Double Negative: The Black Image & Popular Culture, Racquel J. Gates

Duke University Press, 2018, 236 pages, ISBN 978-1-4780-0054-9

I get my book recommendations from the weirdest places, and that’s the fun of it. In early 2022, academic Raquel J. Gates suddenly popped up twice in my pop-culture radar. She was an invited host on Turner Classic Movies, introducing one of my favourite films of the early 1940s—Stormy Weather—in terms I resonated with. And then she showed up again introducing the Criterion Channel’s April 2022 “Beyond Blaxploitation” event, again in a way I found interesting. I looked her name up on Amazon, saw that she had a recent book called Double Negative, and ordered it.

It turned out to be a great pick. While clearly an academic book (that is: written by an academic, published by a university press, dense in footnotes—45 of the book’s 249 pages are made of notes, references and an index), it’s a breezily readable exploration of cultural issues of relevance to black (and white) America.

It all gets off to a great start with “Negativity and the Black Popular Culture” as introduction—in a few pages, Gates defines her topic of interest as slightly disreputable culture (I don’t think I can get away with using “ratchetness” in the fullness of the expression as she does)—mirroring Chris Rock with Katt Williams, going from Flava Flav to Barack Obama as black signifiers, and going from those examples to a broader discussion of the African American community as encompassing and embracing all of those examples—from the reality TV “housewives” to the aspiration represented by the Ava Duvernay Barbie, with so-called negative portrayals of blackness often making space for charged discussions that would not occur in more genteel settings. There’s some thick material for thought here, engaging with the cultural vernacular and contextualizing it against history, politics and the media.

The rest of the book works within that context. Chapter 1 tackles a close examination of Coming to America, and specifically how Eddie Murphy influenced the meaning of the film over its (white) director John Landis. Chapter 2 is about a quartet of “sellout films of the 1990s” (less familiar titles that had a fraught relationship with black identity). Chapter 3 studies the performances of Halle Berry, both as an actress and as a celebrity, charting a complicated history regarding her acceptance and roles as a black actress. Finally, the last chapter delves into black reality television—specifically Love & Hip Hop and Basketball Wives—, finding much value in so-called lowbrow culture. An envoi discussing Empire felt timely given the book’s publication date.

Having seen the film not too long ago, I found the Coming to America discussion fascinating—especially in attempting to establish the primary influences on the film and how that has helped it become a major touchpoint for Black America. While the first chapter had me nodding along at familiar material, the second had me taking notes on unfamiliar and decidedly lower-profile movies. The Halle Berry chapter was a great exercise in making interesting arguments out of familiar tabloid and entertainment news. I was slightly less compelled by the reality TV chapter, but that’s largely for lack of familiarity with the shows being discussed. (Although I was back on-board in discussing Empire, having seen all of its first season.)

I am not doing Gates a favour by summarizing Double Negative so succinctly, because there is a lot of fascinating material here. Trying to give a longer summary would probably expose how I haven’t understood a single thing about the book (a fair charge, given how far I am from the topics of the book as a white French-Canadian man). But what I can articulate is just how much fun the book is to read. There’s a welcome mixture of academic rigour and popular accessibility here, with the sometimes-exasperating academic trait of overly explaining things here coming across as an enthusiastic invitation to match Gates’ understanding of the topics being discussed.

I’ve read too many engaging academic papers to be surprised at just how much Double Negative held my attention, but even by those standards it’s an unusually successful melding of intellectual firepower and cultural awareness. There’s a good idea on every other page, and Gates weaves everything into a compelling narrative. At a time where cultural discussions online seem to be all rapid-fire hot takes with considerable velocity but no depth, it was a treat to sit back with a sustained, well-articulated argument that really dug into its examples of discussion, finding nuance and context in unusual places. It’s unusually interesting to be asked to reconsider what’s accepted to be good and what’s accepted to be bad and how this leads us to different places in defining meaning. Flava Flav is no Sidney Poitier, but then again no one is either Flava Flav or Sidney Poitier, and the drive to define blackness by its more admirable examples is also a disservice to everyone.

I was so impressed after reading the book that I then did something unusual—I tracked down Gates’ email address and sent a fan letter. I don’t usually do this, but it felt like a nice gesture to let someone know when they’ve done something great. And now I’m taking my message to you, dear readers—if you have any interest in the racial cultural discourse in the United States, Double Negative should be on your reading list. Heck, if you’ve even seen Coming to America or Halle Berry or Empire, there’s something for you here as well. Accept random reading recommendations—you never know where they’ll take you.