1 Ali G: Just Who Does He Think He Is?

By Rachel Garfield
Pulbished in: Third Text, 'Ali G: Just Who Does He Think He Is', R.Garfield, vol. 54, Spring 2001,pp.63-70, ISSN 0952-8822

'both whiteness and blackness cover and conceal a host of ethnicities, of cultural backgrounds whose differences are leveled by the very concepts of white and black'1

Ali G began as a short slot in an 'alternative' comedy show called the 'Eleven o'clock show' on the UK's Channel 4. The usual format took the form of an interview in which the Ali G character (an imbecilic 'Wigger'2) would question a range of Establishment figures. The source of humour in his act was the clashing of worlds as the Establishment figures struggled to enter into the language of a 'street kid'. However whether the laughter was at the expense of the Establishment, the 'Wiggers', Black kids or a mixture of the three was unclear. Nonetheless within a few months Ali G was a hit, securing his own show and latterly appearing in the latest Madonna video.

In mainstream commentary on the phenomenon, much was made of the fact that no one apparently knew what either Ali G's purported ethnicity was, or that of the actor who was playing him. However, from the start it could be argued that many Jews would have already recognized the ethnicity of both, through such signs as his flashy attire and swagger (spruntz3), albeit through the coding of the ubiquitous Nike and Tommy Gear street wear.

So what relevance does this have? In this paper I want to argue that in considering the figure of Ali G as a problematizing agent (both his ethnic ambiguity and his historical/political imbecility are worthy of unpacking) wider questions can be reconsidered. I am ultimately aiming for a more open reading on race than those I have often encountered.

As a Jewish man taking on a Black persona Sacha Baron-Cohen seems to me to be problamitizing a simple reading on race and belonging. He flags up the flaws of the Black/White binary and the notion of ideological choice as common indicators of ethnicity. He also provides an opportunity to look at the shifting sands of the political construct of Blackness and the politics of appearance.

The suggestions in this paper are speculative and in some ways expose the difficulty of ethnic categorization. 4 This difficulty centres on ideology, not biology. With its privileging of maternal lineage, the Jewish notion of identity stands at odds with the secular post-colonial definitions of globalising neoliberalism, (centred upon a Black/White polarity). The concept of a Jewish man being unable to father Jewish children except with a Jewish woman, whilst on the other hand a non-Jewish man being able to sire Jewish children, is not only a thorn in the side of secular patriarchy (not least in its indexing of a pre-capitalist order) but also highlights the inseparable role of ideology in all categorisations of race and ethnicity.

3 In terms of historical contexts I will be looking for precursors, both historical and contemporary to provide a context for investigating Ali G as a performer. The history of 'Blacking Up' in the US is an apposite place to begin this search as there were a disproportionate amount of Jews 'Blacking Up' in the early part of the twentieth century (The most famous of them were Jews also). They took over from the Irish who were previously the largest group of performers in this field5. The whole phenomenon of 'Blacking Up' therefore is bound to the construction not only of Blacks themselves but to the construction of the Irish and Jews in the 'Blackface' heyday.

Furthermore, the persona of the Ali G figure is far more complex than the adoptive stage caricatures of, say, the UK 'Black and White Minstrel Show' of the 1970's - a phenomenon which cannot in any case be separated from the politics and racism of the time. However, Ali G can be considered as a problematized reconfiguration of that tradition. In this context I will be looking at the tradition of Jews 'Blacking Up'.

I will then briefly look at the initial Press responses as a vehicle for problematising the notion of race ownership. In the final part of the paper I will be using some of Peggy Phelan's arguments in her book Unmarked: the

politics of performance as a way of thinking through some of the issues

implicit in Ali G's performance as well as the Press' attitude to Baron-Cohen's ethnicity.

4 The Politics of Appearance

My questions regarding Ali G stem from my frustration at ethnicity being defined, on the most part, simply along the Black/White divide. In my experience, other ethnicities are included/excluded in the debates along these lines, so that, for example, Asian is considered Black (or at least included in the Black debates) and Jewish is White. The Jewish writings on 'Otherness' are therefore excluded from the Black debates (with the notable exception of Paul Gilroy) and vice versa. This encourages an entrenched, conservatism and a setting up of victim hierarchies where each ethnic group has a special relationship with the diaspora and oppressive histories, exclusive to itself.

