Customer Reviews

Black Magic: White Hollywood and African American Culture (Jazz & American Culture)

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Jamming at the Margins was a masterpiece, the first book I've ever read that used the tools of postmodern, post-canonical criticism to address issues pertaining to Jazz and Jazz history. What happened? Was Gabbard afraid that he had offended members of his target groups that need everything spelled out for them? In any case,Black Magic is, by comparison, a disappointingly weak intellectual performance. The topic - the way Black representation is treated in Hollywood, and the fact that black characters still have a tendancy to function as some sort of enablers for White characters to achieve something or to come together, and then to disappear - is an important one. I will admit it is a topic about which I am passionate, and I was jealous that one of my favorite critics had decided to write a book about it (I was scooped!). But I was also very excited to read it, and with every page I grew more and more depressed. The approach is scattershot: textbook psychology is followed by a plethora of biographical details which is followed by a kind of ironic, impotent outrage. The book feels like it was written in a big rush, poorly edited, barely unpacked. And the praise for Spike Lee and Robert Altman feels barely sincere, toothless. The best chapter should have been the chapter where Gabbard outs himself as a Jazz nerd. It should have been a proud companion to such essays as Walter Benjamin's Unpacking My Library or certain moments out of Roland Barthes. But it isn't. It's a kind of cute, bland, snickeringly charming half-backed self-portrait. What a missed opportunity!