![]() One of Abdurraqib’s tasks is to rescue marginalised performers from the condescension of posterity. Ellen Armstrong was performing for some people who had seen both too much and not enough.” “Magic relies on what a viewer is willing to see, and what a viewer is willing to see relies on what the world has afforded them to be witness to. Armstrong would perform to black audiences in the mid-20th century and Abdurraqib considers how her audience’s poverty and experiences of racism would have shaped their response to her tricks, such as conjuring coins out of thin air. Later in the essay he turns to the life of Ellen Armstrong, a “magical negro” in a more literal sense: she was the first black female magician to tour the US headlining her own show. Abdurraqib – with help from the plot of Christopher Nolan’s 2006 film The Prestige – encourages the reader to think of Chapelle’s disappearance and reappearance in Africa as a kind of magic trick, an escape from the impossible bind that America had forced him into. The incident prompted Chappelle’s famous decision to quit and fly to South Africa. In satirising his country’s racial politics, he seemed to be giving audiences the wrong kind of permission. ![]() White audiences adored it, but were they laughing with or at him? “It took white people loving Chappelle’s Show for it to become worth as much as it was to a network,” Abdurraqib writes, “but it took white people laughing too loud and too long – and laughing from the wrong place – to build the show a coffin.” Abdurraqib recounts how, at the taping of a sketch that made use of a bellboy in blackface, Chappelle noticed a white man who was laughing a bit too much. The programme had an acid wit: one well-known sketch is about a blind black man who, unaware of his race, becomes a strident white supremacist. The magical negro that Abdurraqib is most interested in is the real-life Dave Chappelle, the devilish comic who found success in the 2000s with his TV series, Chappelle’s Show. Take the piece on “magical negroes”, a term that is applied to black characters, like Bubba in Forrest Gump, who provide absolution for white protagonists. Every subject is carefully chosen in the service of a broader critical project, which is to understand the significance of black performance in the US across media such as music, dance, comedy and even card games. This is not to say the essays lack discipline. He might consider astrology, Michael Jackson, Blade Runner 2049 and the musician Sun Ra in pursuit of a single thought, as if in late-night, errant conversation with a friend. He addresses the reader and skates between subjects. ![]() ![]() Hanif Abdurraqib got into writing through the poetry slam circuit in Columbus, Ohio, which might explain why reading A Little Devil in America, his book of essays on black culture, feels like hearing him speak. ![]()
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