Fatty Boom Boom and the Transnationality of Blackface in Die Antwoord’S Racial Project Bryan Schmidt
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Fatty Boom Boom and the Transnationality of Blackface in Die Antwoord’s Racial Project Bryan Schmidt Problematizing Blackface Criticism An international spat erupted in late 2012 between celebrities located half a world away from one another. It all began when US-based idol Lady Gaga reportedly invited South African hip hop megastars Die Antwoord (Afrikaans for “The Answer”) to open for her Born This Way tour when it came to Cape Town. Not only did the self-styled “zef rap-rave krew,”1 which cata- pulted to international acclaim in 2010, reject the invitation, they created a spectacular invective of the pop icon through their then-newest music video, Fatty Boom Boom (noisey 2012a). Along with other incisive imagery, the video portrays Gaga — played by a man dressed in conspicu- ously bad drag (Herman Botha, aka “Ally Ooop”) and wearing a gaudy replica of the singer’s notorious “meat dress” — as a befuddled foreigner who must fend for herself on the streets of a ludicrously dangerous South African city after masked villains hijack her tour van. She eventu- ally wanders into a gynecologist’s clinic where she “gives birth” to a mucus-covered cricket and, finally, gets devoured by a lion at the end of the video. 1. This description comes from Die Antwoord’s official website. “Zef” is a growing music genre (a variety of hip hop) and cultural movement, predominantly among white working-class and Afrikaans-speaking South Africans (Die Antwoord n.d., “About”). TDR: The Drama Review 58:2 (T222) Summer 2014. ©2014 132 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00351 by guest on 27 September 2021 Besides the outrageous portrayal of Lady Gaga, which continued Die Antwoord’s notori- ous use of hypermasculine imagery with misogynist and homophobic overtones, Fatty Boom Boom featured the group members — all white2 — wearing copious amounts of black face and body paint. Although the group is known for using a black/white aesthetic (achieved through such means as body paint, editing techniques, or juxtaposing white bodies with black bodies in their videos), for this obvious instance of contemporary blackface Die Antwoord immediately came under fire from bloggers, academics, and casual observers. Although the tiff between Lady Gaga and Die Antwoord may have been the catalyst that garnered attention for Fatty Boom Boom through social media, it was the video’s racial imagery, rather than the insults leveled at the pop star, that received the most attention and criticism — particularly in the US blogosphere. The conflict between Die Antwoord and Lady Gaga, then, came at the intersection of two forms of mass culture: one relatively new — the internet and the rise of attendant global culture net- works; and one old, but enduring — blackface performance, what Catherine Cole and Tracy Davis have described as “the first American mass culture” (2013:8). Critics writing on Die Antwoord frequently engage with the group by questioning whether their performances constitute blackface minstrelsy (Haupt 2012; Scott 2012). The US blogo- sphere in particular has tended to judge the video based on whether or not it is “racist.” Headlines such as “Did Die Antwoord’s New Video Just Get Away with Blackface?” (Galperina 2012) or, conversely, “The New Die Antwoord Video Probably Isn’t Racist You Guys. Probably” (Farah 2012) illustrate the binary created in this approach: either the video is racist, and should be immediately dismissed or avoided by consumers, or it is not racist and may therefore be enjoyed free of criticism. Disregarding the video’s clear misogyny towards Lady Gaga, and its heteronormative imagery, and any attempt to read the artists’ intent on their own terms, these bloggers judge the validity of Fatty Boom Boom in the cultural marketplace simply by boiling it down to the questions: “Is this Blackface? And is that a problem?” (Harris 2012). A couple things interest me about such critiques. First, critics ask the question “Is this Blackface?” as if it would take extensive investigation to find the answer. Yet there seems to me nothing ambiguous about whether Die Antwoord employs the medium of blackface in Fatty Boom Boom. Multiple times in the video, group members Yo-Landi Vi$$er (Anri du Toit) and Ninja (Watkin Tudor Jones) appear drenched from head to toe in black body paint, and Yo-Landi wears a yellow polka-dotted sun dress that, along with her child-like affectation, seems to directly cite the pickaninny stereotype. It therefore seems impractical to wonder about whether the performance literally constitutes blackface. It does. The intense focus on this point, then, indicates that folded into the