Lead man holler: Harry Belafonte and the culture industry

My dissertation "Lead Man Holler: Harry Belafonte and the Culture Industry," looks at how African Americans were able to represent a black aesthetic and politics in the music, film, and television industries of the 1950s and 1960s. Belafonte's position as a multimedia artist who was successful in using three branches of the mainstream media to communicate his particular aesthetic and political point of view offers a unique perspective on how each industry engaged with race and politics. I focus on Belafonte's career to explore larger questions including the following: Why were certain black performers popular? How did they act as screens for mainstream cultural desires while also expressing the particular points of view of subaltern people?;Belafonte is not technically an immigrant because he was born in New York City, but I believe the five years he spent from age eight to twelve with his mother's family in Jamaica and his roots in Harlem's West Indian immigrant community are central to understanding his work. His television, music, and film work can be seen as a series of immigrant acts in the way that Lisa Lowe has defined them: "the politicized cultural work that emerges from dislocation and disidentification." For example, Belafonte's concert and television performance of spirituals recalled the subjugation blacks endured in slavery and his chain gang songs and work songs (including calypsos) highlighted the exploitation that continued and was even fostered under European imperialism and American democratic capitalism in the period of his stardom. Belafonte's work, while asserting a desire for full equality and integration into U.S. institutions, also manifests a longing for diasporic connections that can't be fulfilled by entrance into the nation state.