The ghetto fabulous aesthetic in contemporary black culture: Class and consumption in the Barbershop films

Roopali Mukherjee

THE GHETTO FABULOUS AESTHETIC IN

CONTEMPORARY BLACK CULTURE

Class and consumption in the

Barbershop films

With diamonds, mink, and champagne, black popular culture has, in recent years,made an audacious spectacle of conspicuous commodity consumption. Commonlytermed ‘bling’, the ‘ghetto fabulous’ aesthetic of these flashy displays hasprompted vociferous debate about the cultural meanings of contemporary blackconsumerism. Is it pathological? Subversive? Deviant? Since the nineties when itfirst appeared, the ghetto fabulous aesthetic has left its mark on a range ofcultural productions from music videos to ghetto lit, fashion to film, walking afamiliar line from defiance to bowdlerization, from raucous wild child of thestreets to co-opted product tagline.

This essay explores a new cinematic genre within this repertoire, the ghettofabulous genre of black film that has emerged to variously castigate andcongratulate black investments in ghetto fabulous bling. Appearing at the close ofthe twentieth century, the genre reflects key shifts in the political imaginary andeconomic transformations of the ‘post-soul’ era. Drawing on two such texts,Barbershop (Tim Story 2002) and Barbershop 2: Back In Business (KevinRodney Sullivan 2004), studio films with all-black casts and directed by youngAfrican-American filmmakers, this analysis focuses on their engagement withcontemporary cultural tensions over class and consumerism, their narrativecontainment of a transformative black politics, and their reconciliation of post-soulpriorities with hegemonic discourses of the market. I argue that ghetto fabulousfilms are quintessential products of the post-soul era, their allegorical priorities inpointed accord with neo-liberal individualism and the promise of classtranscendence. Performing crucial work of hegemonic cooptation, these texts offerarchetypes of the ghetto entrepreneur and black enterprise itself as a salvationalsphere for the urban poor. Reining in unruly desires, these texts draw working-classAfrican Americans into the capitalist fold, articulating a post-soul politics thatpreaches black acquiescence with hegemonic discourses of advanced capitalism.

Cultural Studies Vol. 20, No. 6 November 2006, pp. 599�629

ISSN 0950-2386 print/ISSN 1466-4348 online – 2006 Taylor & Francis

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09502380600973978

Keywords black popular culture; film analysis; post-soul politics;commodity consumption; black consumerism; advanced capitalism; raceand class

The Oxford English Dictionary added the term ‘bling bling’ to its lexicon of newwords in 2003. Taken from the pages of contemporary hip hop,1 bling bling,abbreviated in recent years to simply ‘bling’, epitomizes a specific stance onblack conspicuous consumption. Revealing a particular class trajectory, often ameteoric rise from rags to riches, bling encapsulates key aesthetic signifiers �luxury cars, designer labels, fur coats, gold and diamond jewelry.

The decade of the nineties has seen a profusion of this audacious spectacleas movie stars, pop icons, and sports figures alike flaunt these markers ofeconomic success, new signifiers of the American Dream. In particular, blackcelebrities, men and women who live on the fashionable cutting edge,routinely make stylized proclamations of their blackness through elaborateperformances of bling in music videos, on the red carpet, and in the movies.Since its appearance in the late nineties, white pop icons like Madonna, ParisHilton, and soccer superstar, David Beckham have mined its au courantelements for their performative repertoire, but the appeal of bling remains itsshowy ‘ghetto fabulous’ stance, its elevation of the black urban experience asultimate crucible of cool. That is, the audacious poses of bling serve, morethan markers of class emulation, as embodied substantiation of the fabulousnessof the ghetto, emphatic affirmations of working class, urban, black life.Answering capitalism with uber-capitalistic excess, bling performs specificallyracial work, positing blackness as social asset and the ghetto as reservoir ofrebellious creativity and stylish daring.

As Christopher Holmes Smith has argued of the iconic status of the ‘hiphop mogul’ within American culture (2003, pp. 69�97), the culturalsignifications of ghetto fabulous bling illuminate with eloquence the discursivecontradictions of what many now term the ‘post-soul’ era.2 Revealing a rangeof ideological tensions that inhere within, the ghetto fabulous aesthetic proffersan object of rich analysis about racial identities at the close of the twentiethcentury, about conspicuous consumption and class mobility, and theimplications of advanced capitalism upon what some have perceived as thedeath of civil rights.3

As the nineties progressed, the ghetto fabulous aesthetic left its mark on arange of media and popular cultural productions � New Jack cinema, hip hopmusic, rap videos, ghetto lit, and so on.4 Hip hop artists like Mystikal (1998)and Dr Dre (2001) extolled its virtues in rhyme. Fashion labels like Sean‘P. Diddy’ Comb’s Sean Jean and Kimora Lee Simmons’ Baby Phat traded on itschic urban flair, while style critics pondered its influence and appeal (Davis2003, Kamp 2004, pp. 255�271). Art shows and corporate advertising

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campaigns riffed playfully on its varied significations,5 as celebrity tabloids andcable networks like MTV made the public spectacle of ghetto fabulous bling anational pastime.

In the decade since its appearance then, the ghetto fabulous aesthetic hastraveled a familiar journey from defiance to bowdlerization and cooptation �from raucous wild child of the streets to co-opted product tagline. Like hip-hop music as a whole (Neal 1997, pp. 117� 135), ghetto fabulousness, aquintessential product of the post-soul era, survives as a meticulously groomedsignifier of youth rebellion, evidence of rebelliousness itself transformed into aformulaic, and profitable, market commodity.

As Dick Hebdige has suggested, ghetto fabulousness evidences the‘continual process of recuperation’ through which elements of a spectacularsubculture are ‘incorporated as a diverting spectacle within the dominantmythology from which it in part emanates’ (1979, pp. 92� 99). As the poses ofghetto fabulousness become codified and comprehensible, they are eithercontained through ideological repression or transformed into commodityform, reintroduced in the market for consumption by those who had producedthem in the first place (p. 96).

At the close of the nineties then, cultural productions of the ghettofabulous aesthetic offer a case for careful study, not only of the ‘hiddenmessages inscribed in code on the glossy surfaces of style’ (Hebdige 1979,p. 18), but also of the contradictory forces of cultural cooptation that respondto them. If hegemonic power requires the consent of the dominated majority,and hence, can never be permanently exercised by the same alliance of rulingfactions, the acquiescence of the masses is likewise never fixed or guaranteed.It must constantly be won, reproduced, and sustained. In this sense, thecultural career of the ghetto fabulous aesthetic offers a useful look intocontemporary forces of hegemonic cooptation, a key means by which theacquiescence of the masses is secured. Here, the cooptive work of popularculture, and in particular, black popular culture is instructive, tracinggeometries of class and race within hegemonic tensions of advancedcapitalism.

Notes on post-soul culture

Forty years after the Southern civil rights movement had danced on JimCrow’s grave, the discourse of civil rights survived principally in the service ofneo-liberal masters. By the nineties, the plaintive blues of non-violentintegration and the fearsome wrath of black nationalism had both beenabsorbed and defanged by dominant political narratives that read them asvestiges of the racial past, evidence of a ‘politically correct’ malaise that wasthe ignominious legacy of the sixties (Mukherjee 2006).

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Each election season served up fresh reminders of failing inner-city schoolsand ‘unteachable’ black youth, as political candidates played mercilessly onwhite guilt and fear. As middle class African Americans moved to the suburbs,rising up the ranks as middle-management tokens in the meritocracy, astaggering number of black men sat warehoused in prisons and otherinstitutions of carceral control. Demonizing immigrants for ‘stealing Americanjobs’ and African Americans for cashing in on ‘melanin merit’, neo-conservative policy pundits dominated network news programs positioningpoor blacks as a foil for the eviscerated white American Dream.

Sounding the eerie silence of retreat from racial justice, white sympathy-fatigue metastasized to racial resentment and wrath as a series of assaults tookshape within cultural imaginaries of the decade. They took aim at legalvictories hard-won during the sixties, and focused grassroots efforts onorganizing populist attacks on welfare, affirmative action, and immigrantrights. As these assaults gained in political strength and visibility, publicdiscourses revealed unimagined reversals of civil rights ‘truths’, premised onthe logics of neo-liberalism, and denying their role in neo-racisms of thenineties.

Part of the context for these shifts is provided by massive transformationsin the American economy that began in the seventies. De-industrialization,foreign competition, and plant closings in many sectors, including the hard-hitautomobile and steel industries over the course of the eighties raisedunemployment rates, and replaced stable, well-paying careers with part-time, low-wage jobs. Together with escalating rates of drug dependence andincarceration, these shifts took their greatest toll on working class AfricanAmericans, affecting young black males disproportionately and in hugenumbers.

