus: ‘‘There’s no stupid-ass white folks touching your hair or stealing your culture, claiming it’s theirs.’’

O I D E N T I T I E S : MI

NE A

ND

OT

HE

R

S’

SO

IL

IV E

H TW T I W

But it’s clear from the start that the ‘‘neighborhood’’ is a studio backlot, and the dancers are costumed in the colors of Skittles, and their dancing involves a lot of grinning and spinning and stretching out their arms — shuffling. Black freedom looks like a white 1940s Hollywood director’s idea of it. At the end of the number, the dancers stand frozen with their arms raised in a black-power salute, as if waiting for someone to yell ‘‘cut.’’ No one does.

PE

RC EEP

The dream melts away, and we’re back with the guy being arrested, passed out on the ground. The cop starts shoving him into the cruiser. ‘‘I thought I was going to Negrotown,’’ he says.

TION

‘‘Oh, you are,’’ the cop replies, as the piano riff from the song starts to play and the car drives off.

S OF I

T”

The show left us with a dream of Edenic self-containment as the key to black contentment — a stunning contradiction of all its previous sketches. It was a rebuke to both racial integration and ghettoization. It split me open. I cried with laughter at the joke of this obviously fake place as a kind of heaven. I cried with sadness, because if you’re in Negrotown, you’re also in a special ring of hell. The bitterness of the sketch made me wonder if being black in America is the one identity that won’t ever mutate. I’m someone who believes himself to have complete individual autonomy, someone who feels free. But I also know some of that autonomy is limited, illusory, conditional. I live knowing that whatever my blackness means to me can be at odds with what it means to certain white observers, at any moment. So I live with two identities: mine and others’ perceptions of it. So much of blackness evolving has been limited to whiteness allowing it to evolve, without white people accepting that they are in the position of granting permission. Allowing. If that symbiotic dynamic is going to change, white people will need to become more conscious that they, too, can be perceived. It could be that living with recycled conflict is part of the national DNA. Yet it’s also in our natures to keep trying to

change, to discover ourselves. In ‘‘Far From the Tree,’’ Andrew Solomon’s landmark 2012 book about parenting and how children differentiate themselves, he makes a distinction between vertical and horizontal identity. The former is defined by traits you share with your parents, through genes and norms; the latter is defined by traits and values you don’t share with them, sometimes because of genetic mutation, sometimes through the choice of a different social world. The emotional tension in the book’s scores of stories arises from the absence of love for or empathy toward someone with a pronounced or extreme horizontal identity — homosexuality or autism or severe disability. Solomon is writing about the struggle to overcome intolerance and estrangement, and to better understand disgust; about our comfort with fixed, established identity and our distress over its unfixed or unstable counterpart. His insights about families apply to us as a country. We’re a vertical nation moving horizontally. We’re daring to erase the segregating boundaries, to obliterate oppressive institutions, to get over ourselves. Nancy Meyers knows it. Sam Esmail knows it. So, in his way, does Donald Trump. The transition should make us stronger — if it doesn’t kill us first. Wesley Morris is the new critic at large for The New York Times and a contributing writer for the magazine.


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GOING


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FLAT


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Before Debbie Bowers had surgery for breast cancer, her doctor promised that insurance would pay for reconstruction, and said she could “even go up a cup size.” But Ms. Bowers did not want a silicone implant or bigger breasts. “Having something foreign in my body after a cancer diagnosis is the last thing I wanted,” said Ms. Bowers, 45, of Bethlehem, Pa. “I just wanted to heal.” While plastic surgeons and oncologists aggressively promote breast reconstruction as a way for women to “feel whole again,” some doctors say they are beginning to see resistance to the surgery. Patients like Ms. Bowers are choosing to defy medical advice and social convention and remain breastless after breast cancer. They even have a name for the

Excerpt from The New York Times article, “Going Flat” After Breast Cancer By Robin Caryn Rabin

Before Debbie Bowers had surgery for breast cancer, her doctor promised that insurance would pay for reconstruction, and said she could “even go up a cup size.” But Ms. Bowers did not want a silicone implant or bigger breasts. “Having something foreign in my body after a cancer diagnosis is the last thing I wanted,” said Ms. Bowers, 45, of Bethlehem, Pa. “I just wanted to heal.” While plastic surgeons and oncologists aggressively promote breast reconstruction as a way for women to “feel whole again,” some doctors say they are beginning to see resistance to the surgery. Patients like Ms. Bowers are choosing to defy medical advice and social convention and remain breastless after breast cancer. They even have a name for the decision to skip reconstruction: They call it “going flat.” “Reconstruction is not a simple process,” said Dr. Deanna J. Attai, a breast surgeon in Burbank, Calif., and a past president of the American Society of Breast Surgeons, adding that more of her patients, especially those with smaller breasts before diagnosis, were opting out of reconstruction. “Some women just feel like it’s too much: It’s too involved, there are too many steps, it’s too long a process.”

