Movie Review

Thulani Davis is credited as "originator of the series concept and story editor" of this astonishingly coherent six hours of purposeful drift through a century of an emerging African American culture. And the late Henry Hampton, producer of a lifetime of brilliant, emotionally charged television histories capped by his history of the civil rights movement, Eyes on the Prize, served as executive producer. I begin with this commonplace notion that there were central intelligences behind this conceptually risky series that ran on public television last year because their work is an exemplar of how good television works. Whether the most conventional of hackwork or the most soaringly realized epic, television requires a seemingly doubt-free intelligence at its core.	1
Studying and then portraying in moving images a rich and evolving culture that arose out of an oppressively stifling history might have resulted in a glibly Jungian exercise in race essentialism that would have taken the stage away from the the small army of creators. That is, Davis and Hampton and their collaborators did justice to African American culture while risking the postmodernist temptation to wrap authorship in a veil of anonymous cultural agency. As the title—I'll make Me a world—insists, authors seem once again old-fashioned Byronic heroes struggling both with their art and with a surrounding white culture that could spoil or ruin either by overpraise or by smug elitism.	2
Deeply embedded in the running theme of black creativity is yet another angle, so unspoken as to seem unconscious. Black culture, by its nature as a low-down, outlaw, almost parallel universe, evolved as a perpetual avant garde. The pace was as dizzying as that of the language of the streets, so much so that the black press often ran glossaries so that the black squares could dig the latest jive, much in the spirit of The Cab Calloway Hepster's Dictionary. One might argue that this incessant black drive for the new was the engine that drove many aspects of European and American modernism. Certainly Pablo Picasso and the Gershwins and Stan Kenton thought so.	3
All of the ground covered in the series will be familiar to serious viewers of the African American scene: the black urbane culture that arose from the Great Migration from southern farms to northern cities, the moment in World War I that helped nationalize the culture, the postwar era in which a rage for "going out" for entertainment fueled the performance aspects of the culture, the deepening of the culture (sometimes under white patronage) into a Harlem Renaissance, the insistent penetration of the culture into white circles during depression and war, its despair at how few gains seemed to have been won after World War II, the bursting forth of a more overtly active and political culture into "the movement," and its eventual turning inward for inspiration even as the culture entered "the mainstream" that always seemed ominously smothering with damnation or praise.	4
How to render this broadly familiar material into a freshened and new consciousness? Mainly through ruthless culling and then by new emphases and new linkages. No Sissieretta Jones here, no Fisk Jubilee Singers or other holdovers from the nineteenth century. The accent is on Bert Williams and George Walker, two fin-de-siècle "crossovers," but men (Ada Overton Walker is curiously omitted in this feminist-tinged series) whose best work was in performances of Paul Laurence Dunbar's In Dahomey. Opening with a crossover act readily introduces another implicit angle: that "double messages" were embedded in much black work: one for blacks, one for whites; one for squares, one for hipsters. This notion is poignantly set in place by reenacting Bert Williams as a tragedian under his burnt cork, a device that echoed L. Q. Sloan's similar playing of Williams in Marlon Riggs's Ethnic Notions.	. . .