As black Americans bifurcated into upper class uplift and working classblight, neo-liberal discourses that had gained acceptance in the context ofRonald Reagan’s eight-year Presidency reinterpreted the ‘failures’ of liberalGreat Society programs, claiming that ‘measures intended to decrease povertyhad actually increased inequality, that attempts to assist the disadvantaged hadactually worsened their disadvantage, [and] that controls on minimum wageshurt the worse paid because they destroy jobs’ (Rose 1996, p. 51). Emergentethics of reactionary individualisms placed responsibility for an individual’seconomic viability entirely on his/her shoulders creating hated figures of the‘welfare queen’, the ‘quota queen’, and the black teenage mother as indolent‘baby factory’ (Hancock 2004, Sparks 2003). And renewing Horatio Algermyths about self-empowerment and thrift, these critiques consolidated apowerful voting bloc of anxious white males who claimed a newfound ‘victim-hood’, a plaintive ‘me-too-ism’ as Richard Dyer puts it (1988, pp. 44� 65) tousher in waves of racist and racialized assaults on affirmative action, socialwelfare, and immigrant rights.


As these shifts in public consciousness percolated in this, the post-soul era,black conservatives like Ward Connerly collected their dues by cozying up toneo-liberal challenges to social justice, rewarded with a bounty of privilegesfor their willingness to be recruited as racially-correct voiceovers in racistassaults of the decade. In contrast, working class African Americans emergedvilified in the national imaginary for their ‘toxic reliance’ upon unfair programsfor redistributive justice. And in the movies, middle class strivers took theirplace as docile and well-behaved helpers, calling out troublesome Others inheroic servitude to white male authority in the mythic meritocracy (Mukherjee2006).

Striking a discordant chord within this milieu, cultural interventions of thehip hop generation produced artists, poets, and filmmakers who emerged asexplorers at the fragile frontiers of a new black politics. To the poorest andmost disenfranchised of these voices, the civil rights movement was marred bydismal failures. As Manning Marable has noted, ‘‘‘lower class blacks’’ [were]virtually unaffected by civil rights legislation, affirmative action, and federalgovernment initiatives to diminish unemployment’ (1984, pp. 176� 177). Inthis context, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks lingered as distant icons,disappearing into an irrelevant past, as the victories of the sixties � the end oflegal segregation, the growth and suburbanization of the black middle class,and the hegemonic ascent of discourses of multiculturalism � moved apacewith sharp declines in the socio-economic circumstances of the majority ofblack Americans. By the nineties, black college enrollments were dropping,and real incomes for black workers showed precipitous declines (Aronowitz2000, Lyne 2000).

The resistant subcultures of hip hop took shape over these decades in avariety of public venues � on the sound stages of MTV, in spoken wordsound-offs in ‘underground’ black enclaves, on ‘urban radio’ nationwide.Together with the fury and frustration that found expression in the narrativesof ghetto-centric films of the early nineties � New Jack City (1991), Boyz ‘N theHood (1991), Juice (1992), South Central (1992), Menace II Society (1993), DeadPresidents (1995) � hip hop texts issued searing indictments against Reaganistrollbacks, systemic police brutality, and racist structural neglect as they hadblighted African American neighborhoods and communities (Grant 2004,Guerrero 1993, Massood 2003).

As hip hop culture and its marketplace developed, a ‘quantum paradox’emerged in the sense that the genre created space for a range of blackideologies, ‘from the most anti-white to the most pro-capitalist, without everhaving to account for the contradiction’ (Tate 2003, p. 7). As hip hop musicand styles gained a massive cross-racial audience, they began to be rapidlycoopted by the mandates of commercial viability. Within a few years, the bulkof recording and studio contracts were earmarked for those of this generationwho championed black commodity fetishism and ‘gettin’ mine’ as the only


plausible responses to entrenched black disempowerment (Neal 1997,pp. 117�135). Collapsing the dynamic heterogeneity of the hip hopgeneration, the public face of post-soul culture grew synonymous withperformers who would syncopate the fighting anthems of Black Power to thedrumbeats of the marketplace. These voices celebrated black superstardom inmusic and sports as markers of the African American Dream, championing anew paradigm of race protest that focused much of its wrath on the politics of‘playa hatin’’.

Analogous with cultural manifestations of The Official Buppie Handbook inthe eighties (Bynoe 2004, Ellis 1989, Staples & Staples 1985), the ghettofabulous aesthetic emerged over this period as a guide to identifying andemulating the consumptive tastes of the black glitterati. Black youth took theirplace at the forefront of this emulation economy, spending more, on average,than other American teens. As recent reports suggest, in 2004, black teensbetween the ages of 12 and 19 spent more on clothing, fine jewelry, computersoftware, and athletic footwear relative to such patterns among all otherteenagers (Brown & Washton 2004, Magazine Publishers of America 2004).Likewise, the Selig Center for Economic Growth reported a sharp rise in blackbuying power � from $585 billion in 2000 to $723 billion in 2004 � butcautioned these increases did not necessarily signal greater black wealth(Holmes June 2005).

These trends are instructive in light of nationwide earnings indicators thatsuggest, for example, that in 2003, African Americans took home an estimated$656 billion in earned income, the highest levels in history. A significantportion of this increase is attributed to the changing economic circumstances ofthe black middle and upper classes. For despite unprecedented levels of earnedincome, as a whole, black households remained lowest among all races interms of median income, earning on average $30,000 per year (DeNavas-Waltet al. 2004, p. 3).

Similarly, as the 2000 US census reported, in comparison to whites whoowned 88.3 percent of American businesses, blacks ran a scant 1.6 percent,significantly below the 5.9 percent owned by Asians and 3.9 percent byHispanics (Survey of Business Owners 2002). Thus, despite the rapt attentionthat a handful of hip hop moguls, talk show tycoons, and publishing magnateshave enjoyed in the tabloid and popular press (Holmes Smith 2003, pp. 69�97), the lived circumstances of the vast majority of African Americans aremarked by economic stagnation or worse. Indeed, the rise of the ghettofabulous aesthetic points to the widening distance separating the middle andupper classes from the black poor. Showy displays of fetishistic consumption bywealthy blacks, as nationwide trends suggest, have little bearing upon theconsumptive habits of the vast majority of African Americans, shut out by thevery standards of capitalist structures that the bling aesthetic celebrates.


Thus, ghetto fabulous � its appointment of new standards of cool, itsproliferations within popular media, its diverting spectacle within the culturalimaginary � emerges less as a meter of real commodity consumption, andmore as a reference to the work of blackness within hegemonic tensions of thepost-soul era. While it tells a familiar story of sub-cultural resistance andhegemonic cooptation, the career of ghetto fabulousness reveals a range ofprecisely racial engagements with advanced capitalism.6 It offers a glimpse ofcontemporary modalities of cooptation, and the imbrications of race and classwithin them. If post-soul culture is marked by increased scrutiny on AfricanAmerican claims to full citizenship, and racist attacks on their demands formeaningful participation in the politico-economic sphere, the cultural career ofghetto fabulous is a useful lens through which we might explore black culturalcooptation as lietmotif of the post-soul era.

The ghetto fabulous genre of black film

Within the cultural repertoire of this era, a series of Hollywood texts, studiofilms featuring all-black casts and directed by young African Americanfilmmakers, emerged to variously castigate and congratulate black investmentsin ghetto fabulous bling. I draw on two such films, Barbershop (Tim Story,2002) and its sequel, Barbershop 2: Back In Business (Kevin Rodney Sullivan,2004), reading them as exemplars of what I term the ‘ghetto fabulous genre’ ofblack film.

Light-hearted tales of working class black life in the urban ghetto, thesetexts mark a self-conscious move away from somber race dramas thatcharacterized the New Jack aesthetic of the nineties. In deliberate contrast tosystemic and trenchant critiques at the core of ghetto-centric films, early textsof the ghetto fabulous genre presented the New Jack aesthetic as farce,parodying both urban blight and bling excess. Thus, incorporating elements ofscrewball comedy and minstrel farce, Tamra Davis’s CB4 (1993), RustyCundieff’s Fear of a Black Hat (1994), and Paris Barclay’s Don’t Be a Menace toSouth Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood (1996) are pointed inter-textual parodies of precisely those dogged portrayals of urban poverty andbesieged masculinity that had made ghetto-centric films deeply moving andpolitically potent.

