Race, Mission, Rememory: Disrupting the "Anachronistic Black College" as a Controlling Image in School Daze

• In Event: 29.024 - Dystopian Futures, Black Queer Sex, and Racial Rememory: New Critical Perspectives on Education Through Film

Abstract

Objectives

In this paper, I will answer two important questions: What were the conditions under which a “rememory” of Black colleges appeared through television and film, and how might we understand these depictions of Black college life as mass-mediated encounters that shape how we view these institutions today?

Perspectives

Throughout the mid-1980s and early 1990s, Black colleges were in vogue. Those of us who came of age during this time, I argue, received messages and images—implicit and explicit—of what the Black college experience might have been and could be. For instance, we were introduced to Heathcliff Huxtable’s Black college t-shirts with names such as Howard and Fisk on The Cosby Show (Carsey, Cosby, & Werner, 1984). We watched the spin-off show, A Different World (Carsey, Cosby, & Werner, 1987), which further introduced us to particular portrayals of the rituals of Black college life, and we learned more about the promise and politics of the Black college through the box office hit, School Daze (Lee, 1988). In the absence of shared national understandings of Black colleges, the impressions left by these depictions were critical and enduring. In this paper, I draw upon Toni Morrison’s notion of “rememory”—or the revisiting or remembering of memories as a distinct act of re-presentation and knowledge production (Rushdy, 1990)—to explore how School Daze used rememoring to shape popular views of Black college life.

Methods and Data Sources

The method of analysis for each paper in this session is a contextual reading of the chosen films (also the data sources) that situates them within, and explores how they reveal truths and tensions about, the social, cultural, political, and/or educational discourses that make them meaningful cultural artifacts (Ott & Mack, 2014). This particular paper pays close attention to the historical significance of historically Black colleges and universities within African American struggles for educational opportunities, social advancement, and political liberation (Gasman & Geiger, 2012; Watkins, 2001). The legacy of these institutions, along with the emergence by the 1980s of Black powerbrokers in television and film with allegiances to these institutions (e.g., Bill Cosby, Spike Lee, and Debbie Allen), speaks to my first inquiry question and provides an important backdrop for understanding the acts of rememoring that shaped depictions of Black college life in School Daze.

Results and Significance

After opening with my own rememoring of yearning to attend the fictitious Hillman College (A Different World) and Mission College (School Daze), I discuss how the rememoring by Black directors and producers responsible for A Different World and School Daze emphasized the Black college as a distinctly Black middle class space. In particular, I analyze the politics of colorism, membership in social networks like fraternities and sororities, and participation in sanctioned forms of social activism as key factors in the production of Black middle class sensibilities in these rememored spaces. I then conclude by weighing the affordances and limitations of such intensely classed rememories of Black colleges in the American public sphere.

Author

• Hilton Kelly, Davidson College