Alma Latina: The American Hemisphere's Racial Melodramas
Much-maligned, the genre of melodrama remains ever popular globally,
achieving late in the Twentieth Century a televisual and affective
lingua franca of sorts in the form of the Latin American telenovela.
Despite culturally specific storylines and conventions (aficionados
easily can distinguish between Mexican, Brazilian, and Colombian
productions), the telenovela reaches international audiences throughout
Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia. While some critics rightly point to the
popularity of the telenovela to contradict inflated reports of the
homogeneity of global media, the opposition
homogeneous-heterogeneous also risks appealing to a discourse of
diversity that may be too simplistic. In other words, the idea of
diversity as a good-in-itself (and the index of a more democratic global
media) elides more complex (and inherently transnational) histories of
production and reception for the telenovela, especially in regard to the
different marginalized identities that form a key congregation amongst
its mass audience. The many Mexican adaptations of Fannie Hurst's 1933
novel Imitation of Life provide a case in point, demonstrating
how the racial melodrama resonates as a popular form throughout the
Americas. Hurst's family drama about a tragic mulatto—most (in)famously
adapted in 1959 by Douglas Sirk into the classic Hollywood melodrama
starring Lana Turner—inspired multiple Mexican adaptations for both
cinema and television, most recently a telenovela from 1997. The
supposed incongruencies between the racial imaginaries of Latin America
and the United States are challenged by the obvious cache of Hurst's and
Sirk's texts in Mexico. The hemispheric popularity of the tragic
mulatto trope requires race scholars to rethink long-held
generalizations about racial formation in the Americas. I wish to
explore the capacity of melodrama to open up a space for marginalized
identities, and I will examine how the melodramatic mode both
consolidates and exacerbates the logics of racial domination.
In Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle
Tom to O.J. Simpson, Linda Williams persuasively argues the salience
of a melodramatic mode particular to the Unites States.[1] Jesús
Martín-Barbero, on the other hand, explores the various Latin American
registers for melodrama, including Brazilian cordel literature,
Mexican corridos, and Colombian vallenatos, but most
significantly within the form of the telenovela. His analysis attempts
to account for the complex identifications stirred by melodrama:
Melodrama is the reason that the moving force behind the
plot is always the ignorance of an identity, be it the child's ignorance
of his parent's identity, one sibling of another's, or a mother of her
child's. It is present in the struggle against evil spells and outward
appearances, against that which hides and disguises, a struggle to be
recognized by others. Might this not be the secret connection
between melodrama and the cultural history of the Latin American
'sub'-continent?[2]
In other words—if I may borrow a favorite motif from Douglas Sirk,
the mirror—melodrama's extravagant imitations (of everything and
nothing in particular) hold up a mirror to the supple, contradictory
realities of marginalized subjectivities. According to Martín-Barbero,
the family relationships privileged in melodrama function as a metaphor
for a "primordial sociality": "this sociality lives on culturally, and
from its locus, the people, by 'melo-dramatizing' everything, take their
own form of revenge on the abstraction imposed by cultural dispossession
and the commercialization of life" (277). If, as Martín-Barbero
contends, the "thick, censored plot of the tightly woven fabric of
family relationships" serves as the metaphor for melodrama's
primordiality, I would add that the family drama of the tragic mulatto
represents a foundational trope enabling melodrama's integrations of
national and hemispheric imaginations.
Fannie Hurst's 1933 novel, Imitation of Life, long out of
print and overshadowed by its lavish Hollywood adaptations, was only
recently reissued from Duke University Press, with an introduction by
Daniel Itzkovitz. In his helpful and comprehensive introduction,
Itzkovitz discusses the adaptations of the novel, first by John Stahl
(1934) and then by the master of cinematic melodrama, Douglas Sirk
(1959). Reviewing the particularities of Sirk's film, including its
casting history, Itzkovitz inserts a parenthetical aside in order to
identify Susan Kohner as the "Jewish actress" playing the tragic mulatto
Sarah Jane.[2]
I do not bring this up to fault the author for his
omission of Kohner's Mexican heritage (in fact, I am guilty elsewhere of
the inverse omission). Instead, I wish to highlight melodrama's ability
to mediate a range of identities, especially its capacity for opening a
space for marginalized subjectivities to play on a national or even
world stage (or screen). The space that Itzkovitz's sentence
grammatically models functions as an appositive non-closure, a
parenthetical fill-in-the-blank: Jewish, Mexican, mulatto, or even
queer. In an interview with Cynthia Fuchs, Susan Kohner's sons, the
screenwriting and directorial team of Chris and Paul Weitz, joke that
the only people who know their mother's work are "gay men and
cinephiles." Chris Weitz quips, "It is the gay litmus test"
(20).[4]
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