The debate over who sits under the banner of Black is framed by the history of Colonialism. Whereas arguments for a non-essentialised subject are common currency in Cultural Studies research, the membership to the class of oppressor or oppressed is over-determined. This affects the Jewish Communities particularly, who are generally seen to belong to the former and therefore decidedly White. This construct omits Jews of colour, who are the majority of Jews in the world (and a significant minority within the Jewish Community in Britain). It is also a recent construct, as James Baldwin wrote in

Essence in 1984; "No one was white before he/she came to America, It took
generations and a vast amount of coercion before this became a white country. There is an Irish communityThere is a German communityThere is a Jewish community.Jews came here from countries where they were not

5 white, and they came here in part because they were not white Everyone who got here, and paid the price of the ticket, the price was to become 'white'".6

Even when Jews arrived in the US they were not considered White. This passage to Whiteness took until the 1950's and is still problematic particularly within Europe (US films of the immediate post WWII period, such as 'Crossfire' and 'Gentlemen's Agreement', which pleaded for tolerance towards Jews, attest to this first point).

To further complicate matters, there are many different positions within the Ashkenazi 7Jewish Community itself; some consider themselves White, some 'Other'. However, I want to argue here that whilst it is often held that the opportunity to choose one's position removes Jews from the frame of the oppressed,8 the lived reality is more complex, and, moreover, the 'choice' of readings presented by the ambiguities of the Ali G character flag up the multifarious roles that 'choice' plays in all ethnic categorisation, description and self description at this historical juncture. In the West Neo-Liberalist employment laws frequently pay lip-service to the ethnic diversity of the workforce, if only (!) for 'monitoring purposes'. This is another context in which the Ali G character can well (and probably hilariously) be imagined: the context of the DSS office, or the job application form. In such bureaucratic documentation the purported emphasis is on self definition. Yet according to the Commission for Racial Equality Guidelines, none of the categories offered should include 'Jewish', (or a host of others, for example Romany). I would

6 suggest this is because the notion of self definition for Jews has long been portrayed as one of a choice that Jews already have , whereas for others, the normative view is of choice as something (yet)to be conferred by benign

authority. The character of Ali G-as-Jew-playing-a-racial-other, or even the

Ali G as-person-of-indeterminate-racial-origin is pointedly vivid in this context.

The notion that Jews have a 'choice' in their identity invariably hinges upon assumptions that all Jews are White or can 'pass', or are simply a religious group/ideological cabal, or don't experience oppression any more. I am less interested in answering this kind of chauvinism at this point than examining the ways in which such thinking is highlighted by a phenomenon such as Ali G but one could, of course, observe immediately that all such assumptions are (a) defined by voices other than Jews and (b) are closely related to the anti-Semitic, "any problems the Jews have, they have brought upon themselves".

Jews Playing Black: A potted history

Michael Rogin in his book Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrant in the

Hollywood Melting Pot,9 looks specifically at the Jewish players within the
history of 'Blacking up' and what the investment may have been for those actors to have played such an important role within this niche of acting. He suggests that 'Blacking up' was a way of representing Blackness in a containable and benign form for the White audiences10 and that it was taken up by Jews as a way of identifying Blackness as the 'Other' and themselves

7 as fully integrated Americans, leaving behind their ethnic difference (Using the example of The Jazz Singer , he explains how Al Jolson escapes his 'Old World' ethnicity through 'Blacking up'). He explains that as 'Blacking up' 'essentialises' blackness so it 'liberates'11 Jewishness to be mainstream and White (all these terms essentialise, however). Furthermore, it was part of the great post-war push for Jews to be fully emancipated at the expense of Blacks. (It is interesting to note that according to Rogin, Jolson's films were very popular until he tried to bring his Jewish identity into the films at which point they flopped.) Jews wanted to be White. But that is not the whole picture. Maria Damon in her paper Jazz-Jews, Jive, and Gender, argues that for some Jewish men, to immerse themselves in Black culture was a way of being able to be '"more Jewish"', she states, ' a number of Jews found in African American culture the resources for resisting absorption into a dominant culture they found stultifying, hierarchic, unjust, unaesthetic, and unJewish'12 she cites Mezz Mezrow, Phil Spector and Lenny Bruce, as three paradigms for the 'assimilating down' as she puts it (this term in itself speaks volumes of the power relations between the two groups) - Mezz Mezrow becomes Black in his own mind, Phil Spector desires the trappings of Blackness and Lenny Bruce, who posits Blacks as honorary Jews. Damon notes a distinct nostalgia in these figures for a time when the Jew was more 'Other' than he is in today (i.e. post-war America) an Otherness that has been supplanted by the African-American.