Social media has allowed these women to become more open about their decision to live without breasts, as well as the challenges, both physical and emotional, that have followed. For a recent video created by wisdo.com, a social media platform, and widely shared on Facebook, Ms. Bowers and her friend Marianne DuQuette Cuozzo, 51, removed their shirts to show their scarred, flat chests. And Paulette Leaphart, 50, a New Orleans woman whose clotting disorder prevented her from having reconstruction after a double mastectomy, walked topless from Biloxi, Miss., to Washington this summer to raise awareness about the financial struggles of cancer patients. “Breasts aren’t what make us a woman,” Ms. Leaphart said. The nascent movement to “go flat” after mastectomies challenges long-held assumptions about femininity and what it means to recover after breast cancer. For years, medical professionals have embraced the idea that breast restoration is an integral part of cancer treatment. Women’s health advocates fought for and won approval of the Women’s Health and Cancer Rights Act of 1998, which requires health plans to cover prosthetics and reconstructive procedures.


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“BREASTS AREN’T WHAT MAKE US A WOMAN” Rebecca Pine, 40 decided against reconstruction surgery after a mascetomy


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EKON ESHUN ON THE

black dandy The writer and broadcaster discusses his new exhibition, a photographic archive that traces black masculinity across the ages and across the world to uncover the politics of dressing up.


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There’s a politics to dressing up as a man, a dance around flamboyance and acceptability, around notions of gender; it’s a politics that’s heightened when seen in relation to black masculinity. Black masculinity is often figured through stereotypes of realness and authenticity, or through opposing reductive visions of decency and criminality. These worlds, issues and themes are what writer and broadcaster Ekow Eshun explores in his new exhibition, Made You Look: Dandyism and Black Masculinity, that traces the similarities in the diasphoric black male experience across the globe, across a hundred years of photographic documentation of it. It finds its traces in the streets and the studio, in street style images and the performance of the studio, it explores the hybrid spaces, places of heightened realities, and in these arenas it finds a kind of freedom of self-expression as oppositional to the racism and rigidity of society. I wanted started by talking about your initial inspiration to bring these works together for this exhibition? 
To be honest it’s very much to do with being a black person, living in the country of Black-Britain, and coming to see how black men carry themselves. For me, the way they walk, they dress, these aren’t random things, there’s a politics to them because these are questions of identity. These men are striving to represent the versions of themselves that makes sense to themselves. I was interested in the fact that you can look at images of black men taken in London or Jamaica or Bamako or in New York, and there’s a similarity in the poise.

The exhibition spans the globe, but also time, as it takes in about 100 years of photography. You’ve said you looked for things that revealed similarities, but what about difference? What unexpected things did you find? It’s an interesting question, because essentially the thing the show is dealing with is this diasporic black identity; the identity of a people who’ve been scattered across the world. So yes, some things stayed the same, this assertion of elegance and grace. The shorthand for all this of course is dandyism, a styled out representation of man, but it’s a question as well, a question of what being a man means. The Dandy is often seen as being quite effeminate, to be dressing up, taking care of your appearance, being interested in fashion, but there’s something oppositional in it as well, a reaction to how society might chose to view you. That’s what is so striking about these pictures, that they combine these two different ideas. Exactly that. The concept of Dandyism suggests something that is quite dramatically superficial, a man who is unduly concerned with style and dress. But when you place this idea in relation to the black man you introduce a definite politics to dressing up. It’s a politics of social opposition that states that states that we want to be seen on our terms, but also a politics of gender that deliberately blurs accepted conventional notions of masculinity, taste, and acceptable style. It’s about shaking things up, fucking things up.

