The White Negro
The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster (German: The White Negro ) is an essay by the American writer Norman Mailer from 1957 in which he describes a group of young whites from the 1920s to 1940s who were repulsed by the prevailing culture or disappointed and drawn to the world of "black" perceived swing and jazz , which adopted the African American / Negro culture as their own; this group was then called hipsters . The basic theme is the turning away from the social constraints on conformity towards hippness , which is understood as a way out and perceived as closer to human truth . Mailer puts a main focus on the African-American sexuality described as direct, unrestrained and viral, which the hipster basically tries to imitate. The essay first appeared in Dissent magazine in the summer of 1957 and was published shortly thereafter as a single publication by City Lights . In 1959 he became part of the band Advertisements for Myself . The White Negro is considered to be one of Mailer's most important early essays and a fundamental description of the historical hipster and wigger phenomena .
content
At the beginning of the essay Mailer places a lengthy quote from an article by Caroline Bird from Harper's Bazaar published in 1957 in which she calls hipsters the only non-conformists of their time.
Mailer then names the effect of the Holocaust and the atomic bomb on the general psyche of his generation - the absolute confrontation with the possibility of simple, statistical annihilation and thus the senselessness of existence. He names the reaction of the will to individual existence as the moment of birth of the American existentialist or the hipster who takes the only possible way out of the awareness of possible near and senseless death: “to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger "To divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self".
Mailer calls the source of his definition of hipsterism “the Negro for he has been living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries”. The interest of the white American existentialists in hippness, the absolute turning towards the present due to the constant threat from the world, he justifies with the "collective disbelief in the words of men who had too much money and controlled too many things", but also mentions a few white thought leaders, including Henry Miller and Wilhelm Reich .
Accordingly, he calls the American hipster the white negro and explains that turning to this kind of existence is like a religion. This religion, which basically boils down to the direct recognition and acceptance of needs and their satisfaction, he sets against the restrictive reality of white society.
Mailer also explains the hipster language, taken from Afro-American jargon, and its relationship to sexuality; According to Mailer, the hipster seeks redemption in the assumed sexual freedom of the African-Americans of the time.
Hip , according to Mailer, is a new language for a new philosophy, a departure from everything that has existed that has no interest at all in what is found or proven / deducible, but only in what is directly experienced, in the enormous present. The truth is "what one feels at each instant in the perpetual climax of the present". The moral principle is that you do what you want wherever and whenever: "Hip ethic is immoderation, childlike in its adoration of the present". Mailer sees this as a kind of antidote against the authoritarian powers, which, due to the loss of confidence in the self-fulfillment ability of the individual, want to force people into paths that these powers consider to be good.
At the end of his essay, Mailer wonders whether American society, especially its liberal sections, will peacefully absorb the Afro-American population, or whether there will be hysteria and the like; He goes on to ask, between which sections of the population a final war for supremacy will be fought, “between the blacks and the whites, or between the women and the men, or between the beautiful and the ugly, the pillagers and managers, or the rebels and the regulators ".
swell
- The White Negro . Mailers text.
- Roy Grundmann: Andy Warhol's Blow Job (= Culture and the moving image). Temple University Press, 2003, ISBN 1-56639-972-6 , pp. 169-177.
- Mailer, Norman. "The White Negro." Advertisements for Myself. New York: GP Putnam's Sons, 1966. 337-58. Print.
- Hip essay by Joachim-Ernst Berendt, 1962
Individual evidence
- ↑ The German translation appeared in 1963 at the latest in the text collection Reklame for myself
- ↑ The "White Negro"
- ^ Renaissance Man, Man of his Times: Norman Mailer's "The White Negro" and Literary Manhood in 1950s America