Any investigation into the Jewish-Black relationship in the West has to take into account that the 'Grand Alliance' of the Jewish involvement in the Black

8 Civil Rights movement in the United States (which Baron-Cohen himself has researched for his BA thesis, according to the Jewish Chronicle) was much better for the Jews than Blacks, at best it was fueled by an ethical position of empathy; at worst it was somewhat paternalistic. Jews have gained a much greater economic base in the US and have largely been accepted as 'White' along that aforementioned great divide, as suggested in Blackface/White

Noise, 'Those with the insignias of power can play at giving them up, without
putting themselves at risk' 13

So, is the allure for some Jewish artists and performers of identifying with Black culture, a case of identifying with a group who are more 'more "us" than "we" have become'?14 Sandra Bernhard in her film Without You I'm Nothing explores and plays with this theme15. In some ways she is the closest parallel to Ali G. Anne Pellegrini in her essay 'Whiteface Performances: "Race," Gender and Jewish Bodies', analyses this film in detail.16 I will select a few of her points useful to an analysis of Ali G.

The film opens with the song from Nina Simone 'Four Women', where, dressed in African dress she sings 'my skin is black, my arms are long, my hair is woolly and my back is strong..' , she continues to mimic a whole series of Black singers as part of her 'show'. Much of the tension within the film is created by the relationship between Bernhard and her observers, that is the Black audience who 'don't "get" Bernhard' and Bernhard who 'does not "get" her audience' 17, thereby critiquing the ability of any White person to truly understand what it feels like to be Black. Except that Bernhard is not White;

9 she does not identify as being White but as a Jew. She describes her liberal Jewish background and posits White as Christian as she describes a childhood fantasy family to which she "belonged" who had gentile, allAmerican names and celebrated a 'white' Christmas. She refers to her father's gentile girlfriend sneeringly as having 'no lips', and refers to her piano player who is Black as ' me and my Jewish piano player, we get along so well'. Like Lenny Bruce she suggests that Black and Jewish are one and the same thing, while concurrently critiquing that position, destabilizing the Black/White dichotomy. As Anne Pellegrini states 'this destabilization occurs through the introduction of an excluded middle term, which resembles both sides, but is identical to neither: Jewishness' and continuing with' In posing herself as the question of race, Bernhard appears to align herself with blackness not so much over and against whiteness as conceived through it. Her passage from blackness to Jewishness takes place through a caricatured whiteness.'18 Perhaps Baron-Cohe's passage is from Whiteness to Jewishness through a caricatured Blackness?

Ali G makes himself look ridiculous. By stating, 'Is it 'cos I is Black'19 when clearly his skin is not, he also makes explicit a tension between what is seen and what is perceived. He is parodying the desire to be Black. He is also questioning what makes a Black male black. (Much like Adrian Piper questions what being Black means in some of her work20) He indicates that he may be a 'Wigger' by identifying himself as part of the 'Staines massive' and therefore a suburban boy (for suburban read white) , but also, like

10 Bernhard operates within the gulf of not 'getting' the audience. For Ali G, however, the audience is the interviewee, the White establishment, who does not 'get' him either. Bernhard is identifying with but not being understood by her objects of desire. Ali G pretends (possibly) to be a 'Wigger' who is not being understood by the white establishment except he is not white either (possibly). Like Bernhard, Baron-Cohen is a Jew so maybe he is also implying a gulf between White and Jewish.

In the final analysis Ali G's position is more ambiguous than Sandra Bernhard. In Without You I'm Nothing, not only does she critique the parody within the fabric of the film by having an indifferent and often hostile Black audience as a 'reality' check, but the last word is given to a Black women who writes 'fuck you Sandra Bernhard' on the table' alerting the viewer to the fact that whatever Sandra Bernhard thinks she feels, she does not know what it feels like to actually be Black. Baron Cohen/Ali G does not have this selfreflexivity. Although in his most recent series he has a Black DJ who disses him as an ignorant whitey, it is too staged to be convincing, too tokenistic.

The question is could a male gentile have played the Ali G character. Does this cross-dressing mark the Jew as liminal or does it reinforce his Whiteness? What saves Ali G from the position taken up by Rogin - of benign minstrelsy as an assimilationist tactic - is the political stance he takes up. Minstrels played straight, Baron-Cohen is constructing himself as an object of laughter. He is not there merely to entertain or make White people feel safe within their view of Blackness. The people he interviews are the wielders of

11 power, while feigning ignorance he teases out the inconsistencies, of these figures, exposes the thinly veiled bigotry. For example in the now much quoted interview of George Patten, the Chief of the Grand Lodge of Orangeman, Ali G forces Patten to admit that he would never even consider 'going out' with a Catholic woman and watched Major General Perkins, who had fought in World War II, flounder, having asked him if he ever thought of changing sides.21 (He is also a bridge between generations as he 'explains' politics to a young audience). Furthermore by keeping the audience guessing about the true identity of the character, we are forced to question what we, the audience think we are laughing at, which is also a political move on Baron-Cohen's part.

