hudson global niggadom

8/12/2019 HUDSON Global Niggadom

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Global Niggadom

Peter Hudson

Back in ninety-five KRS-One caught flack for appearing in a televised Nike adthat found him updating the lyrics to Gil Scott-Heron's black nationalistanthem, "The Revolution Will Not be Televised." Without a hint of irony, KRSchanged Gil's final couplet from "The revolution will not be televised/ therevolution will be live," to "The revolution is basketball. Basketball is thetruth." Soon after the ad aired, Rap Pages editor Sheena Lester took The

Teacher to task for "loaning his mighty sword to the capitalist devils" byendorsing a blatant, misleadingconsumerismthatundermined struggles for black self-determination and made black revolt another trinket ofcapitalism. "There should be nothing so enticing aboutmaking money," wrote Lester, "that would have us LIE toour people -- or ourselves -- about something as crucial asthe practice or policy of resistance, especially inAmerica." 1

"O ye of little faith," replied KRS in the following issue,italics and all. "Never should you doubt the integrity ofthe Blastmaster. The God of Rap moves in mysteriousways." And it was mysterious: what followed was a rambling, convolutedtreatise on capitalism, hip hop, and revolution, full of the characteristic crypticeloquence that saw him proclaim in a Transition interview that "Americadoesn't exist." 2 In response to Lester's comments that "Nike owns niggas" andthat niggas shouldn't be trying to further that control, with "Nike don't 'ownniggas.' Niggas own Nike." 3 Welcome to KRS's cipher.

You have to wonder, though, in an era where the politics of visualrepresentation have more relevance than the vulgarity of the material, whetherthe seemingly faulty logic of KRS's economics that far off? Apparentlydismissing the hip hop mantra to keep it real, KRS provides a provocativecommentary on the political terrain of late twentieth-century society. He has no

penchant towards sentimentality in embracing the rapid ascent of the image, ofsurfaces, as the gelded foundations of a contemporary black ontology. In KRS's
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world, the mass-mediated spectacle of blackness -- or more specifically AfricanAmerican-ness -- has taken on extra-large symbolic size. Black gods overseevast afrocentric empires of signs keeping Babylon in a form of ideologicalcheck. NBA highlight reels and music videos are gospel. Tupac and Biggie are

prophets awaiting their second coming. The spectacle of OJ eclipses that ofChrist as The Trial of the Century becomes The Trial of the Last TwoMillennia.

And with the ascendancy of this new negro virtuality, the meanings symbols of blackness has shifted. As blackness is inevitablyincorporated into the status quo (described by KRS as"the mental takeover of the mainstream population by theHip Hop culture"), its politically charged origins areerased. Signs of blackness seem connotatively ambiguous,ripped from their contextual moorings, floating freely inan amorphous ocean of relativized symbols with onlytenuous links to any previous meanings. Blackness is nowan empty signifier, a shell without populist, insurgentmeaning. As Ronald Judy writes, "it is the end of blackfolk and the beginning of global niggadom. "4

Global niggadom is the cultural space of the "nigga" -- defined by Judy as "thatwhich emerges from the demise of human capital, what gets articulated whenthe field nigger loses value as labour" -- manifested through the signage andsymbolism of hip hop. In "On the Question of Nigga Authenticity," Judy mapsout the relation between niggas and the relatively conservative blackcommunity. Looking at nigga constructions of self, particularly in gangsta rap,Judy suggests a disjuncture between black folks who have become obsoletewithin the logic of late capitalism and know it -- Cornel West's black, nihilisticanti-heroes -- and those who still seek a validation and acceptance within itsmores (i.e. the black bourgeoisie). With this disjuncture comes a severing ofany necessary or deterministic relationship between what we have understoodas "black culture" and an authentic, politicized consciousness defined through"blackness." "The nurturing haven of black culture which assured memory and

provided a home beyond the ravishing growth of capitalism is no longer,"writes Judy. "There cannot be any cultural authenticity in resistance tocapitalism."

But if the nurturing haven of black culture was destroyed -- if it ever actuallyexisted in the first place -- the shared memories that provided common pointsof reference for the construction of this home have also been erased. Thememory of a shared racial past, of the experience of the middle passage and
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slavery, grow faint and irrelevant, undermining the potential for the collectiveenterprise of diaspora. Indeed, "diaspora" creates a fictive web of culturalsolidarity that becomes meaningless in opposition to capitalism.

Global niggadom replaces the African diaspora as the site of identity formationand resistance to capitalism, fulfilling Louis Chude-Sokei's statement: "Neweconomic and cultural conditions require new gods and symbols, old onesstagnate or become malevolent and repressive." 5 The nationalist dream of aunified racial community is displaced by hyper-real diasporas imaginedthrough pop culture memories circulating in endless, digitally reproduced back-list.

