Preliminary Programme

My talk is on one particular episode of Mr. Ed, a highly successful and popular TV series that was screened between 1961-66 (CBS). The protagonist is a speaking horse living in a stable also serves as office of to Mr. Ed's owner, a married architect. (The latter is the only person in the world who is able to communicate with Mr. Ed.) My paper follows a suggestion made by eminent historians of TV, such as Lynn Spigel, to give close readings to the singular events that are being addressed in particular episodes of sitcoms. For and even though being ostensibly designed as LOL (least objectionable level) TV show by Arthur Lubin, the plots of many of the 143 episodes are nevertheless steeped in allusions to the severe social tensions contemporary middle class whites in US American Suburbia felt themselves exposed to. And indeed, Mr. Ed contains an amazing amount of often only thinly camouflaged bitter social satire that forms a constant comment on some of the most pressing political social issues of the early 1960ies.
A case in point, is the episode “Ed the emancipator”, which was screened first in March 1963, because it addresses racism. Mr. Ed (who cannot only talk to his master but also reads books) starts to lecture an insolent cockatoo on Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. After fierce resistance form the neighbor Mr. Addison who does not wish to have the cheeky bird in his house, Mr. Ed decides to follow Lincoln's example and to liberate all the birds in the local pet shop; the horse leads them to the neighboring house, where it feeds and eventually hides the beasts. In due cause Mr. Ed has to acknowledge that he was wrong in assigning personal rights to the birds which cause phobic reactions in the neighbor.
Striking is the fact that this sequel not only comments on, but precedes the many and decisive historical moments that characterized the year of its release: it is aired only months before the Birmingham Riots, and before Martin Luther King's famous “I have a dream” speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC. In Mr. Ed, the issue of civil rights, is addressed by means exploiting the surrealist potential of film to its utmost: In a dreamlike scene that is reminiscent of the cinematic work of Luis Bunuel, the neighbor’s phobic reactions to seeing their house populated by all kinds of silent birds seems to be the only way to address the social issue in a thinly camouflaged but still recognizable way. The reasons for this specific mode of representation will be the main topic of my talk, in the course of which I will also consider the episode in the light of a different, but related phobic representation of uncanny birds, namely Alfred Hitchcock's famous movie which was also released in 1963. (Show less)

I have been always struck by how men of my father’s generation were so well dressed in those iconic black and white documentary photographs depicting their arrival after a three-week transatlantic journey by sea. Their neatly pressed suited with and a white breast pocket handkerchief, polished brogue shoes, white starched shirt with throat straggling tie and a trilby hat cocked at an angle. In Eastern Caribbean vernacular, they were ‘Saga Bwoys’ or ‘Sweet Bwoys’, a masculine persona who in my rite of passage from being short pants ‘coloured’ boy to a black British young man I saw as an exemplar of ‘good grooming’ in his sartorial attention to detail as words for the ladies danced off his tongue like Lord Kitchener’s Calypso. These ‘Lonely Londoners’ would later become Jamaican ‘Rude Bwoys’ swaggering as if to a Ska or Reggae beat in their two-tone mohair suits with the attitude and creole chat of the best dressed chicken on the street. ‘Mods’ as a white youth subculture were so impressed that they adopted the ‘Rude Bwoy’ sartorial and performative persona. In my camel Crombie coat, suede trimmed Garbicci cardigan or ‘yardie cardie’, pleated Farah slacks, Bally shoes with shiny buckle stepping out like a ‘Rude Bwoy’ in a ‘Causal Style’ to ‘rave’ at a Sound System dance. ‘Saga Bwoys’ and ‘Rude Bwoys’ are constituents of the contemporary ‘Raggamuffin’ geneology that as subcultural black masculine practices have been self-fashioned in the rhizoid network of racial, transcultural and diaspora exchange and transfer.

Yet there has been a limited focus on how and what postwar Caribbean migrant men contributed through the material culture and performativity of the ‘Saga Bwoy’ and ‘Rude Bwoy’ to a diasporic understanding of black dandyism. Using Carol Tulloch’s ‘style-fashion-dress’ amongst other conceptual framework: this presentation will begin to explore the ontology and materiality of a process that saw the aesthetic embodiment and reconstruction of diasporic ‘Caribbeanness’ in a British context of the dressed black male body; a body that would come to reconfigure the streets of urban Britain with fresh dynamic masculinities in motion.

Keywords: ‘Saga Boy’, ‘Rude Boy’, ‘Rave’, ‘style-fashion-dress’, material culture, black masculinities, dressed body, performativity

© Michael McMillan – May 2013

Dr. Michael McMillan
M: 07710342097
E: m.mcmillan62@btinternet.com
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The failure of the second Ottoman siege of Vienna (1683) represents a turning point in the European imagination of the Turks. Throughout the early modern era (1453-1683), Christian Europe felt itself in the tight grip of the Ottoman advance. Europeans cried and were frightened by the Turks. Obscene dog, despotic, ruthless infidel, they said he was used to be engaged, in a natural way, in bisexual behaviors. The Italian historian Giovanni Ricci stresses remarkably that the fear of European military passivity against the Ottoman invasion was phenomenized by the fear of passive male and female sodomy, perpetrated by the Turks on the Christians. But with the depletion of Ottoman expansion witnessed by the Christian victories of 1684-1699, European male ruling classes weren't shaken by these unconscious fears anymore. The image of the Turk therefore evolved from the powerful and cruel sodomizer of Christian men to the harem Turk, who was able at most to tyrannize over women more or less eager to please. On the path of decline, he took a comical look, he became the object of exotic interests, cultural fashions and sexual fantasies.
The musical arts do not represent an exception to the rule. The Turquerie is well represented in the chamber music and operas of the eighteenth century. The Così fan tutte, opera who debuted at the Burgtheater in Vienna in 1790 with libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte and music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, is always included in this particular fashion. It is based on a gallant costume game and deal with the adventures of two Neapolitan noblemen who, for a bet made with an old friend, test the loyalty of their beloved by simulating a departure for the war to dress up like Turks and court them. Considering this opera mainly for its aspect referring to the Enlightenment ethics and thought, music or socio-cultural historians never focused their attention on the comic presence of the Turk, which is normally judged as a natural effect of the eighteenth century Turquerie.
To fill this lack of critical attention for such a central aspect of this opera, this paper wants to problematize the comic effect of the Turk in the Così fan tutte. Through a careful analysis of the libretto, we'll demonstrate that, beyond the comic patina, the story has specific references to a particular and shameful (for Christians) consequence to the Turkish conquest of Otranto (1480-1481): the intentional escape, during the Ottoman retreat, of many Christian women with the Turkish occupiers. Cleverly built on past wounds never healed, the Così fan tutte reveals itself as a great return of the repressed of the author Lorenzo Da Ponte, a converted Jew who was banished from Venice for the accusation - among others - to continue to cultivate the Jewish faith in his heart. Return of the repressed that was staged in one of the most important theaters of Vienna, one of the cities which for long cried because of the Turks and in 1790 laughs, unaware of the deeper meanings of this opera. (Show less)