Identity Anxiety

'The Politics of identity call for the "self-representation" of marginalised communities, for "speaking for oneself" and while poststructualist feminist, gay/lesbian and postcolonial theories have often rejected essentialist articulations of identity, and biologistic and transhistorical determinations of gender, race and sexual orientation, they have at the same time supported 'affirmative action' politics, implicitly premised on the very categories elsewhere rejected as essentialist.' 22

The public discussion regarding Ali G began with the New Nation report in January 200023. Curtis Walker, branded Baron-Cohen racist while all the other (Black) comedians interviewed in this report, expressed differing

12 degrees of ambivalence about the character, while admitting he was funny. Felix Dexter even suggested that the 'interviews do expose a patronising deference from the great and the good to a man saying totally ridiculous things and that reaction borders on racism'24. However over the following week a flurry of articles in the national press asked the question 'Is Ali G racist?' ignoring some of the finer points of the Black comedians' statements in the New Nation report. The only attempt at intelligent comment was the Gary Younge article in The Guardian25. The rest seemed premised upon the position where, 'culture is analyzed as property rather than process' 26. As Ella Shohat and Robert Stam observe, in their article 'The Politics of

Multiculruralism in the Postmodern Age' that while the 'constructionist'; view

suggests 'that no one can speak for anyone' the 'identity politics' view is that only 'delegated representatives can speak' . These two positions, they state, sets up the trap of both Gilroy's 'ethnic insiderism' and of wondering how to 'not prolong the colonial legacy of misappropriation and insensitivity towards so-called minorities without silencing potential allies?'27

So is Ali G the bridge between camps, the figure who takes us out of the place where skin colour denotes which group you belong to and who you speak for. Anecdotal evidence would suggest that Ali G transcends the colour divide amongst young people, maybe because many of the codes of Blackness - of dress, music and speech have been so widely adopted that they have become positively mainstream. Black street culture is no longer black and you no longer have to be Black to be black. Anecdotal evidence (i.e.: New Nation poll where 80% thought Ali G was very funny and hadn't

13 thought about whether he was offensive or not) also suggests that many of his supporters are Black - not that this sanctions his act. The point is however that Ali G is not generally seen to be representing Blackness - but representing a character who is an object of fun for many different reasons, depending on who's looking.

Performing Black

Peggy Phelan in her book Unmarked: the politics of performance28, explores the politics of representation using Freud and Lacan to understand some of the failings (as she argues) of contemporary debates on gender and race. She is looking at the relationship between representation and politics, aiming to undermine the assumption that visibility equals power. She suggests that there is much power in the 'unmarked' and that the politics of appearance is misleading and counterproductive.

Talking of some of the issues arising out of Adrian Piper's work Phelan states that, 'The same physical features of a person's body may be read as "black" in England, "white" in Haiti, "coloured" in South Africa and "mulatto" in Brazil. More than indicating that racial markings are read differently cross-culturally, these variations underline the psychic potential and philosophical

14 impoverishment of linking the colour of the physical body with the ideology or race"29

She also draws on Judith Butlers position of gender being constituted through performativity. Butlers position outlines how gendered behaviour and sexuality is learned, that in order for the subject to adopt heterosexuality they must reject homosexuality or in order for the subject to adopt 'female' behaviour they must reject 'male' behaviour, there is therefore no originary, all is a copy of a copy.

If Adrian Piper identifies as an African American yet she 'looks' white enough to 'pass' then what is it that makes her black. Is an American of African derivation who 'passes' white? Or does the 'one drop' policy still apply? And what does this imply?

Before Ali G was identified as Jewish, there was much speculation (according to the press analysis) as to what his ethnicity actually was. His name seemed to be Islamic, possibly. He was identified as, possibly Asian, North African, mixed race (i.e. having one black parent) but no one seemed to suggest he was White (or maybe no one considered that anyone white would take up the position he does). No one mentioned Jewish either. This suggests that he was seen as neither White nor Black (north African is considered Black within the Post-Colonial debates) and corroborates with Pellegrini's30 argument of a third, unacknowledged position.