question, “Is this blackface,” is the related but not precisely synony mous question, “Is this racist minstrelsy?” The collapsing together of these two questions carries the consequence of characterizing all blackface enactments — whether local or global — through the US cultural lens, presuming 2. Following the model set forth by Adam Haupt (2012), I will italicize all references to racial categorization in an attempt to reinforce that racial identities are culturally, historically, and politically constructed. As Haupt reminds us, US racial categorizations, black and white for instance, are not analogues with those of South Africa where white, black, coloured, and native were all legislated racial identities with distinct legal and social standings. Many who would be raced black in the United States would be raced coloured in South Africa, for example. When I do Racial Project Antwoord’s Die not italicize words like “black” or “white,” I am not referring to race, but rather, to the color itself. Because of my own position as a white US citizen who has never been to South Africa, my racial terminology requires a degree of caution; it is based on only an academic understanding of racial formation in South Africa, and lacks the cru- cial texturing of an embodied experience of these racial dynamics. When quoting authors who do not italicize racial references I have left their words unaltered. Figure 1. (facing page) Yo-Landi Vi$$er in Fatty Boom Boom by Die Antwoord (2012). (Screen grab courtesy of Bryan Schmidt) 133 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00351 by guest on 27 September 2021 Student Essay Contest Honorable Mention Bryan Schmidt is a PhD student in Theatre Historiography at the University of Minnesota. He has presented his research at Performance Studies International, the American Society for Theatre Research, and the Mid-America Theatre Conference. He is currently co-authoring a paper surveying research on modes of spectatorship to appear in Theatre Journal. He served as the graduate student associate for the PSi Oral Histories Project in 2013. The University of Minnesota offers a unique graduate program committed to the study of theatre and performance as practices of social, cultural, and political consequence. Our students’ work in theatre historiography and performance criticism examines the stakes of representational acts, movement, and meaning-production both within and outside the discipline of theatre. The close mentorship of faculty and our rigorous core curriculum help our students develop theoretical fluency, ethical reflexivity, and the skills necessary for interdisciplinary inquiry. Faculty areas of expertise include community-based theatre, performance as social change, dance theory, performance ethnography, digital and political performance, cultural policy, race, ethnicity and migration, museology, Enlightenment thought, medieval, and avantgarde performance, with research focusing on Latino/a America, Eastern Europe, Asia/Pacific, the Middle East, and the Global South. In addition, students draw on the expertise of over 30 affiliate faculty with interests in theatre, performance, and theory, across the University of Minnesota. that blackface is a medium only of white artists and that it necessarily has a damaging effect. As recent scholarship has shown (including Cole 1996 and 2001; Gubar 1997; Jakubiak 2011; Brühwiler 2012; and Cole and Davis 2013, the TDR special issue on Routes of Blackface) — the situation has become far more complex due to the processes of globalization, the hybridization of cultural forms, and international populations’ creative alterations of what was originally a US colonial technology. Cole’s signature analyses of Ghanaian concert party theatre, for instance, describe how, after receiving blackface minstrelsy as a US cultural export in the 19th century, black Ghanaians themselves adopted blackface in performances with markedly different dynam- ics than the sources from which they inherited it. According to Cole, due to its alternative tra- jectory in Ghana (vis-à-vis the US) blackface no longer carries any racial signification to many Ghanaians who use it (1996:206). While it is important to note that this cannot drain blackface of its historicity — one intimately bound up with transatlantic slavery and colonialism — it com- plicates the US interpretation of blackface performance as always already racist, or even imme- diately related to race at all. Analyses of African blackface in which US bloggers position themselves as cultural arbiters, then, perform a neocolonial appropriation of African cultural formations and a re-racialization of images through the US critical lens (Thomas 2013). Furthermore, blogs like those of Aisha Harris, Marina Galperina, and Troy Farah