...A strange combination, yes? But all of these--the pancake advertising icon, the classic Warner Brothers cartoon rabbit, and late comedian Richard Pryor's alter ego--are part of an NPR series, In Character. I haven't yet listened to all of the programs but many seem to be of interest to me. At least two of these excellent programs touch on topics that I have touched upon here in this blog.
First, I have previously explored the issue of racist imagery used to sell products, a topic covered in America's Love Affair with Stereotyped Brands:
Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben and Chiquita Banana are household name brands with conflicted origins. The program looks at stereotyped characters in advertising, how they've evolved and how public perceptions of those characters have changed.
I posted on this topic a while back, on the occasion of a promotion (of a sort) of rice man, Uncle Ben. At the time I mused:
It is an oddity of the history of advertising that Black folks have been featured so often as part of companies' brand identity. Apparently, at one point in time nothing could prompt a consumer to snatch a product off of a grocery shelf like a demeaning characterization of a smiling Negro. Of course, two of the better known Black characters are Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben. (No relation? It's hard to say as neither has ever had a last name... I've talked before here about my relationship to the whole history of "racial naming." Suffice it to say that for certain generations of Blacks, it is not endearing for White folks to refer to us as Uncle or Aunt (unless we are, in fact, their uncle or aunt.)
The NPR piece does a good job of unpacking some of these and other issues. I also was pleased to find that I am not alone in sometimes getting hurt, angry, and/or confused reactions to my negative reactions to these images. In another conversation in another forum about this kind of defensive reaction in support of, in this case, Uncle Ben, I reasoned, "Well, I guess people are really sensitive about their rice." After listening to this NPR program, I suppose the same can be said of pancakes and bananas.
I have also explored the "trickster" character in a previous SITBB post. In NPR's program Bugs Bunny: The Trickster, American Style that "wascally wabbit" and other characters are discussed in terms of that archetype:
Bugs is a uniquely American expression of an ancient archetype — the Trickster."If you want to teach Folklore 101, and you need an example of a Trickster, Bugs Bunny is it," says Robert Thompson, director of a Syracuse University pop-culture studies program. "He defies authority. He goes against the rules. But he does it in a way that's often lovable, and that often results in good things for the culture at large."
Other famous tricksters: Puck in A Midsummer's Night's Dream, the Coyote in Native American mythology, the spider Anansi in West African stories, the Monkey King in Chinese culture. They're all characters who disregard every convention of their society, even of reality itself.
When I posted here about the trickster I related it to a question I was asked by my examining committee during my oral preliminary exam:
Well, the oral prelim question was something like: "Dialectics is not a very widely applied theory in family science; You say it was challenging for you to wrap your mind around it: How would you teach that conceptual framework to a classroom of undergraduates in our department?"
The answer I came up with--though much after the fact, unfortunately--was that I would explain dialectics in terms of the trickster character:
Anyway, it seems to me a trickster is a perfect metaphorical representation of much of what dialectical contradiction is all about: like how someone (or something, like a concept or cognition or attitude) can be multiple seemingly oppositional things simultaneously; like how a body of accumulated knowledge can sometimes reveal one set of conclusions (or one storyline) and other times reveal another, depending in part on when the research/story is being "told" and by whom; like how a dialectical contradiction can sometimes blur boundaries ("both/and") but other times insert a new boundary, in turn creating new categories (even new worlds...)
I have never explicitly written about the next archetype--which might be described as the incredibly wise man masquerading as the village idiot or drunk. But a character that represents this figure well is one created by comic genius Richard Pryor and discussed in the program Talkin' Trash, Telling Truth: Richard Pryor's Mudbone.
Listening to the (heavily bleeped) segments of Pryor in his Mudbone incarnation brought back so many childhood memories for me. Late into the evening my parents and assorted friends and kin would be in the living room, sipping wine that came out of big jugs or cardboard cartons. I'd sneak out of bed to overhear Pryor's routine, titillated by his language and astounded that he could transform himself so completely into his characters. I took my cue for what was funny largely from the guffaws of the grown-ups. Only later when I heard these bits as an adult could I fully understand the wonderful humor. And fully appreciate how Pryor's characters--especially Mudbone--so wonderfully captured important and difficult truths about race in America.
This issue and more is discussed in the NPR program by William Jelani Cobb, Spelman College prof and author of To The Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip-Hop Aesthetic.
Actually, all the NPR programs I just talked about feature academics. How fun to have these topics in the scope of your scholarship! I'm definitely going to have to look into getting a gig like that...
Posted by perry032 at January 25, 2008 10:00 AM