15 Once it was 'discovered' Sacha Baron-Cohen was Jewish, every article described him as 'White Jewish'. This is an interesting juxtaposition Citing him as White Jewish identifies him as non Black yet citing him as White

Jewish, identifies him as different from the normative White - and therefore
Other, thereby acknowledging Jews as non-White. 31 Furthermore, the need to know his 'real' identity says much about the politics of ownership of race. (Felix Dexter, a comic of Carribbean derivation has created a character to lampoon who is Nigerian, but the politics there is different - Black is conflated as one, the friction between different Black groups is often unacknowledged).

Phelan suggests that 'The focus on skin as the visible marker of race is itself a form of feminizing those races which are not White. Reading the body as the sign of identity is the way men regulate the bodies of women.' 32 It is interesting to note here that in European anti-Semitic discourse, the Jewish male was feminized. This image has been absorbed within Jewish selfimage, which often sees the Jewish mother as all powerful and the father as ineffectual.33 Maybe Baron-Cohen's adoption of Ali G is a bid to find a different image of manhood than this. Many North-West London Jewish boys have been mimicking street codes of Blackness for years34. It would not be too far fetched to consider that maybe these young men are the models for Ali G, after all it is the community in which he grew up. If, as identified by Rogin, Jews 'Blacking up' was a symptom desiring Whiteness, in post-war America in 21st Century Britain it seems young Jewish men are turning their back on Whiteness, desiring a Blackness that has mainstream currency amongst the youth.

16

In his act Baron-Cohen (unlike Bernhard) remains invisible as a Jew but visible as desiring to be an 'other'. The earlier suggestion that the desire for the Jew to be seen as 'Other' within a culture that does not openly acknowledge the 'Otherness' of Jews may be simplistic. Peggy Phelan, in identifying some of the flaws in what she describes as 'representation' politics, states that 'unable to see oneself reflected in a corresponding image of the Same, the spectator can reject the representation as "not about me"' 35. This "not about me" becomes complex with Ali G - if the viewer cannot make a clear assessment of who he is, "not about me" becomes meaningless. Phelan continues 'or worse, the spectator can valorize the representation which fails to reflect her likeness as one with "universal appeal" or "transcendent power"'36. Ali G sidesteps this issue by failing to reflect anyone's likeness, he confronts us with the impossibility of the 'real-Real' and breaks down the barrier between 'one who is and one who sees'37 His popularity undermines the conventions of 'representational politics' and moves the conversation away from who has a right to speak for whom into the realms of the failure of representation to really represent.

Phelan argues that within the discourse of the gaze the desire for a reciprocal gaze has been inadequately examined. She uses Lacan to suggest that in the gaze between Mother and child, lack (of the phallus) is met with lack and so desire is born and despite the 'psychic paradox: one always locates one's own image in an image of the other and one always locates the other in one's own image'38, one can never truly satisfy the desire to see oneself in the

17 other. Baron-Cohen, by 'playing' a Black man acknowledges that the failure to meet the gaze of the other is what incites desire in an endless replay of deferral. By being a Jew 'playing' a Black man he acknowledges the failure of the reciprocal gaze between Jews and Blacks - one can never be the other, yet (some) Jews continue to nostalgically desire the closeness of the 'Grand Alliance' where they imagine Jews and Blacks were seen as one.

Conclusion

Much work has been done on the representation of the Black male body as a means of control of that manhood by the White wielders of power. While it is confining for Black men, (and one has to take into account the huge amount of money being injected into the music industry which is currently dominated by black musicians), nonetheless, it seems to be a liberating identification for many other young men not of African descent (including Asian and Jewish).

The press responses to Ali G show what a transgressive move his character is and how much investment remains in the entrenched Black/White dichotomy. It asks questions regarding how one is seen as well as who can speak for whom. (The lack of attention given to Felix Dexter's Nigerian character or Harry Enfield's Cypriot character also collaborates in an essentialised Black/White positioning).

The question Ali G may be proposing for young British Jews is that of how to be Jewish. The only obvious models here seem to be those of either

18 assimilation or religious orthodoxy; there is a lack of self-formed external identity If you reject the two already mentioned options, where is there to go except for other, more seemingly visible ethnicities. Black is sexy. Jewish is not.

Whereas the usual springboard for discussing race in this country is racial violence, a seemingly marginal activity (according to the Press), BaronCohen's character acknowledges how mainstream black culture has become and has forced the issue onto the public agenda with humour. Through the awkward laughter may come a new discussion.

