"Black Bart" Simpson

Our first of two reading assignments for tomorrow's class was an essay entitled; "Black Bart" Simpson: Appropriation and Revitalization in Commodity Culture, written by Peter Parisi. I have sat and read the complete article twice and some sections multiple times. If I understood the essay thesis, he used the Black Bart t-shirt craze of the early 1990's as an example of how the black and white cultures interact with each other. His dissertation also noted that the Afro-American culture actively upon wide areas of the dominant white American expressive culture.

Parisi takes the appropriation of "Bart Simpson" and subsequent revitalization into "Black Bart" and assimilates it with slaves taking protestant hymns, psalms and spiritual songs and reworking the structure using different rhythms, text and melodies. He further this assimilation by citing jazz and blues as appropriation and revitalization to take an element of the dominant culture uniquely theirs. That this co mingling of African and Euro-American cultures is a "complex and multi-dimensional" relationship. He went on to suggest that this co mingling of cultures was a two-way street and while it had become more visible was not completely studied.

The commodity aspect involved the t-shirts. The t-shirt of today has become a message board of our individual persona. The messaged whether stated or intoned say to people who we are, were we have been and identify those issues or objects important to us. What is unclear, according to Parisi, is who created the commodity. He notes that because of copyright infringements, the creators remain unknown. Koreans and whites, were noted to possibly be involved. The African-American cultural leaders expressed concern over the Black Bart t-shirts as well because of the messages regarding "Underachiever", and those showing disrespect for parents in particular were of concern. One comment in particular quoted by a Baltimore t-shirt vendor that "We are the only people in the world that let somebody take a White cartoon character, paint it Black and then sell it to us for 10 bucks."

The meaning of the t-shirt was also explored. School principals banned the Black Bart t-shirts. Some people condemned the show and made improper assumptions about show content based on the t-shirts messages. Children quoted in the article seemed very knowledgeable about show content one forth grader's quote seemed to reflect a perceptive observation about the show's portrayal of positive family dynamics.

I found some enlightenment into the role commodity plays in the expression of appropriation and revitalization of culture. That cultural diffusion is a dynamic process that moves back a forth between African and Euro-American cultures. It helped me to understand why the diverseness in cultures exist but yet is at it's core, an individual product of universal roots.