As the nineties progressed, the major studios turned away from gritty racefilms in search of greener pastures, and in their place, a series of bourgeois‘soul dramas’ appeared.7 The popularity of these texts, starting with theblockbuster hit, Waiting To Exhale (Forest Whitaker, 1995), likewise signaled agrowing cultural ennui among middle class blacks about anti-Reagan screeds asthey had taken shape in the verses of gangsta rap and the narratives of ghetto-centric films. Thus, Love Jones (Theodore Witcher, 1997), Soul Food (George


Tillman, Jr., 1997), Hav Plenty (Christopher Scott Cherot, 1997), Woo (Daisyvon Scherler Mayer, 1998), The Best Man (Malcolm D. Lee, 1999), The Wood(Rick Famuyiwa, 1999), Brown Sugar (Rick Famuyiwa, 2002), each is a talethat engages specifically bourgeois, domestic concerns � the tribulations ofblack heterosexual romance, coming-of-age tales that forge middle classaspirations among black youth, inter-generational conflicts that are mitigatedall in the family.

Keeping pace with these changes, the ghetto fabulous genre slowly shiftedgears as well, moving away from its previous focus on black-on-black farce andtoward a series of generic urban comedies with a social conscience.8 Inscribinga post-soul fabulousness to the ghetto and its denizens, these texts attribute aspecific value and function to black commerce and consumerism. Performingcrucial work of cultural cooptation, ghetto fabulous films ascribe a nostalgicallure to working class life, one that celebrates black business spaces assalvational spheres, sites of refuge and renewal. Moreover, they condemn thehedonistic consumerist excesses indulged by hip hop moguls, rap stars, andcable shows like MTV’s Cribs , and instead champion black entrepreneurial zealas a key mechanism for political transformation and personal fulfillment. Thus,containing the audacious impulse that had provided bling with so much of itsspectacular power, these urban comedies celebrate a ghetto fabulousness of adifferent sort, their allegorical priorities in pointed accord with neo-liberalindividualism and the promise of class transcendence.

Illuminating the tortured fronts of contemporary class warfare, the ghettofabulous genre, like all cinematic genres, etches national desires and cautionarynightmares. Telling portraits of their ideological milieu, these filmic textschastise working class conspicuous consumption as irresponsible and perverse.Playing its part in a familiar tale of bowdlerization and cooptation, the ghettofabulous genre reveals how blackness operates within the visual economy ofadvanced capitalism. Substantiating the terms of what Hebdige has termed the‘continual process of recuperation’ (1979, p. 92), these texts illuminate themodalities of contemporary hegemonic cooptation as African Americans arebrought into the capitalist fold, reining in unruly desires and conforming blackpost-soul politics to the material realities of capitalist technology andeconomics (Mulvey 1993, pp. 3�20).

Inviting black stand-up comics and hip hop performers with establishedmarquee values to star in them, these films capitalized on rich cross-marketsynergies, drawing in racially mixed audiences, both urban and suburban. Towit, making strong showings for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), State StreetPictures, and rap star Ice Cube’s film production company, Cube Vision,which collaborated to produce them, both the films I consider here surpassedthe ‘axiomatic $30 million domestic glass ceiling’, the box office figure blackfilms are assumed to rarely exceed (Mitchell 2004).


The first in the series, Barbershop (2002) earned more than $20 million inits opening weekend. Staking out the top spot in domestic box office sales at itsdebut, the film made more than $75 million over its theater run in the UnitedStates. Encouraged by these returns, MGM executives announced the companywould ‘capitalize on its success with Barbershop ’ by releasing a series of black-oriented urban comedies (www.imdb.com). Two years later, Barbershop 2:Back In Business (2004) debuted with a strong $24 million in ticket sales, andrepeating its predecessor’s performance, ranked first among new releasesduring its opening weekend. The film earned nearly $65 million over itstheater run on 2700 screens, a theater count record for an ‘urban feature’.And as head of distribution for MGM, Erik Lomis reported, while ‘blacksmade up almost all the opening weekend audience for the first film, non-blackcrowds accounted for a third of viewers at Barbershop 2, a sign the sequelenjoyed more crossover appeal than the original’ (Germaine 2004).

Delivering cheaply produced goods for a relatively handsome profit, partof the reason for the emergence and durability of the ghetto fabulous genre iscertainly its box office appeal. But, as this analysis shows, the appeal of thesefilms also points to their engagement with contemporary cultural tensionsabout class and consumerism, their narrative containment of the promise of atransformative black politics, and their reconciliation of post-soul prioritieswith hegemonic discourses of the market. It is to these themes that this essaynow turns.

A pathological black consumerism

Calvin’s Barbershop, a ‘neighborhood institution’ located at 79th andExchange on the south side of Chicago, is owned and operated by CalvinPalmer, Jr. (Ice Cube), a working class African American who has inheritedthe shop from his recently deceased father. For Calvin, an expectant father inhis early thirties, the barbershop is a burden, an albatross around his neck that,as he laments, serves only ‘to kill a man’s dreams’.

At our first meeting, Calvin is downstairs in the cluttered basement of hismodest home. It is close to 7 o’clock on a wintry Saturday morning, andCalvin is fiddling with the wiring on a sound mixing board. In the two yearssince his father’s death, Calvin has tried his hand at a number of quick-richschemes � a T-shirt company, a Herbalife vitamins agency � and each venturehas sunk, squandering small business loans and grants he has received from thelocal bank. His newest endeavor, converting the basement into a soundrecording studio, so he ‘can get someone to rent [it] out, make a platinum CD,and we get paid’, appears on shaky ground as well, as Calvin nearlyelectrocutes himself rewiring the mixing board.


Despite these setbacks, as he explains to Jennifer (Jaszmin Lewis), hisyoung pregnant wife, Calvin dreams about ‘gettin’ paid and livin’ large’.Jennifer watches bemused, as Calvin unfolds a glossy picture of televisionmaven Oprah Winfrey’s guesthouse, a lavish eight-bedroom, two-and-a-halfbath annexe to the main house on her 164-acre property in northern Indiana.9

‘And this is just the guesthouse!’ Calvin exclaims, the opulence of Winfrey’sestate, his ghetto fabulous pie in the sky.

In contrast, as Calvin learns soon after he inherits it, the barbershop is amoney pit. His father, who ultimately remained more neighborhoodphilanthropist than hardnosed businessman, has left the shop in seriousarrears. And Calvin, distracted by his insta-rich fantasies, has failed to pay hisproperty taxes and now faces the prospect of the bank foreclosing on the shop.Feeling at a dead end and frustrated that he cannot ‘do his own thing’, Calvinagrees to sell the family business to the neighborhood loan shark, LesterWallace (Keith David) for $20,000 in cash.

Wallace is a slick parasitic figure, an echo of Youngblood Priest of theSuperfly era, who hustles peonage in place of prosperity, a short-lived high forenduring dependency. His plan, as he reveals to Calvin after the deal is done, isto close the barbering operation that has been in place for forty years andconvert Calvin’s Barbershop into a ‘gentlemen’s club’. ‘Oh, its gonna becalled, ‘The Barbershop’. I’ll keep that same theme going with the girlsdressed like little barbers’, he explains with an unctuous smile. ‘And you cancome in and they’ll give you a trim. And then, you can get some trim’.

At the start of the narrative then, we find the protagonist, Calvin PalmerJr. battling a familiar set of desires. In contrast with the ghetto fabulousfantasies that occupy his mind � opulence, luxury, and class transcendence onpar with Oprah Winfrey all while doing his own thing � there is instead, thetedium of managing a business that runs at a dismal loss. There are overduetaxes, bank debts, and obligations that come with a new marriage and agrowing family. There is the neighborhood, blighted by drugs, unemployment,and neglect, where, for Calvin, ‘things are getting worse everyday too’.And there are doubts about barbering itself, its merits as a ‘respectableoccupation’, a career, as Calvin puts it, that ‘nobody in here wants . . . for therest of their lives anyway’.

Thus, Calvin starts out a protagonist seduced by the allure of ghettofabulous bling. He is a hustler without a hustle, a stereotypical working classfigure desperate for a taste of the good life but lacking the means to achieve it.But in place of a formulaic rags-to-riches turn, the narrative focuses instead onrehabilitating the wayward hero out of his pathological desires, a slowevolution from dreams of wastrel bling to ghetto fabulous entrepreneur. Inother words, a central didacticism of the Barbershop series, the original and thesequel alike, is the ideological reformation of working class African Americans,


dissuading them from irresponsible commercialism and urging them towardcapitalist enterprise and toil.

