In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post: Civil Rights Era

Abstract

All students of American culture owe debts of gratitude to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ron ald Reagan for the extended tutorial that each provided on how to ingratiate and insinuate one's public persona into popular culture, becoming a normal (if not always beloved) part of the “nonpolitical” world rather than a clumsy occasional intruder there selling shopworn goods in a market with few alternatives. If Roosevelt and Reagan demonstrated how politicians subtly woo us through their alignment with the values and symbols of popular culture, our understanding of how politics orders culture is less nuanced and well developed. It is the great strength of Richard Iton's rigorous and ambitious new book that it moves us several important steps closer to having a clearer, more unified understanding of how both fierce contention and unacknowledged consensus shape our public universe. In Search of the Black Fantastic is organized around a series of deeply researched case studies that cover fifty years of uneasy relations between the American establishment with nearby “others,” whether they be internal neighbors or neighbors from other points south, such as the Caribbean basin. Iton consistently demonstrates how ideological systems that reward classism, racism, and sexism create a divide more powerful than the opportunity for mutual exchange that might otherwise be presented by geography. In every chapter, Iton skillfully reveals how ideals of revolution and reaction exist together in unexpected ways. Even when he covers familiar ground, as with his look at Paul Robeson and his circle, Iton raises new challenges: his examination of Robeson's qualified return to public grace shortly before his death in 1976 suggests how little was learned from his exclusion. Robeson returned as a civil rights hero whose actual ideas remained out of bounds.