Third, the delicious irony of Ali G is that Baron Cohen, a Jewish man satirizing the widespread appropriation of black culture, has almost single-handedly brought into the British mainstream the real hip hop culture that had spent 20 years languishing in the margins with niche DJs like Tim Westwood. In Joined up politics and Post-Colonial Melancholia, Paul Gilroy, Chair of the African American Studies Department at Yale, observes that Ali G detonates "anachronistic assumptions" of race and how it is constructed in post-colonial Britain. All of a sudden, through a fictional character who can't convincingly act black, hip hop culture has entered the British mainstream.
At the risk of seeming to support those reactionaries who believe in ethnic essentialism - joining the chorus of "he's one of us" I referred to earlier - I think there is something about the origins of Ali G that is peculiarly Jewish. Despite the last century's Anglo-Jewish community having bequeathed to its descendants a sclerotic and stultified religious establishment and generations of communally undereducated and alienated individuals, it has at least emphasized the importance of identity. This was not necessarily a choice for white English boys growing up Anglican Christians by default. Growing up Jewish in a Britain that is still profoundly suspicious of outsiders and institutionally racist, identity is always in "question." Baron Cohen had to think about his identity as a Jew. His own questions were even more fraught because he grew up half-Welsh in England just before the first independent Welsh parliament for centuries. Was he part of a race, a religion, a nation, a people? Since his mother was Israeli, was he an Israeli, a de facto Zionist? How should he think of himself? How should he constitute himself to others? How should he answer the new college friend in freshman week who asks "Are you a Jewish?"
These may sound like banal questions to Americans who have grown up with the rhetoric of diversity, and to American Jews for whom particularist identity is largely a choice. But Britain is still overwhelmingly a white protestant Christian country whose head of state is the head of the church and the richest woman in the world. At the same time, British racists have not had 400 years of slavery to set the tone for race relations. The majority of non-white or non-Christian populations are relatively recent, and so British racists have had to make do with a weak importation of colonial imagery to discriminate against "diversity." This means that the boundaries and syntheses between different communities in Britain are still up for grabs, unlike the hardened racial barriers in America that have to be figured (usually along gender lines) and then penetrated in films like Bulworth or Monster's Ball.
Now, Ali G is in the States, where the establishment is far more invested in the rigid assumptions of racial and ethnic roles, and where hip hop has long been a vital cultural force. Ali G has added his camp fashion friend Bruno and Borat, the Kazakhstani reporter with Id writ large, to bang out a few more assumptions about nationality, sexual preference and fashion. Will Americans get the joke, or, will they, like Naomi Wolf, be part of it?
The interdependence of fantasy and reality
February, 2003
Viewing the 1950s through its own fantastic prism
January, 2003
According to 8 Mile, hip hop is about class, not race
December, 2002
How to be Spike Lee instead of another Clocker
October, 2002
The Art of the Press Conference
September, 2002
CBS's packaging of the '9/11' documentary reveals exactly what America
fails to understand about September 11.
April, 2002
Harry Potter is cute, but is it a bad thing that adults crave escapism?
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