Indeed, as several scenes in the films reveal, the Barbershop seriesexcoriates the ghetto fabulous aesthetic. Thus, for example, there is RickyNash (Michael Ealy), the dour, secretive, two-time felon, whom Calvin hasgone out on a limb for and hired as one of the barbers in the old shop. In amoment of rare lucidity, Ricky exclaims:

We don’t need reparations! We need restraint! . . . Some discipline!Don’t go out and buy a Range Rover when you livin’ with your mama!And pay your mama some rent! And can we please, please, please try andteach our kids something other than the Chronic album? And please, blackpeople, try and be on time for something other than ‘free before eleven’at the club!

Likewise, the garrulous Eddie (Cedric The Entertainer), an ‘old school’veteran from the days when the barbershop was steered by Calvin’s father,shakes his head ruefully at the new generation that surrounds him. Theproblem with black youth, as Eddie sees it, is that they ‘sit up there watchin’too much TV, listenin’ to that Jigga Ray and all them folks up in there.Hippity-hoppity nonsense. And don’t know nothing’. As the crowd leans in towatch Eddie’s technique with a pearl-backed straight razor on a waitingpatron, the scene is solemn. It is a history lesson for Calvin and his cohort, areminder that the hip hop generation with its foolish investments in ghettofabulous bling marks a dismal shift in the black work ethic, a cultural declinefrom the skilled craftsmen of history to boys who ‘sit around in a FUBU shirtwith [their] drawers hanging all out’.10

These contrasts champion a reformed work ethic that separates boys frommen, posers from providers. The secret to success, by these admonitions, is instriving to specific standards of commerce and a nostalgic return to anundespairing life of thrift. The answer, as these voices demand, is‘inconspicuous consumption’. Much as in David Kuchta’s account of maleconsumers in seventeenth and eighteenth century England where ‘dressingdown’ as opposed to women’s ‘dressing up’ was a means of signaling sobriety,modesty, and responsibility (1996, pp. 54�78), here again, consumptivedesire emerges as the standard by which the right to political subjectivity ismeasured. Ricky’s admonition, like Eddie’s, operates as a key modality ofideological control, setting up distinctions between rational consumption incontrast with a pathologized working class consumerism, antithetical topolitical resistance and ultimately, politically powerless.

Attacking irresponsible consumerism, inadequate parenting, and a flaggingwork ethic at once, these narrative preferences echo the terms of fiercedebates that African Americans have engaged in recent years over the political


implications and social value of ghetto fabulous consumption. Offering a rangeof testimonies, these voices have interpreted this latest avatar of blackconsumptive excess in a variety of ways � from a modern version of the ‘blackis beautiful’ ethic to ‘death on display, gussied up to appeal to poor folksdesperate for a taste of the good life’ (Fulwood 2001). Here, comedian andtelevision icon Bill Cosby’s recent blistering assaults find ghetto fabulouspreferences for high-priced sneakers over Hooked on Phonics tapes at cause inthe putatively static circumstances of black working class families (Cosby 2004)while his detractors, in vociferous opposition, find engaged critiques of‘materialism, consumptive desire, personal choice, moral aspiration, and socialconscience’ within working class consumptive culture itself (Dyson 2005).

These oppositions trace well-worn debates over whether black consump-tion is pathological or subversive. As Regina Austin has noted, blackconsumption has elicited, in the main, two sets of critical assessments thatboth associate it with deviance. The first interprets black consumption asalienation, that is, blacks consume as a ‘means for compensating humiliationsand disappointments they incur by reason of being black, exploited, degraded,and oppressed’ (1995, p. 238). The other approach, Austin suggests, findsresistance in black consumption. Here, the argument goes, consumption is ‘asite of struggle to exploit the transformative potential of commodities byrevealing the repressed or negated contradictions that underlie theirproduction and distribution’ (p. 239).

But, as Robert Weems has shown, assigning a political character to blackconsumerism may not be a facile matter at all. Weems argues that blackAmerican investments in commodity consumption have taken unique andsurprising turns over the years. Thus, for example, the mobilization of buyingpower among blacks during the decades leading up to the civil rights struggleof the sixties served in unexpected ways to enable grassroots activism forredistributive justice for African Americans. In fact, as Weems suggests, thecontradictions of consumer capitalism created key openings in the fight to endsegregation as blacks, unwelcome and unwanted as citizens, were neverthelesssought by American businesses as part of the profitable ‘soul market’ that wasemerging in the sixties (1998, pp. 70�77).

Weems’ insights are comparable to those we find in Lizabeth Cohen’swork who argues that in the quarter century following World War II, aconsensus developed around the ideal of the United States as a ‘consumers’Republic’. Taking shape as ‘almost a civil religion’, this ideal was based on theconviction that an economy and culture built on mass consumption woulddeliver widespread prosperity as well as fulfill long-sought American goals ofclassless egalitarianism and democratic freedom (2003, pp. 127� 129). Overthese years, the ‘Golden Age’ of American affluence, commodity consumptionwas imagined in dominant discourses as the means by which American societywould be leveled and unified. Thus, the pursuit of prosperity defined more


than just the nation’s economy; it became a basic component of Americancitizenship (pp. 10� 11).

As Cohen points out, the integration of ‘working class people into themainstream mass consumer, mass cultural world of postwar America did notundermine a distinctive working class politics’ (Cohen & Stave 2004,pp. 231�256). Instead, class-based organizing forces � industrial unionism,the National Democratic Party, and so on � built on common culturalexperiences that workers shared, producing greater investments among theworking classes in institutions like labor unions. Thus, the integration of theworking classes into commodity culture, far from undermining working classpolitics and activism, engendered a range of unexpected consequences,including class-consciousness and solidarity among the working classes.

As Americans have watched every aspect of their lives from religion toromance, surrogacy to security recast as market commodities, AfricanAmerican commercialism has moved apace. The rise of ghetto fabulousness,its signifiers replete with race and class meaning, is necessarily lodged withinthe narratives of these larger shifts. But like black and working classconsumerisms of past historical moments, the emulative spectacle of ghettofabulousness is not easily pegged as simply deviance or subversion.

For some, ghetto fabulous consumption emerges as an archetype ofworking class commodity fetishism.11 As Thorstein Veblen (1899) arguedmore than a century ago of the emulative desires of the middle classes, theirdrive to conspicuous consumption key to membership in the leisure class, thebling aesthetic reveals that those who have not had access to wealth and luxuryinvariably make a gaudy show of their new possessions. They literally weartheir consumptive desires on their sleeves. In this sense, ghetto fabulousconsumption may be read as a substantiation of the relations between‘pleasure, performance, and participation in prosperity’ (Austin 1995, p. 239),of the pleasure of fetishistic consumption upon which capitalist economiesdepend.

Proving one’s taste in ostentation and excess then, serves as a ‘check forracial authenticity’ (Pough 2004, pp. 146� 147), working to ‘keep it real’(Basu 1998). Vouching for racial belonging within categories of black andurban, ghetto fabulous is a marker of vernacular blackness, its stylizedaccoutrements authenticating the racial identity of the black working classes.So doing, it makes possible a class politics of intra-racial othering. That is,through its glib performance, bling serves to slap back middle class censure, toretaliate against ready distinctions between acceptable consumption, thatwhich is associated with middle class racial uplift, and deviant consumption, acoarse and demeaning working class consumption that affirms the worst blackstereotypes (Austin 1995, p. 236).

Here, as Weems has asserted, the dubious distinction of being the onlygroup in the United States to have once been designated as ‘slaves’ fuels the


view among African Americans that consumerism can serve as a means todistance oneself from a ‘degraded past’ (2000, p. 166). The ‘compensatoryfantasics’ of female consumerism that Mary Louise Roberts (1998) hasexplored are illuminating here. As she suggests, in the face of the law,medicine, the church, and the state, which operated in the eighteenth andnineteenth centuries to contain women and police female sexuality,commodity consumption among women communicated ‘an unbridled energy,a kind of last-resort pleasure’ (p. 827). As American society has, for centuries,shaped and limited the consumption of black communities through acombination of structural factors, everyday social practices, and symbolicmeans (Chin 2001, p. 33), African Americans have responded by projectingpoliticized aspirations onto commodities, placing great conviction in thecapacity of commodities to improve their lives (Mullins 1999, p. 189).

The consumption of luxury goods by the black glitterati of the post-soulera, and the emulation of these habits by the black working classes thus, signifya pleasurable consolation prize. Excluded from the realm of politics and socialpower, the ghetto fabulous aesthetic points to African Americans indulging inconspicuous consumption as their ticket to the American Dream, their wayinto the American polity. Adding a provocative page to the tortuous saga ofblack consumerism, a tale that weaves back and forth over ‘blackness-as-commodity’ and ‘blacks-as-consumers’, ghetto fabulous is a modern version ofan old conjuring trick, the performance of political subjectivity throughcommodity consumption.