In an essay on the state of dancehall in the post-Reagan/Thatcher/Seaga years,Chude-Sokei's maps out the economic and political impetus behind the shiftfrom the conscious lyrics of a generation before to the gun-talk and slacknessof the early nineties. "The ideology of roots' did not offer a framework withinwhich to contend with the changing environment of music, multinationalcapitalism, and global communications technology," writes Chude-Sokei.Instead, today's Jamaican youth dismiss the redemptory promise of Africa infavour of a grim celebration of the immediacy and realness of an entrenched,

brutally Darwinian capitalism .6

The forces of globalizationhave worked to create theintense local experience of yardin dancehall and diasporicJamaican culture. Dancehall isthe music of a migrantcommunity who, despite theirterms of residence in foreign,still passionately call Jamaicahome. Apart from theoccasional cross-over artist who

breaks into the mainstream, dancehall has relatively private channels ofcommunication. Hip hop's diffusion, on the other hand, has occurred withoutthe bodies and communities whose struggles and aspirations originally fuelledit. Its migrations have occurred through electronic means, through digitizedtexts, rather than flesh-and-blood people. The legends of its origins in theBronx -- or in the mythologized sites of Queensbridge, Compton, CrownHeights or Staten Island -- are second-hand memories to most of its consumersThese legends can be invoked but never precisely named. They are cities of the
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imagination for a nigga diaspora in Toronto or Tokyo or Paris, and, of course,the suburban white nigga communities across North America.

This physical displacement from the originary topographies of meaning andexperience weakens the connections of this cybernetic formation of diaspora.The peripheral consumers of hip hop become suburban parasites of black andLatino inner city experience. The fetishization of ghettocentric myths ofidentity allow for the simultaneous erasure of the material conditions ofromanticized inner city communities, and of the supposedly peripheral rolesinhabited by rap consumers .7 The death of North American cities and theirrebirth as sanitized playgrounds for wealthy tourists goes unmarked, as does

both its financing through cutbacks to education, libraries, parks, and othersocial programs, and the buying out of local democracy by developers. It's thiskind of real economic clout that proves that global niggadom has nothing onPlanet Hollywood.

Despite this, global niggadom and Chude-Sokei's post-national geographiesremain more inventive responses to economic globalization and restructuring.and the neo-conservative social policy emerging from and facilitating it thananything produced by the North American left. For the most part, responses tothis capitalist entrenchment from black activist communities have beenintellectually and creatively vapid. Neither the anachronistic vacuity ofAfrocentricity, nor the invocations of "diaspora" that, while able to critique theessentialism and ahistoricism of Afrocentricity, seem plausible only within thequasi-anthropological pretensions of cultural theory, have been able toanticipate or critique the shifts in capitalism and its attendant shifts in racialformation and white-supremacy. They are the political formations ofvictimization, reacting with too little, too late. Global niggadom refuses tocoddle blackness as if freedom lay in a fetishization of the term, but itsuncritical complicity with capitalism leaves it as a symbolic force only. It usesthe political and economic networks of capitalism that have given it life in aself-serving fashion; it is like a mercenary or parasite that is willing to thriveoff its host until it is dead, instead of killing it outright.

KRS isn't the pimp he thinks he is in his relationship with Nike. While Nikecan, with self-satisfied aplomb, proclaim "Yep, we're capitalists," in a recent ad-- fully aware that the world knows this, and, perhaps, fully aware that theyhave helped to transform the world in such a way that few actually hold itagainst them -- KRS has to duck down and hope his mouthy rhetoric can coverhis ass .8 KRS's assumption that because he's a black man -- necessarilyoppressed -- getting paid by the man is an anti-racist, even revolutionary,gesture, falls into the kind of individualistic logic that capitalism thrives off.
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Brotherman doesn't realize that when capitalism is seen as an antidote for the politics of race, it only obscures the more complex, increasingly important, politics of class.

Notes

1 Lester, Sheena "You Must Learn, Pt. II" Rap Pages January 1996, 6. Return to text

2 Lipscomb, Michael and KRS-One. "Can the Teacher Be Taught? A Conversation with KRS-ONE andMichael Lipscomb", Transition: An International Review 57 168-189. Return to text

3 KRS-ONE, "Me Neva Go Commercial: Kris Responds," Rap Pages , February 1996, 9. Return to text

4 Judy, R. A. T. "On the Question of Nigga Authenticity" boundary 2 , 21:3. Return to text

5 Chude-Sokei, Louis. "Post-nationalist Geographies: Rasta, Ragga, and Reinventing Africa," African Arts, Autumn, 1994, 80-96. Return to text

6 Although "Post-national Geographies" was published before the redemption of artists like Buju Bantonand his conversion to rasta and a discourse of dread, the conditions that Chude-Sokei describes are still

present. Buju's shift represents, I think, less a progressive movement and critique than a desperate fall-backto reliable, essentialist symbols that actually work to obscure the conditions of his surroundings.. SeeOumano, Elena "Selassi I Rule the Dancehall: Reggae Get Righteous Once More" The Village Voice ,August 15, 1995 pp. 57 and Robinson, Michael "Dread Resurrection: Buju Banton" Urb 44, Summer 1995,13-15. Return to text

7 For more on this see Wimsatt, William "Upski" Bomb the Suburbs. The Subway and Elevated Press Co.,1994. Return to text

8 See Katz, Donald. Just Do It: The Nike Spirit in Corporate America and Gragg, Randy, "Domination by

Design." Metropolis . June, 1997. 63-67, 83-85.
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