MidTerm :Failure to Define and Confine “Blackness” in “Separation Anxiety”

Failure to Define and Confine “Blackness” in “Separation Anxiety”

Both Stuart Hall’s “New Ethnicities” and Cornel West’s “”The New Cultural Politics of Difference” address the notion of “blackness” and how the ides and opinions concerning the role and significance of this cultural category have shifted and changed in recent history. The essays by Hall and West claim that previous “cultural workers” had goals of promoting positive images and ideas about “blackness” and black culture, and downplayed any negative aspects or stereotypes. Presently however, the goals of these “cultural workers” have changed, and instead of spending energy on trying to alter and construct a “positive” black cultural category, attention has been shifted to questioning and contesting the very notion of an “essential” culture and spirit of “blackness”. Hall and West argue that this act of categorizing is ineffective and inaccurate because it fails to recognize the complexity and diversity of blacks and black culture.

The short story “Separation Anxiety” by Evie Shockley subtly addresses and engages several of the ideas and arguments Hall and West suggest in their essays. To begin with, the story its self is set in the future on a black “reservation” which the characters fondly refer to as the “Ghetto”. In the “Ghetto,” the goal is to isolate, preserve, and document black culture; consequently, diversity and exposure to other cultures is seen as “contamination”. The strain that this strict emphasis only on “Black” culture and tradition creates is evident in the conversation between Roosevelt and Peaches in which he explains, “ we keep it real for our young people, so that they grow up with their history living all around them.” Peaches responds, “there are times when this emphasis on the past like to drowned me. All these authenticity rules! Gotta have eighty percent historical content in each program. Can’t change not a step in performing some nineteenth or twentieth century dance……. I need to see if black dance got a future.” This perspective is clearly synonymous with Hall’s assertion that “there can be no simple ‘return’ or ‘recovery’ of the ancestral past which is not re-experienced through the categories of the present: no base for creative enunciation in simple reproduction of traditional forms which are not transformed by the technologies and identities of the present.”

On the other hand, “Separation Anxiety” fails to completely dispel the concept of “blackness” and stereotypes concerning blacks and black culture. First of all, Shockley writes without capitalization, proper grammar, and uses slang regularly throughout the story, and in doing so contributes to the stereotypical notion of blacks as uneducated. Secondly, the “Ghetto” is suggested to be economically struggling, importing more goods from outside than it is exporting; and with wages which are not keeping up with the cost of living. This characterizing of the community also contributes to a negative black stereotype about “black” neighborhoods, suggesting unrelenting, inevitable poverty as a racial characteristic of blacks. Finally, many of the various small environmental details within the story are overtly stereotypical, from the church with its gospel music and “praise Jesus” and “amen’s”, to the fried chicken, collards, and cornbread, and not to mention the fact that the occupation of the characters is as dancers!

Upon examining “Separation Anxiety” in light of these overt assertions of “black culture” as a predictable, definable category, it is difficult to assert that the story clearly conveys the suggestions set forth in the essays by Hall and West. Yet, perhaps this combining of generalizing “blackness” with the suggestion that it is not a full, simple definition of blackness, is merely exemplary of the “splitting of ethnicity” which Hall suggests that “we all speak from a particular place, out of particular history, out of a particular history, out of particular experience, a particular culture, without being contained by that position….” .

Ultimately, it is the restrictions and excessive attempts to document, monitor and categorize the “culture” and “history” of blacks in the “Ghetto” that drives Peaches to leave the reservation, even though she loves it and supports the goals of the community. She feels that the “Ghetto” is stagnant and static in its dictation of what “black culture” is defined and promoted as. With all attention and emphasis placed on maintaining the borders and limits of what can be defined as “black,” the project in a sense has failed if blacks feel culturally stifled and want to change and/or leave the black cultural community creation “Ghetto”. This story therefore supports the most significant argument posed by Hall and West that “blackness” is not a static, definable cultural category; indeed, the very notion of essential “blackness” is debased.