For others, hip hop culture together with its audacious ghetto fabulouspose opens up subversive plays on black identity. Here, the argument goes, itis often only through personal fetishistic consumption that individuals are able,even if partially and incompletely, to ‘overcome the reifications of socialrelationships premised on inalienability, and be or become something orsomeone else’ (Johnson 1998, p. 233). In this sense, ghetto fabulous is ameans, however partial and incomplete, to ‘do one’s own thing’, to repudiate‘collectively fixed or inalienable identities’ (pp. 218, 235), viz., the wretchedof the earth, public enemy number one, the underclass, and so on. Opening upreified racial identities to question and repudiation, ghetto fabulous muddiesthe interpellative field as black popular cultural icons emerge, at once, as racemen and hip hop moguls, ghetto boys and chairmen of the board.

Likewise, the bling aesthetic makes specifically racial claims on commoditymarkers of white cultural capital � Cadillac, Harry Winston, Louis Vuitton.Thus, assigning resistant meanings to abiding signifiers of white affluence, itdisrupts the racial exclusivity of white access to luxury, wealth, andconsumerist excess. Introducing elements of play and pastiche, moreover,bling engages with street economies of knock-offs and counterfeits, dislodgingready standards for authenticating the ‘real thing’ against ‘designer fakes’ andopening up the high-end of commodity culture to poachers, freeloaders, and


tricksters. At once vulgar and chic, titillating and threatening, ghetto fabulousbling thus, emerges as a polysemic signifier in post-soul culture, revealingmultifarious engagements of race and class in the late capitalist moment.

Whether or not we are able to agree, once and for all, on the politicalcharacter of post-soul black consumerism, it is clear which side of thesedebates the filmic scripts of the Barbershop series choose. Pathologizing workingclass consumptive desire as irrational and ultimately reckless, these texts arenotably silent about entrenched structural inequities that black Americans hadpainstakingly brought to national attention through decades of civil rightsstruggle. As conservative critic, Roger Clegg notes with satisfaction, ‘what isremarkable � and refreshing � about Barbershop , a movie that AfricanAmericans wrote produced, directed, and star in, [is that] there is not onesingle line in which anyone blames . . . white racism as the reason for the trialsand tribulations’ of blacks in the contemporary ghetto (4 November 2002,p. 20). For Clegg, it is ‘a very good sign’ that African Americans themselvesacknowledge that, ‘the principal obstacles to continued black progress, indeed,are internal, not external’ (p. 21). And it is in this sense that the Barbershopseries emerges as a quintessential voice of the post-soul era.

As Angela Dillard and others have argued about the role of middle classAfrican Americans in vitiating structural critiques made familiar by civil rightsstruggles (Cose 1993, Dillard 2001), multicultural conservatism in the post-soul era enlists allies across class lines. As the Barbershop films suggest in theforegoing scenes, black consumerism sustains vitriolic attack from workingclass blacks themselves. If Dillard’s work revealed the collusions of the blackmiddle class within the rise of a neo-conservative groundswell in the nineties,cinematic texts of the ghetto fabulous genre suggest that in the post-soul era,voices from the black working class join in these assaults, credible witnesseswho pathologize the subversive signifiers of working class style and politics.

These filmic critiques serve to underscore the irrationality of working classconsumerist excess as well as to smooth over ideological tensions between raceand advanced capitalism. They deny the workings of capital in the systemicsubordination of African Americans, and instead, proffer capitalist enterprise asthe engine that will, most reliably and effectively, drive black politico-economic progress. Key to these cooptive labors, we find working classAfrican Americans themselves reining in black consumptive desire, bringingthe neo-liberal politics of ‘responsibilization’ (Burchell 1996, pp. 29� 30) tothe post-soul ghetto. Promoting an ‘enterprise culture’ in all forms of conduct,they encourage working class African Americans to overlook, and moreover,deny the collusions of capital in the exploitation of black labor and the stiflingof black enterprise.

Thus, a key element of the cooptive service of the Barbershop series is thatit works toward a consensus on black consumerism that depoliticizes AfricanAmerican critiques of capitalism. Ultimately working to normalize neo-liberal


standards of responsibilization and enterprise, the protagonist, Calvin makes acritical metamorphosis over the course of the narrative from bungling dreamerto provider patriarch12 much as the ex-felon-turned-barber, Ricky endures aprocess of maturation from nihilistic ghetto thug to G.E.D. graduate, someonewho ‘give[s] a damn about [his] life’.

In this progression, cinematic texts like the Barbershop films have no choicebut to muzzle the resistant ethos of black commodity consumption. Containingthe destabilizing potential of such showy spectacles, these films highlight thecollusion of working class voices in shoring up a consensus on black economicdiscipline in the post-soul era. As these voices seal off the unruly semiotics ofghetto fabulous displays, they toe the hegemonic line.13 Equating inconspic-uous consumption with political maturity, these texts celebrate capitalistendeavor as the key to political empowerment, denying in the process thepotential for a black politics geared to fundamental transformation � a‘complete shift in the pattern of ownership, the expansion of labor rights, andthe democratization of the relations of production within US society’ (Marable1995, pp. 71�89).

A post-soul politics of compassionate capitalism

The black barbershop, like the black church, Melissa Harris-Lacewell argues,remains a hallowed cultural space where black political subjectivity is nurturedand cultivated (2004, p. xxi). Exalting the subaltern sphere of theneighborhood barbershop, Eddie, the veteran barber in Calvin’s Barbershopexclaims: ‘This is a place where a black man means something! Cornerstone ofthe neighborhood! Our own country club! . . . If we [black men] can’t talkstraight in a barbershop, then where can we talk straight? Nowhere else’.

Referencing the iconic status that the barbershop and its female twin, thebeauty parlor, have traditionally enjoyed in African American culture, Eddie’saccount echoes those we find in black literature, film, and television14 thatconstruct the barbershop as a site of racial refuge, a ‘culturally veiled space’where ‘blackness is both a necessary and sufficient condition for membership’(Harris-Lacewell 2004, p. 170). In these ‘hush harbors’,15 African Americanshave historically constituted a covert black public sphere, where unhamperedpublic exchange is premised on the fact that the space itself is beyond the reachof whites.

Challenging the exclusionary violence of bourgeois public spaces, thephysical spaces of black barber and beauty shops, like the street, the school, thechurch, and the city, mark themselves as venerable ‘spheres of critical practiceand visionary politics’ (Black Public Sphere Collective 1995, p. 3). Thesecrucibles of moral and civic opinion, abuzz with the rhythmic banter ofthe political and the profane, serve in critical ways to sustain a ‘black


counterpublic’ both as a reaction to the exclusionary policies of whiteinstitutions, and as an assertion of the value of everyday talk among AfricanAmericans who are otherwise stratified and separated by race (Harris-Lacewell2004, pp. 3� 11).

It is interesting to note then, that the first film in the Barbershop seriesspurred controversy soon after it opened, focusing public attention onprecisely this iconic stature of the black barbershop. The debate focused onscenes in the film where the sharp-witted Eddie referred to civil rights icon,Martin Luther King Jr. as a ‘ho’, who got his ‘freak on with anybody andeverybody’, and Rosa Parks who, for Eddie, ‘didn’t do nothin’ but sit her tiredass down’. The comments drew demands from Reverends Jesse Jackson and AlSharpton for a formal apology from MGM, which the studio made, and threatof boycotts unless the offensive scenes were cut from the home release editionsof the film, which the studio ignored.

For a number of black voices, the problem with the scenes was not thatEddie had belittled the work of civil rights heroes but that he had done so inmixed company, knowing that ‘white people were present’ (Sachs 2002). Thescene was troublesome, by these accounts, because it divulged racial secrets tooutsiders (Lawrence 2004, Tubbs 2002). In a cultural climate of neo-liberalassaults on civil rights gains, Eddie’s voluble critiques, they argued, nudgedapproval for racist impulses among whites in the audience.

As Harris-Lacewell argues, the controversy crystallizes the status ofthe barbershop in black popular consciousness and the populist value of thesubaltern counterpublic that coalesces within (2004, p. 253). Ultimately, sheargues, it serves to remind us that political views among blacks remain widelydiverse, and that the public sphere that cultural institutions like the blackbarbershop enable remain vital safe havens for subaltern political dialogue.

But like the mom-and-pop grocery store around the corner, black barberand beauty shops are approaching their commercial decline. The economicallure of selling out to more profitable ventures like fast food restaurants,video rental chains, and gentlemen’s clubs combined with the oftenoverwhelming demands upon market share exerted by nationally franchisedcompetitors and the slow capitulation of neighborhood businesses to the forcesof gentrification have worked to write subaltern political spaces like the blackbarbershop into history. Thus, it is the threat of the disappearance of thesespaces, and the consequent erasure of African American counterpublics thatcoalesce within them, that emerges as another central dilemma in theBarbershop films.

