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UC Riverside UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title The Political Aesthetic of Irony in the Post-Racial United States Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8fd7t1ph Author Jarvis, Michael Publication Date 2018 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE The Political Aesthetic of Irony in the Post-Racial United States A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English by Michael R. Jarvis March 2018 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Jennifer Doyle, Chairperson Dr. Sherryl Vint Dr. Keith Harris Copyright by Michael R. Jarvis 2018 The Dissertation of Michael R. Jarvis is approved: Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside Acknowledgments This project would not have been possible without the support of my committee, Professors Jennifer Doyle, Sherryl Vint, and Keith Harris. Thank you for reading this pile of words, for your feedback, encouragement, and activism. I am not alone in feeling lucky to have had each of you in my life as a resource, mentor, critic, and advocate. Thank you for being models of how to be an academic without sacrificing your humanity, and for always having my back. A thousand times, thank you. Sincere thanks to the English Department administration, UCR’s Graduate Division, and especially former Dean Joe Childers, for making fellowship support available at a crucial moment in the writing process. I was only able to finish because of that intervention. Thank you to the friends near and far who have stuck with me through this chapter of my life. Jared, Leslie, Cary, Andy, Alex, the CTBs. To F. To Murford P. Doggington, a good boy. And to my family, whose constant love for and belief in me is frankly shocking. An early draft of the section of the Conclusion on Get Out appeared as a DVD review- essay in the February 2018 issue of Science Fiction Film and Television. iv For Grandma 我愛你 v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION The Political Aesthetic of Irony in the Post-Racial United States by Michael R. Jarvis Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in English University of California, Riverside, March 2018 Dr. Jennifer Doyle, Chairperson This dissertation examines artistic responses to the prevailing racial discourse of the early 21st century United States, i.e. post-racialism. Each chapter explores the work of artists in various media—film, portraiture, television, and music—with an emphasis on the ways that their practices of ironic substitution and recontextualization—e.g. parody, pastiche, satire—work to simultaneously revise previous aesthetic works and modes and to engage with a hegemonic US post-racial narrative that has at its core the maintenance of white supremacy and the suppression of race as an avenue through which to formulate grievance against oppressive state and institutional structures. This project is in dialogue not only with contemporary critical race theory but also negative valuations of irony’s political efficacy inherited from the late-20th century academic discourse of postmodernism. Reading the work of artists across various media and engaging with discourses of race, masculinity, fashion, and ontological dualism, I argue for the progressive potential of irony and humor, and look critically at the de facto privileging of sincerity in contemporary socio-political discourse. vi Table of Contents Introduction: Eirôn Work and Its Discontents 1 Chapter 1: “Wherever you go, there you are”: Post-Futurist Pastiche and the Oppositional Vision of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension 40 Chapter 2: Painting Grace: Kehinde Wiley’s Pastiche and the Ornamental Construction of Post-Black Visuality 75 Chapter 3: “They Didn’t Get Us”: Post-Black Satire and Key & Peele’s Critical Humor 122 Chapter 4: “No Respect for the Thrones”: Disidentificatory Pastiche and Revolutionary Camp in Run the Jewels’ Run the Jewels and Run the Jewels 2 174 Conclusion: Jordan Peele’s Get Out, and Post-Racial Smarm 256 Bibliography 286 vii List of Figures Fig. 1.1, Yoyodyne Billboard, screenshot from The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension DVD 74 Fig. 2.2, Portrait of Andres Stilte (1639), Johannes Cornelisz Verspronck 114 Fig. 2.3, Portrait of Andres Stilte II (2006), Kehinde Wiley 115 Fig. 2.4, Alexander the Great Variation (2005), Kehinde Wiley 116 Fig. 2.5, After Van Dyck’s Charles I and Henrietta Maria (2006), Kehinde Wiley 117 Fig. 2.6, George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook (1974-75), Robert Colescott 118 Fig. 2.7, Capture of Juliers (c1622-25), Peter Paul Rubens 119 Fig. 2.8, Capture of Juliers (2006), Kehinde Wiley 120 Fig. 2.9, Barack Obama (2018), Kehinde Wiley 121 viii Introduction: Eirôn Work and Its Discontents The Legacy of Postmodernist Irony In “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” a 1993 essay on televisual culture and its influence on postmodern literature, novelist David Foster Wallace mourns the inability of the contemporary intellectual