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10. the Agitating Power of Nonviolent Cool in “Going to Meet the Man”

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10. the Agitating Power of Nonviolent Cool in “Going to Meet the Man” BEAZLEY KANOST 10. THE AGITATING POWER OF NONVIOLENT COOL IN “GOING TO MEET THE MAN” PROBLEMATICS OF AMERICAN COOL In early and mid 20th-century America, behavior marked as cool received increasing attention that arose out of African-American jazz and blues cultures’ burgeoning popularity and influence. As Beat writers and mass culture with its focus on middle-class whites, appropriated, adapted, commodified and marketed their perceptions of the African-American urban hipster’s language and mannerisms, cool came to characterize youthful male rebellion against conformity to bourgeois norms. Marlon Brando as rebel biker in The Wild One (Kramer & Benedek, 1953), Jack Kerouac’s (1955) Dean Moriarty in On the Road, and Allen Ginsberg’s (1956) hipster geniuses in “Howl” formed in the wake of Charlie Parker’s and Miles Davis’s figures as effortlessly brilliant masters of art and style. In The Birth of the Cool, Lewis MacAdams (2001) describes coolness as, at root, defiance (p. 20): defiance of racist stereotypes (p. 24), defiance of fear, and for whites, defiance of white middle-class culture’s lack of style and passion (p. 20)—a defiance which Norman Mailer (1959) famously articulated in his essay “The White Negro” (originally published in Dissent, Fall, 1957). MacAdams cites scholars who trace cool American styles of behavior to the male slave’s demeanor while he was tortured and demeaned. Such explanations sometimes also focus on his having to witness the rape of a woman he loved (MacAdams, p. 20). This example points to a racialized America’s focus on black men’s sexual relations (Mercer, 1993; Tate, 2003), a focus that also permeates white appropriations of the hip and cool that, like Mailer’s, had no conscious racist intent—that in fact assumed they evinced an anti-racist stance. Cultural critics have tended to problematize popular notions of the cool because they emerged out of appropriating African-American art and style without adequately crediting and paying the artists who originated them (Davis, 2003, 2012; Tate, 2003). Moreover, popular representations of African Americans as hip and cool tend to sexualize them (Mercer, 1993; Tate), as Mailer’s (1959) essay does so famously in describing the “Negro hipster,” ostensibly the object of admiration. Mailer’s conception of this hipster is one whom racism has confined in economic, intellectual and social marginal spaces and who has compensated for that confinement by developing “animal,” irrational qualities Mailer associates with jazz and orgasm, and by further ridding himself of inhibition with drugs (pp. 339-341). That popular culture has continued to represent African Americans as A. Scott Henderson & P. L. Thomas (eds.), James Baldwin: Challenging Authors, 149–163. © 2014 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved. BEAZLEY KANOST sexualized objects is evident in how many hip hop artists choose to present and market themselves, encouraged by profits that speak of a large white audience’s desire for such representations (West, 2004, p. 181; Tate, 2003). In Black Cool: A Thousand Streams of Blackness, Rebecca Walker (2012) argues for a new conception of “Black Cool” (p. xv) as a source of power unmarred by racist stereotypes and associated with west African modes that predate American cool and do not form around reactions against oppressive power. She presents President Obama as an exemplar of such cool (p. xiv), marked by “audacity” and “propelled by an unstoppable force,” but also possessing a “reserve [that] is mesmerizing” (p. xv). Richard Majors and Janet Mancini Billson (1992) also ascribe west African antecedents to “a repertoire of black styles, including cool pose [that] has sprung from a unique fusion of African heritage with the legacy of a ruthless slave system” (p. 55) in the US. They note that the titles of fifteenth-century rulers from what is now Benin and Nigeria referred explicitly to their cool and cite sixteenth-century Yoruba beliefs and practices. These examples provide insight into an “idea of cool” which “bears a spiritual meaning: sense of control, symmetry, correct presentation of self, and sophistication,” and “a part of character—ashe” (Majors & Billson, p. 57). They describe ashe as “a noble confidence and mystic coolness of character [… that] reveals an inner spirituality and peace that marks the strongest of men” (Majors & Billson, p. 58). But Majors and Billson also discuss contemporary African-American men’s cool behavior as sometimes maladaptive, in that it prevents them from articulating the full range of their feelings to themselves or others (p. 43). Thomas Frank (1997) maintains that from the early 1950s on, corporate marketers recognized and used the appeal of rebelling against conformity to sell products, thereby subverting any actual non-conformist impulse to rebel. Frank focuses on dominant culture during a period when advertising did not employ many representations of African Americans and so he doesn’t treat the subject of cool as racialized. Poet David Meltzer (2001) similarly explores the commodification and popularization of Beat culture (pp. 392-396, 399-400) that he first encountered very differently as a “bebop true believer” (p. 398) in his youth. Nilgin Yusuf (2006), in analyzing a shirt sporting the image of Robert DeNiro’s character in Taxi Driver (Phillips, Phillips, & Scorsese, 1976), asserts how the cool rebel—the outcast risk-taker—has become an image on a product whose purchase belies any authentic claim to outsider status. Jim MacGuigan (2009) notes how its cool has contributed to African American popular art’s influential “cultural capital” around the world (p. 92), but without sufficiently altering the economic conditions for most urban African Americans whose culture produces that art (pp. 98-99). For MacGuigan, coolness has come to characterize “the almighty brand” (p. 199). He claims that “brands may be cool by definition, but ‘cool’ itself is almost impossible to define....To try to say exactly what it is, is uncool. The allure of brand, then, is a kind of psychological magic, hard to explain, yet effective” (p. 199). Susan Fraiman (2003) criticizes coolness—whether that of the jazz hipster or derivations of that image in Beat writings and films from The Wild One to Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (Bender & Tarantino, 1994)—as adolescent male rebellion that 150 .
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