“how black men embrace uniqueness, embrace otherness, embrace difference”


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made How would you describe the relationship between the world of exhibition and the fashion industry, and the way these threads of influence move between the street and the catwalk. The show in a way has two main arenas that it takes place in, the street and the studio. The fashion world has always had this ability to appropriate everyday style, and play it back for people to see in a different way. The relationship between this and black culture has always been a fraught thing, which can be seen as either exploitative or collusive.

you

I’m slightly generous, I don’t think black culture or black identity is being totally ripped off by fashion, it’s not as straight forward as that. The thing I find more interesting is the process of invention, when you can walk down the streets of Kingston or London and find black men constantly reinventing ways to look, carry themselves, style themselves… now some of these things, might, at some point, end up on a catwalk or in a magazine, but fashion moves slower than the street, and there’s not a finite supply of style to goes round. By the time fashion has often started taking notice of something, the streets will have moved on.

look


black

The street and studio are the two sites of the exhibition, but you can also describe it as documentary and fiction, but it’s interesting where they overlap and you can’t quite tell one from the other.

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There’s actually a third space, between the street and the studio, which is a blurred space, a perfomative space, there’s works in the show that speak to that though. For example, in the work of Samuel Fosso, he’s a genius, really, a very enigmatic photographer. He started taking photos in the 70s, and he had a very conventional studio. But at night, when there were no customers, he’d take self-portraits, and these self portraits are fantastic parodies of the people of the day. He dresses up, takes on different guises, performs ideas of what a black man can look like. Its a heightened version of reality, he shifts his identity, from looking like he’s going to a disco, to looking like a business man. It’s about how there isn’t a real, singular image or way of being a black man. Black culture is often defined in terms of realness, of authenticity, that there’s only one way of expressing or exploring what black identity can be, but when you get into that heightened realm, anything can be possible.

“there isn’t one singular image or way of being a black man”

What do you hope people will take away from the exhibition? I think people are welcome to take away anything they want. But from my point-of-view, I live all the time with an idea of the value of complexity. We’re in a very dark time in Britain at the moment, post Brexit it feels nightmarish. The Brexit model of Britain is a place where there’s only one way to be British, and everything else is suspect, and foreign. I’ve lived all my life with the opposite feeling, which is that the identity you carry within yourself in a hybrid one, that the identity of a nation and its culture is a hybrid one as well, difference should be an hour. The nature of the show, hopefully, is about how black men embrace uniqueness, embrace otherness, embrace difference. These things deserve to be at the heart of who we are.

masculinity


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Image credits THE YEAR WE OBSSESSED OVER IDENITY Page 1-2: Toro, Joana. Life in the Heart of New York’s L.G.B.T. Latino Community. NYTimes.com.

Page 3: Wagner, Andre D. Photographing New York’s Streets, Where ‘Everything Feels New’.NYTimes.com. Page 9: Lehrman, Jessica. Revolution. Jessica Lehrman Photography. Page 10: Kennedy, Chuck. Michelle Obama Meets With Melania Trump at White House. Nbcnews.com. Page 12-13:Toro, Joana. Life in the Heart of New York’s L.G.B.T. Latino Community. NYTimes.com. Page 14-15: Florida Shooting: Live Updates. NYTimes.com. Page 17: Images via VFILES. This Is the Story Behind Young Thug’s ‘Jeffery’ Dress. Complex.com Page 18-19: Lehrman, Jessica. Revolution. Jessica Lehrman Photography. Page 20: Wagner, Andre D. Bushwick Brooklyn, 2014. Abstractelements.com

“GOING FLAT” AFTER BREAST CANCER

Page 23: Velum: Bird, Cass. The Best Lingerie Comes in All Sizes. Vogue.com. Base Image: de Géa, Béatrice. ‘Going Flat’ After Breast Cancer. NYTimes.com. Page 24: Jay, David. The Scar Project. TheScarProject.org. Page 27: de Géa, Béatrice. ‘Going Flat’ After Breast Cancer. NYTimes.com.

EKOW ESHUN ON THE BLACK DANDY

Page 29: Henson-Scales, Jeffrey. Young Man In Plaid, NYC, 1991.

Page 31: Chennelle, Kia. “The Waiting Man I.” 2013. Black Dandies, Style Rebels with a Cause. NYTimes.com Page 32: Sidibé, Malick. On the motorbike in my studio, 1973. Courtesy CAAC – The Pigozzi Collection, Geneva. Page 35: McDean, Craig. Unlocking the Mystery of Benjamin Clementine. NYTimes.com.


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colophon Typography II Fall 2016 Editorial Type Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts Dana Berger Typefaces: Anton, Gibson, Fugaz One, Shirkhand, Trade Gothic LT Std


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