eartha kitt RIP

[Jonathan M. Hall]

I am far from conversant in this period of US culture and I am afraid we
are on a tangent that is not entirely relevant to the list.  But since
Birgit paraphrased my comments, I feel the need to respond.  Regrettably
though, in the future, I will not be able to follow the thread as
responsibly as I might.  So these might represent my last thoughts on the
issue--mainly a clarification of my earlier point.  

When Birgit wrote about Eri (a singer whom I like but whose CDs I cannot
afford to buy) and her Turkish, Eartha Kitt came immediately to mind.  And
though I could not remember the Usukudara title, I thought if not the same
song, than at least something akin must be going on.  My thoughts went
particulary to Cold War American culture and not to some anchorless idea of
'internationalism.'   Far from erasing differences between periods and
cultures, my comments were particular at a level that Brigit ignored.  The
US postwar and midcentury offer a formation of the international in
American cultural products in a manner that is no longer seen today.  While
Eartha Kitt's fans these days are either nostalgic listeners or operating
from some kind of camp sensibility, her much wider audience in the 50s and
60s was part of an American appropriation of the foreing in an environment
marked by the absence of an extended network of former colonies and the
simultaneous purported common sense of /development/ and the dollar.  I do
not intend internationalism as a technical term, but I do intend it do
describe something particular to American cultural products of the period.

It is a well-established fact that Broadway, for example, changed
significantly with World War II and the incumbent influx of small-town
Americans into the city:  the war for Broadway led to an emphasis on a more
easily understood narrative, a moving away from more risque vaudeville
origins, the increased hegemony of the heterosexual plot within the
performance.  I am not at all fluent in recent work on postwar American
culture, but by postwar internationalism, I was specifically trying to come
up with a term that could explain Eartha Kitt (with her marketed
/foreign-ness/ of a scintillating but easily consumed form) and her
popularity.  Along these lines, I don't think one should underestimate the
highly particular combination that the Cold War, the extension of buying
power (in other words, the massive extension of access to overseas
commodities to larger sectors of the society is not at all the "trivial"
thing Brigit claims it--indeed here is the political economy of
imperialism) , the move of the center of American culture into the suburbs,
and a no longer isolationist America's self-rationalization of its form of
imperialism and modernization as something not based not in a British-like
civilizing mission, but in supposed American pragmatism and common sense. 
Refractions of this ideology are pervasive (and my suggestions here are not
at all new or fresh), but as I suggested, it can be seen particularly in a
film such as Funny Face (with Audrey Hepburn the borderline (English) other
that must be subdued into American domicility).  [Funny Face is an
especially good example, becuase it also admits the highly developed
reflexivity this mode could take in its humorous laugh at "the American
abroad.")  For the same reason, Frank O'Hara's poem, written at the death
of Billie Holiday, is similarly telling in its dichotomizing of the easily
purchased foreign object and the complete shock of death/the loss of
'African-American realness.'  O'Hara's poem lets us think about this
internationalism also in relation to race politics in the US--and as Andrew
Ross (perhaps too hopefully) wants us to believe--specifically as a
critique of the structuring of blackness as an 'authentic' root--which
would provide an obverse to the internationalism.  Basically here, I am
suggesting we look at who is the intended audience--like the shifts in
Broadway during the war, I suspect we would see the consumer of this
internationalism as a white, middle class suburban consumer, yet who knows
about caviar.  Some of these brushstrokes I am painting here are very
broad--they lack the precision that someone much more familiar with postwar
American culture could offer.  But nowhere do I intend internationalism as
some transhistorical term as Birgit has interpreted my comments.  

Birgit Kellner wrote:

>where are the historical gaps and shifts from late 19th to mid-20th century?
>How is the
>appearance of exotic elements and also exotic musicians in German popular music
>during the 50s and 60s, which Roland has already mentioned, different from
>similar
>phenomena in the US or Japan? Are there any specific socio-political conditions
>that bring about brands of appropriation of the exotic that are distinctly
>American, Japanese, German - in the sense that certain forms of appropriation
>could
>only or more probably have arisen in the US, Japan or Germany, not of course
>in the
>sense that a certain American "spirit", national or otherwise, would produce
>them?
>I don't have any answers to these questions, but I think that these issues of
>historical specificity as well as local specificity are perhaps more
>interesting
>questions to start out with than the stipulation of an "American cultural
>imperialism" or "internationalism".