David C. Wall

Race, Space, and Gender in Ed Bland's The Cry of Jazz

Ed Bland’s film The Cry of Jazz has been subject to increasing critical and scholarly interest since its re-release (on DVD) in 2006. Ostensibly a narrative of a musical genre, Jazz is at the same time a discourse on race relations circa the late 1950s and a meditation on African American identity. In this essay, we seek to situate this meditation within the larger social and cultural registers of both race and gender. It is our contention that, utilizing jazz as the site of struggle, Bland expresses the crisis of race relations as a crisis through gender in his presentation of a struggle for racial equality as the contest between black and white men over the possession and control of white women. Further underlining the significance of gender, black women, in a denial of their subjectivity, remain almost entirely absent from the film. The film’s sexual politics is, then, a key problematic that, as it valorizes the creative expression of the black American male experience, serves to marginalize the presence, and silence the voice, of black women. Gender, though unexamined explicitly in the film, takes on significance precisely because of Bland’s positing of jazz as the most profound expression of black American identity. If there is no place for black women within Bland’s schematic, then the “world-making” project of jazz as conceived within The Cry of Jazz is deeply compromised. When it was first released in 1959, The Cry of Jazz was intended as a filmic response to what Bland described as the “barrage of nonsense” encountered from those who “were musically illiterate, would lecture [him] about jazz music, which they couldn’t

Modern Bromance, Mikhail Bakhtin, and the Dialogics of Alterity

Employing Bakhtin’s concept of the dialogic, Wall examines the ways in which the claims to a progressive politics of gender of the contemporary “bromance” are consistently undermined by an investment in heteronormativity. Otherness, alterity, and transgression are similarly key features that serve to problematize the structures of representation while simultaneously delimiting and delegitimizing otherness. Situating the bromance in the history of Hollywood buddy films as well as touching on the transgressive nature of film comedy, the chapter outlines the ideological labour of the text through a discussion of the nature of genre while underlining the multivalence of the cinematic text. Wall discusses a number of films in detail and the discourses of disgust, desire, anxiety, spectacle, and seduction that characterize the bromance genre generally.