In the first film in the series, the central crisis takes shape as Calvin realizeshe has made a mistake in selling out the historic family business to the loanshark. Having failed to revoke his deal with Wallace, Calvin finds himselflooking into the shop from the street at the end of the day. He watches as thebarbers move between their customers, sparing good-naturedly with each


other. Long-time regulars engross themselves in another game of checkers, aspatrons wait their turn chatting and listening, sharing an easy rapport. As theold shop casts a warm glow in the cold of the winter evening, Calvin realizesthat with the barbershop gone, the neighborhood would also lose the everydaybanter of news, gossip, and political opinion that that space crucially enables.This is a foreclosure that exacts too high a price, and for Calvin, one that ‘jus’ain’t worth it’.

Seeing through his father’s eyes for the first time, the hero realizes he mustsave the barbershop from its fate as vulgar gentlemen’s club, not because doingso will bring him closer to his ghetto fabulous dreams, and despite its saggingcommercial value. Instead, Calvin sees that if the shop disappears, theinstitutionally and culturally veiled space that it provides for African Americandialogue and exchange will disappear as well. Thus, Calvin’s resolve to prizethe shop back out of the hands of the loan shark is decidedly political,16 and bythe end of the tale, the hero has come to a fully formed civic consciousnesswith formulaic alacrity.

Likewise, in the sequel, Barbershop 2: Back In Business , we find the motleycrew of vendors at 79th and Exchange confronting a new set of challenges �the forces of gentrification and the chicanery of venal black politicians. Thus,we learn in the opening scenes of the sequel that in the coming months, severalnational chains are slated to open in the neighborhood � Kinko’s, Subway,Blockbuster, and ‘one of those fancy cineplexes’. Likewise, we find that Mr.Stewart (Ron OJ Parson), long-time owner of the neighborhood dry cleaners,has sold his shop to the Quality Land Development Corporation (QLDC) for‘more money than [he has] ever seen’, and Miss Emma (Jackie Taylor), aneighborhood institution in her own right, who has run the local daycare sinceCalvin himself was in his diapers, is being forced out of her rented apartmentof forty years to make room for a new housing development that she cannotafford to buy into.

The threat to Calvin’s barbershop in the sequel is presented by theunscrupulous Quentin Leroux (Harry Lennix), the African American corporateturk who opens a ‘Nappy Cutz’ barbering franchise, one of ten locationsnationwide that offers ‘every amenity the African American man desires’,across the street from Calvin’s old-fashioned shop. Promising that his bigger,better operation will put Calvin’s shop out of business in a few months, thecigar-smoking, Porche-driving Leroux personifies a series of ethical contrastsbetween ruthless businessman and compassionate capitalist, pragmaticconservatism and craven corporate greed.

Offered a piece of the shady deal that the local black alderman, LaloweBrown (Robert Wisdom) has struck with Leroux, Calvin is invited to join withBrown, Leroux, and the QLDC developers in exchange for a payback of$200,000 together with the assurance that the barbershop will be protectedfrom future threats of competition and gentrification. As Leroux explains it,


Calvin’s public support for the QLDC project would serve as a ‘determiningvoice’ in persuading the other business owners on the block to sell out. ForAlderman Brown, a corrupt, womanizing opportunist, it is a ‘win-winproposition’ that promises Calvin the class transcendence he has idolized � a‘nice little chunk of pocket change’ he could use to take his wife on a well-deserved ‘vacation to Jamaica � the real one, not the one in Queens’ and ‘anice kick start to [his] son’s college fund’.

But at the climactic City Council meeting where QLDC’s rights to thedevelopment are up for debate, Calvin takes his place among the crowd ofresidents who oppose the gentrification project. Refusing the deal that Brownand Leroux have offered him, Calvin declares his opposition to thedevelopment stating:

All change isn’t bad. Who can argue with progress? Better schools,cleaner streets [are] something we need on the south side. And I want thebest for my son just like my parents wanted the best for me. So somechange on 79th is well needed and well deserved. Also, I’m happy thatpeople outside our community are starting to find the value in ourneighborhood. But if that means selling our soul just to make a quickbuck, I ain’t wit’ that shit. It’s not worth it. That’s why I’m not sellingout like some people I know . . . I look at [longtime residents of thisneighborhood] being driven out ‘cuz they don’t fit the plan of the newdevelopers. [But] we gotta realize that people make this community, notfive dollar coffees in twenty dollar mugs. It’s the people, and once youlose the people, you lose the neighborhood . . . [and that] jus’ ain’tworth it.

Thus, Calvin marks out a range of ethical contrasts between African Americanswho ‘sell out’ and those who do not. Here, he welcomes infrastructuraldevelopments that poor black neighborhoods desperately need as well ascapital investments geared to enhancing the quality of life in thesecommunities. Likewise, Calvin is unapologetic about his priorities as aworking class father in the ghetto. Like his parents before him, he hopes for‘the best’ for his son � financial security, a college education, and the promiseof class transcendence, ever upward from one generation to the next.

But before he is done, Calvin also urges black leaders to choose ‘thepeople’ over products, investments over evictions, and racial solidarity overeconomic opportunism. Thus, while on the one hand, Calvin champions blackenterprise and neo-liberal responsibilization as the ticket to black empower-ment, on the other, he opposes entrepreneurial enrichment if making a quickbuck means selling out the community. By these admissions, the hero emerges,not simply a ghetto entrepreneur, but an urban capitalist with a socialconscience. As in the first film in the Barbershop series, here again, Calvin’s


resolve to shut out the QLDC and its middle class cheerleaders is decidedlypolitical. Subscribing to the promise of commerce as a newfound article offaith, this ghetto entrepreneur reaches for the mythic American Dream even ashe decries corporate expropriation and communal evisceration.

As they play out in these cinematic texts, the archetype of the ghettofabulous entrepreneur and its particularly racial semiotics serve as a metonymfor contemporary black political action, an everyman’s guide to a newtransformative politics. For one, and this is in marked opposition tothe despairing characters at the heart of earlier ghetto-centric films, theprotagonists of the ghetto fabulous genre are not scrambling to flee thesegregated enclaves of the urban ghetto. Instead Calvin and his cohort choosethe neighborhood as a place to live and work. Re-interpreting the archetypal‘bad-asses’ of the blaxploitation genre of the seventies,17 these protagonists areendowed with a fabulousness of productive entrepreneurship rather than oneof consumptive excess. They celebrate ghetto fabulousness as the conscientiousstewardship of black heritage and history, sons and daughters of thecommunity who hold the promise of a better future right there in the ghetto.

Marrying urban capitalism with civic consciousness, these heroes areendowed with a range of innately black, authentically working class talents thatproffer the means to carve out livable spaces within the urban ghetto. Thus,where Spike Lee’s filmic dirge, Do The Right Thing (1989) served as ameditation on how social circumstances in the black ghetto made it ultimatelyimpossible to ‘do the right thing’ (Christensen 1991), the ghetto fabulousgenre articulates a newfound confidence both about what ‘the right thing’ is,and about African American heroes who can be relied upon to do so.

The path to political empowerment, as the Barbershop films make clear,urges inconspicuous black consumption and dogged black entrepreneurship.Hang on to black public spaces, they argue, and slap back the forces ofgentrification. Fight the erasure of black cultural institutions, not throughgrassroots protest or civil disobedience, but through enterprise and thrift.Build intra-racial coalitions that redefine the terms of black embourgeoisementso that upwardly mobile blacks pursue inter-class solidarities with workingclass people rather than fleeing the ghetto. Preserve the hetero-normativenuclear family, the neighborhood mom-and-pop business, and genderedcommunities that discipline black masculinity and shelter black femininityfor these are the principal means to black political empowerment.

The key to racial transformation, by the logic of these appeals, is alignedwith capital rather than in opposition to it. Indeed, as the Barbershop films makeclear in a series of flashbacks to the sixties, black business emerges as anorganic sphere of uplift and salvation for the desperate poor. These choices aremade explicit through glimpses of Eddie’s past beginning with his firstencounter with the original owner, Calvin Palmer Sr. (Javon Johnson) late inthe evening of 4 July 1967.


