[PEN-L:33532] Re: The ideological implications of Scorcese's latest film

[Kendall Grant Clark <kendall@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>>>> "yoshie" == Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx> writes:

  yoshie> The film sure reminds us what the term "race riot" meant until
  yoshie> the 1960s.  -- Yoshie

I recently started working on a review of a book called *When Whites Riot*
by Sheila Smith McKoy, which studies the representation of "race riots" in
South Africa and the US, a few days before going to see Gangs of New York,
and I've found myself applying McKoy's categories and concepts to Scorcese's
film.

So, yes, the film does remind us what "race riots" were before 1960 in the
sense that it explicitly dramatizes white-on-black (among other) mob
violence.

But, no, it's mute about the degree to which such white riots were
typically called forth (McKoy calls this 'ululation') by whites (perhaps
especially by business leaders and other elities, particularly by white
newspapers), as happened in the Wilmington NC (1898) riot (which McKoy
analyzes at length) and in the Atlanta (1906) and Tulsa (1921) riots
(which she does not analyze). To say nothing of the post-riot
representations of violence in white culture, history, and memory, in
which black bodies and black-initiated and sustained violence are created
and then made to displace the actions of whites as the cause of the
communal violence.

So there is a kind of double sense of Yoshie's comments: in historical
fact, race riots in the US were almost always white initiated and
benefited whites; but in the cultural and historical representations of
these events, they become scenes of black excess, animality, and otherness
(which also benefit whites by strengthening the supposed rationale for
social structures and strictures meant to "tame the beast").

By focusing almost exclusively on violence between Irish immigrants and
nativists, Gangs mystifies (well, ignores altogether, really) the social
and historical process by which the Irish became as white as any
'nativist', in ways that African Americans and other people of color never
have. And the creepy, sentimentalist U2 song at the very end obscures the
degree to which the 'hands' which 'built America' were the hands of
Chinese press gang laborers and African American slaves, both of which are
represented in Scorcese's film:  never (or rarely) as active agents of
history, but only as passive slates upon which Irish or nativist gangs (or
politicians) foist and enact their desires (for exploitation, sexual
amusement, entertainment, and so on).

Kendall Clark