to effectively wield irony in order to critique an image culture that itself had become increasingly invested in producing ironic images. Whereas earlier postmodern writers such as William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, William S. Burroughs, and Don DeLillo were able to mobilize the detritus of pop culture ironically in successful critiques of the earnest, conservative metanarratives of midcentury politics and culture, the 1990s writer attempting to follow in their footsteps, according to Wallace, produces work that is “just plain doomed by its desire to ridicule a TV-culture whose ironic mockery of itself and all ‘outdated’ value absorbs all ridicule” (192). Wallace affords television a central role in the advent of cultural postmodernism, especially in the self-reflexivity of quintessentially postmodern literary genres, e.g. metafiction: Metafiction, for its time, was nothing more than a poignant hybrid of its theoretical foe, realism: if realism called it like it saw it, metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it. This high-cultural postmodern genre, in other words, was deeply informed by the emergence of television. And American fiction remains informed by TV…especially those strains of fiction with roots in postmodernism, which even at its rebellious zenith was less a “response to” televisual culture than a kind of abiding-in-TV. (161) 1 While he is careful to equivocate on the chicken-egg question as regards these overdetermined cultural systems, he asserts that both postmodernism, in its reflection of/origins in televisual discourse, and television, in its form and content the perfect medium of/for postmodernism, have destabilized meaning through the proliferation of ironic forms, leading to the attenuation of the possibilities for oppositional ideologies as a result of “television’s power to jettison connection and castrate protest fueled by the same ironic postmodern self-consciousness it first helped fashion” (161). For Wallace, the critical mode of televisual irony creates an “authority vacuum” (180) through its critique of traditional values, replacing these with an “institutionalization of hip irony” marked by “jaded weltschmerz, self-mocking materialism, blank indifference” (181) and an appropriation of oppositional postmodern elements which become deployed in the service of mere “spectation and consumption” (183). While the “rebellious irony” of canonical postmodern fiction “seemed downright socially useful” in earlier decades, it becomes dangerous in its persistence and contemporary ubiquity, “because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an exclusively negative function. It is critical and destructive, a ground- clearing…But irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks” (183). Like Fredric Jameson’s critique of the late-capitalist culture of simulacra, which “with its transformation of older realities into television images, does more than merely replicate the logic of late capitalism” and actually “reinforces and intensifies it” (46), Wallace identifies the failure of irony as a productive force for social change, a development tied to its place within a system that commoditizes countercultural critique 2 and sells it back to the consumer. His solution, it seems, is a new generation of writers (himself, clearly, and we might add, ex post facto, Jonathan Franzen), “anti-rebels” who “have the childish gall to actually endorse single-entendre values” and “treat old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction” (192-93). Adam Kelly and others have referred to this posture—on the part of American fiction writers of the late 20th century and beyond—as the “New Sincerity.”1 Nearly thirty years on, Wallace is dead by suicide, that great killer of romantics, and irony has embedded itself so deeply in our image culture that it troubles the very basis of meaning-making. Like Jameson’s concept of “pastiche,” we might say that irony has become “a neutral practice…amputated of the satiric impulse” (17); it is, instead, today’s lingua franca, especially in terms of the content of TV, advertising, film, and even social conversation—so much so that deviations in the direction of the sincere still rightly risk “accusations of sentimentality and melodrama” (Wallace 193). Given his own championing of the “sincere” and the “authentic,” it is perhaps no surprise that Wallace, in a series of essays from 1989, finds himself drawn to the burgeoning mid-Atlantic hip-hop scene, at a time when rap was beginning to break into the pop consciousness of America, broadly. While noting the incongruity of his white fandom—“No question that serious rap is, and is very self-consciously, music by urban blacks about same to and for same” (Signifying Rappers 25, original ital.)—he writes 1Though Wallace doesn’t use the phrase in his essay, around the same time the term was being applied to rock groups choosing to eschew both the sneer of punk and the irony of slacker- or avant-rock (we might think of the difference between Pavement and Bright Eyes, for example).