A modern-day Jean Valjean out of Victor Hugo’s classic Les Miserables ,Eddie has stolen a piece of steak from the nearby butcher, and as the scenebegins, we find him running for his life through dim alleys with severalmembers of the Chicago police in pursuit. Dashing in through the back door ofthe barbershop, the fugitive threatens and cajoles, demanding sanctuary fromthose he finds inside, until at last, he explodes tearfully: ‘What d’you knowabout a brother needing a job? . . . I just wanted to barbeque. It’s the goddamnFourth of July. Can’t a black man have a Fourth of July too?’ Thus, Eddie’sentry into the microcosm of Calvin’s Barbershop is premised on thepredicaments of working class African Americans desperate for full participa-tion in the rituals of American citizenship, privileges denied to them by twinburdens of race and class.

Later, when Calvin Jr. asks Eddie about his enduring regard for thebarbershop, his unfailing presence there ‘day in and day out’, the narrativeturns to a flashback once again, this time etching the violent chaos ofneighborhood riots in the wake of Martin Luther King, Jr’.s assassination inApril 1968. In a frenzied moment, one of the rioters threatens the old shopwith a rough and ready firebomb, but Eddie, staring him down with resolutefervor, stops him in his tracks. As he recounts the story:

After all that quieted down, your daddy . . . used to always call me a hero.The funny thing is I never saw it that way. I didn’t save the shop, Calvin.The shop saved me. Lot like it did Ricky. I mean, I didn’t have no lifebefore this. As far as I’m concerned, my life began on July 4th, 1967when I came through that back door and your father gave my black ass abreak.

Thus, Eddie’s salvation is contingent upon the economic sanctuary he findswithin the institutional space of black business. Offering him a respectableoccupation as well as a life worth living, it is the black barbershop � ’a place ofbusiness’, as Calvin insists, where ‘we don’t do politics’, and which ‘ain’t nocommunity center’ � that saves Eddie from a life of destitution in the sixties,much as it does for Calvin himself along with many of the others who nowwork at the old shop. Although it has been more than thirty years since Eddiefirst got his break in the neighborhood barbershop, Calvin and his cohortconfirm that the abiding paradigm for black transformation is economicautonomy, and the key to the American Dream, especially for the urban poor,is supplication to capital’s game.

Together with the figure of the ghetto entrepreneur then, the Barbershopseries champions black enterprise as the key to political participation and racialsolidarity. Inner-city hoodlums in the heat of urban riots like the militantcultural nationalists of the turbulent sixties � the Panthers, Black Berets, andso on � are pointedly dismissed in these texts either as troublemakers or fools


or both on par with corporate speculators and venal politicians � the newrobber barons of the ghetto. Thirty years later, neither racial segregation norexploitation, not racist violence nor discrimination linger as a scourge uponworking class African Americans. Rather, the villains of the Barbershop films areblack businessmen who callously threaten venerable neighborhood institutions.It is the opportunistic black alderman and the parasitic loan shark, petty thieveswho steal from their neighbors and reckless mavens of bling who thwartAfrican American uplift. It is their pathological desires that are the real enemyof post-soul black progress.

The rise of ghetto enterprise as salvational strategy for blacks at the closeof the twentieth century substantiates the mediating force of race in relationsof capitalism. For one, the history of African American enslavement is markedby repressive and ideological structures of commodification. Thus, forhistorians of the black experience in the New World, Reconstructionparadigms of black politico-economic autonomy were marked by stridentmoves from blacks-as-commodity to blacks-as-consumers. In the post-soul era,black entrepreneurship emerges as the latest chapter in this tortuous saga, thepromise of political autonomy contingent upon African American engagementwith the rules of a rigged capitalist game.

As Laura Mulvey clarifies, within the whorls of advanced capitalism, asfinance capital flourishes and industrial capitalism slowly declines, the capitalistworld reformulates into economies that create money out of money, andwhich produce surplus value outside the value produced by the labor power ofthe working classes (1993, pp. 3� 20). Here, black labor, hit hardest bytransformations in the postindustrial economy, languishes in the public servicesector � state bureaucracies, police and military cadres, security and sanitationservices � losing ground in manufacturing and technology trades. Asaffirmative action mandates yield visible evidence of the ‘talented tenth’ ofAfrican Americans ascending to middle-management positions and the ranks ofthe petty bourgeoisie, the forces of automation, globalization, and financecapital eschew American labor, and most pronouncedly, black labor, asunproductive and expendable.

In this context, the rise of archetypal urban working class entrepreneurs incinematic discourses highlights the work of racial discipline within thecontinuing story of advanced capitalism. Here, cultural narratives of immigrant‘model minorities’ combine with showy spectacles of the hip hop mogul topreach abiding lessons about ‘underclass’ pathology and its correlation withurban blight. Black labor, by these logics, has only itself to blame for its utterdisposability while the ghetto entrepreneur emerges in contrast, as a powerfulfigure of racial discipline, a substantiation of the promise of capital.

For scholars of neoliberalism concerned with mapping the discursivestrains by which market exchange and enterprise have emerged as universalpaeans of our time, this analysis offers a glimpse of the ways that the ghetto


fabulous entrepreneur takes shape as a cog in the ideological apparatuses of thepost-soul era. Tracing crucial adjustments within signifiers of ghettofabulousness � reined in from audacious racial spectacle to docile racialdiscipline � this analysis showcases the means by which ghetto fabulous films,while they come dressed in innocuous trappings of generic urban comedy,equate African American advancement with individualistic, entrepreneurialinvestment while they, pointedly and repeatedly, undermine black historicalresolve in social justice and collective action.

Notes

1 There is some disagreement over where and with whom the term ‘blingbling’ originated. Danielle Weekes, writer for The Voice (London) creditsNew Orleans rapper BG (Baby Gangsta) with coining the term in 1999 (3� 9November 2003, p. 3). MTV reporter, Minya Oh agrees, explaining that theterm originated with the New Orleans rap family, Cash Money Millionairesbetween 1997 and 1998, and came into national awareness as the title of asong by Cash Money artist BG (http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1471629/2003043/bg.jhtm?headlines�/true). Others suggest it was Sean‘P. Diddy’ Combs, formerly Sean ‘Puffy’ Combs, who first used the term todescribe his personal style, a combination of ‘white Rolls-Royce, pinkchampagne, cream Versace suit, gold and more gold, dark shades, minders,and a pimp’s swagger’ (Shepard 2000).

2 In recent years, scholars in American, cultural, and ethnic studies havegathered in consensus that the post-soul moment marks an important breakfrom the civil rights era that preceded it. For detail on these shifts see,Bonilla-Silva 2001, Boyd 2003, Dillard 2001, George 1992, George 2004,Goldberg 1997, Mukherjee 2006, Neal, 2002.

3 The iconic ‘hip hop mogul’ of recent years includes black performers like JayZ, Sean ‘P. Diddy’ Combs, Russell Simmons, Oprah Winfrey and mostrecently, Kanye West, whose ascension to corporate boardrooms has playednotably on the covers of business magazines and the pages of major newsdailies. For scholars like Christopher Holmes Smith, one of the keys to thepopularity of the hip hop mogul is the way in which s/he appeals to the‘power of socially competitive consumption as a viable mode of civicparticipation and personal fulfillment’ (2003, p. 71). Emblematic of theaspirations of a largely disenfranchised constituency, Holmes Smith suggests,the hip hop mogul serves as a visual signifier of the ‘good life’, normalizingblack political discourse with ‘growth-mediated forms of social uplift’instead of ‘support-led communal development blueprints from the civilrights era’ (2003, p. 71). Thus, the hip hop mogul, the rap star, the sportslegend � and cinematic archetypes of the ghetto entrepreneur as this analysisproposes � are of a piece, each proffering a constellation of semiotic clues tohow blackness works within capitalist projects, how African American


cultural icons, even those that seem opposed to one another, become crucialto contemporary capitalist discipline.

4 A significant body of scholarly work has followed in recent years to explore thesemiotic labors and ideological appeal of these texts. See, for instance, Basu1998, Bynoe 2004, Donalson 2003, Christensen 1991, Dave et al . 2005,Forman & Neal 2004, Gabbard 2004, Grant 2004, Gubar 1997,Hunt 2005, Kelley 1994, Kelley 1997, Kitwana 2002, Maharaj 1997, Massood2002, McBride 2005, Neal 2003, Pough 2004, Reed 1999, Smith-Shomade2002, Watkins 1998, White 1995, White & White 1998, Zook 1999.

5 For example, Continental Airlines and the Hongkong Shanghai BankingCorporation (HSBC) have in recent years produced advertising campaignsthat turn on tongue-in-cheek references to elements of the bling aesthetic.The HSBC ad, for instance, ran for several weeks in early 2005, and featuredan image of a demure South Asian bride, bejeweled with traditional goldornaments from head to waist. The caption read, ‘Bling Speaks In ManyLanguages’, suggesting, by analogy, that so do HSBC’s global operations. Itis significant that the ad was not targeted narrowly to an inner-city audience.To the contrary, it ran in a variety of markets, including on billboards inSouth Asian neighborhoods in Queens, New York. Thus, the bling aestheticenjoys a wide voyeuristic appeal across class and ethnic categories.

6 It should be noted that my emphasis in this essay remains on analyzing thesephenomena within the racial context of the contemporary United States.While scholars of global media have explored the currency of black popularculture across international media markets (Clarke & Thomas 2006, Havens2006, Stovall 2005) and the work of blackness in smoothing US globalexpansion in the era of late capitalism (Lull 2000), the analysis I present herefocuses on the specific cultural and historical contexts of the neo-liberalnineties in the United States. Given the worldwide reach of US mediaproductions, this analysis opens up crucial questions about the globalspectacle of black consumptive excess � how it plays in other corners of theworld, what it signifies as well as what it glosses over � which, while I doaddress them in a longer, book-length manuscript currently in preparationon this topic, remain secondary to this particular essay.

7 For detail on the relationship between industry economics and blackfilmmaking over this period, see Jesse Algeron Rhines’ Black Film, WhiteMoney (1996). Rhines explains that starting in the mid-seventies, a series of‘structural crises’ affecting the major studios created the conditionsnecessary for a ‘renaissance in black filmmaking’ that enabled young blackfilmmakers to experience an unprecedented degree of autonomy in theircraft including the kinds of films they could choose to make. By this account,the emergence of ‘blaxploitation’ films in the late seventies, like ‘ghetto-centric’ films in the nineties and the ‘soul drama’ and ‘ghetto fabulous’genres that followed, each is explained by imbalances between productsupply and product demand that created episodic gluts in black-orientedfilms in past decades.


8 These included F. Gary Gray’s Friday (1995), Robert Townsend’s B.A.P.S.(1997), Lionel C. Martin’s How To Be a Player (1997), Jeff Pollack’s BootyCall (1997), Michael Martin’s I Got the Hook Up (1998), Les Mayfield’s BlueStreak (1999), Raja Gosnell’s Big Momma’s House (2000), Steve Carr’s NextFriday (2000), Tim Story’s Barbershop (2000), Mark Raboy’s Friday After Next(2002), Richard Benjamin’s Marci X (2003), Adam Shankman’s BringingDown the House (2003), Kevin Rodney Sullivan’s Barbershop 2: Back In Business(2004), Lance Rivera’s The Cookout (2004), Keenan Ivory Wayans’ WhiteChicks (2004), Jessy Terrero’s Soul Plane (2004), Tim Story’s Taxi (2004),and Billy Woodruff’s Beauty Shop (2005).

9 Oprah Winfrey sold this property in December 2004. She now lives on a42-acre oceanfront estate in Montecito, California, south of Santa Barbara(Zwecker 2004).

10 This is ostensibly an important message for the Barbershop series for it repeatsin the opening sequences of the sequel. Here, we find Calvin in the privatestoreroom in the back of the shop fussing over Coley, his two-year old son,as he dispenses pithy strains of street advice to the gurgling infant:

One thing you’re gonna constantly have to deal with in your life andthat’s broke-ass black folk. Now they gonna be hard to spot at first,‘cuz they gonna be dressed real nice. But don’t let that fool you, ‘cuzthe nicer they dress, usually, the broker they are.

11 Simply put, anything that is produced by labor in capitalist societies is acommodity. The value-relation between things (physical goods) and commod-ities (the products of labor) is skewed in such societies so that commodities canhave absolutely no connection to their physical properties. Thus, the marketprice of a commodity such as, pieces of the Berlin Wall that sold in auction,apartment buildings in Manhattan, salaries paid to professional athletes and filmstars, designer clothes, shoes, accessories, works of art, and so on, need haveno relation to the physical value of the product.

Products are thus ‘fetishized’ when they become commodities, whichmeans that they take on the characteristics of fetish objects � objects withmagical powers, things we revere for their perceived symbolic, historical,mythical value. These are objects that enjoy a perceived aesthetic value, a‘must-have’ quality that bears no relation to its material value; thus, thematerial and labor costs of constructing a Gucci handbag as opposed to theretail price of such a fashion accessory. Market forces of demand rely onthe phenomena of commodity fetishism for once a commodity achievesfetishistic status, its demand soars and consequently, so does its market price(Berger 1995, pp. 41�70).

12 Calvin’s transformation is complete by the opening sequences of the sequelwhere we find that the protagonist has turned the limping barbershop into avibrant neighborhood business. Gone are his basement quick-rich schemes aswell as his tax arrears and loan burdens. Instead, the newly painted facade


announces that the shop is now ‘Calvin Jr’.s Barbershop’, and along with anew car or two, he has also managed to buy the neighboring storefront thathe rents out as a beauty parlor for women.

13 These ideological labors of the ghetto fabulous genre paint a relatively bleakpicture of the potential of black popular cultural expression for rupturingcontemporary neo-liberal hegemonies of ‘individuation’ and ‘responsibiliza-tion’. While a broader view of black expressive culture that for example,pursues comparisons between mainstream and underground hip hop wouldreveal a vibrant arena of parody, camp, and radical critique geared tounseating the system of dominant values that black enterprise andresponsible consumerism signify, the ghetto fabulous genre itself presentsfew opportunities for such counter-hegemonic readings. Rather, the racialcritiques we find in these cinematic texts emerge as doggedly earnest anddidactic, filmic echoes of the career trajectories of rap stars Ice Cube andQueen Latifah (star of the third film in the Barbershop series) that tracenarratives of black embourgeoisement and political docility.

14 These include historic works such works as Charlie L. Russell’s Five On theBlack Hand Side (1967), adapted for the screen in 1974, Langston Hughes’Little Ham in Five Plays (1968), Richard Wright’s Lawd Today (1969), LonneElder’s Ceremonies in Dark Old Men (1970), and the short-lived black sit-com,That’s My Mama , which premiered on the ABC television network inSeptember 1974. For detail on the historical significance of the barbershop inblack literature, see Harris, T. (Autumn 1979) ‘The Barbershop in BlackLiterature’, Black American Literature Forum, vol. 13, no. 3, pp. 112� 118.Thornton, H. (October 1979) ‘The Barbershop and Beauty Parlor in Afro-American Literature’, Pacific Coast Philology , vol. 14, pp. 76� 83.

15 As explored by Vorris Nunley (2004, pp. 221� 241), spaces like beautyshops, women’s clubs, and barbershops function much like ‘hush harbors’ ofblack history, hidden and quasi-public spheres where vernacular knowl-edges, rhetorical forms, and subjectivities circulate and emerge. The concepthas its origins in the antebellum South, places where enslaved AfricanAmericans gathered in secret to practice Christianity or communal forms ofworship, and to sing religious spirituals undetected by nearby slave owners.

16 Calvin’s transformation is also keenly nostalgic in the sense that itreconstructs the archetype of the ‘old head’ as Elijah Anderson has suggested(1990). Comparable with its female counterpart, ‘the community mother’,the old head was ‘a man of stable means who believed in hard work, familylife, and the church’, and ‘whose acknowledged role was to teach, support,encourage, and in effect, socialize young men to meet their responsibilitiesregarding work, family, the law, and common decency’ (1990, pp. 3� 4).Where Eddie and Calvin Palmer Sr. are, from the start, nostalgic exemplarsof such ‘old heads’, benevolent spirits who watch over the shop and guidethe younger generation of workers, the Barbershop films focus on the youngCalvin’s metamorphosis into this ‘role of surrogate father to those who needattention, care and moral support’ (p. 3).


As Jane Jacobs (1993), Marshall Berman (1982), and others have arguedhowever, the idea of such a ‘public character’, an imagined figure of prestigeand authority who holds the keys to moral and ethical discipline, relies on aromanticized vision of interpersonal trust and moral cohesion as having onceprevailed in African American communities. The danger of such romanti-cism, as these scholars suggest, is that it imagines a return to ‘better times’that may never have existed at all. Moreover, and as a consequence, itpushes for a specific set of reactionary choices, insisting upon hetero-normative family values, hierarchical gender roles, and entrenchedgenerational and class stratifications.

17 These reinterpretations deploy elements of the ‘superfly’ persona of theblaxploitation genre of the seventies together with the enduring ‘pimpaesthetic’ that has returned in recent years in hip hop videos but with acrucial defanging of these archetypes so that the heroes of the ghettofabulous genre, far from posing any ideological threat, instead serve toreinforce dominant hegemonies of neo-liberal responsibilization andcapitulation to capitalist endeavor.

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Documents

The ghetto fabulous aesthetic in contemporary black culture: Class and consumption in the Barbershop films