Or maybe Ali G just reflects the contemporary London where it's 'post-colonial character means that difference is routine. This otherness is magnetic but need not be exotic. There are still conflicts but there is also a savvy, agonistic humanism around' 39

R.Garfield 2001

Pellegrini, Anne, 'Whiteface Performances: "Race," Gender, and Jewish Bodies' from, Jews and Other Differences, Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin (eds), University of Minnesota Press, 1997,pg. 141 2 A 'Wigger' is a term for a White person, usually male who 'acts Black'. 3 This is a yiddish term meaning 'flashy'. 4 I will refer to Black as a person or people of African descent and Jew as someone born to a Jewish mother. These two terms are not necessarily mutually exclusive but I have not scope in this paper to discuss what a Jew is or may be. 5 Rogin, Michael, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigration and the Hollywood Melting Pot, California University Press, 1996 pg 56. 6 op. Cit. Rogin pg. 12 7 Ashkenazi Jews are those of European derivation.

19

8 9

Adrian Piper's position problematises the argument that Black people can't choose and Jews can. op. Cit., Rogin, 10 In a way reminiscent of Homi Bhabha's exploration of the beginnings of mimicry, where Indians were educated as minor officials for the British Colonial power as mediator and acceptable face of the Indian. 11 The term liberate is Rogin's term, I would argue that it is a false liberty, see Tamar Garb's introduction Garb, Tamar, 'Modernity, Identity, Textuality' from The Jew In the Text, ed by Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb, Thames and Hudson, 1995 12 Damon Maria, 'Jazz-Jews, Jive and Gender: The Ethnic Politics of Jazz Argot' from, Jews and Other Differences, Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin (eds), University of Minnesota Press, 1997, pg. 157 13 Rogin, op cit, pg.34 14 Damon, op cit., pg,168 15 Sandra Bernhard, Without You I'm Nothing, dir. J Boskovitch, 1990, US 16 Pellegrini, Anne, 'Whiteface Performances: "Race," Gender, and Jewish Bodies' from, Jews and Other Differences, Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin (eds.), University of Minnesota Press, 1997, pp. 130143 17 ibid., pg. 135 18 ibid., pg. 139 19 The Ali G Video, Channel 4, 1999 20 There is not room in this paper to explore this more fully, although I hope to expand on this point in future work 21 The Ali G Video, Channel 4, 1999 22 Shohat, Ella & Stamm, Robert, ' The Politics of Multiculturalism in the Postmodern Age' in Art & Design, Art & Cultural Difference, A&D 1995, pg.10 23 Slater, Ross, 'Should we laugh at Ali G', New Nation, 10 January 2000, pp. 6-7 24 ibid. 25 Younge, Gary, 'Is it 'cos I is black?'. The Guardian G2, January 12, 2000, pp2-3 26 Gilroy, Paul, Joined-Up Politics and Post-Colonial Melancholia, ICA Diversity Lecture, 1999, ICA Publications 1999, pg.17 27 Shohat, Ella & Stamm, Robert, ' The Politics of Multiculturalism in the Postmodern Age' in Art & Design, Art & Cultural Difference, A&D 1995, pg.10 28 Phelan, Peggy, Unmarked: the Politics of Performance, Routledge, 1993 pg.8 29 ibid., pg.8 30 Pellegrini, Anne, 'Whiteface Performances: "Race," Gender, and Jewish Bodies' from, Jews and Other Differences, Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin (eds), University of Minnesota Press, 1997,pg.139 31 Reminds me of Griselda Pollock's statement 'Western white men produce art; the rest of us produce art which must be qualified by an adjective' Pollock, Griselda, 'Is Feminism to Judaism as Modernity is to Tradition? Critical Questions on Jewishness, Femininity and Art' from Issues in Architecture, Art & Design, Vol. 5 No. 1, Gender and Ethnicity, University of East London 1997,pg 42 32 op cit, Phelan, Pg.10 33 For an in depth look at this subject see 'The Mouse That Never Roars:Jewish Masculinity on American Television' the catalogue Too Jewish? Challenging Traditional Identities, ed. Norman L Kleeblatt, The Jewish Museum New York and Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick New Jersey, 1996, pp. 93-107 34 Thanks to Ruth Novaczek for this insight. 35 Op cit., Phelan, pg.11 36 ibid. 37 ibid. 38 ibid., pg.18 39 Gilroy, Paul, Joined-Up Politics and Post-Colonial Melancholia, ICA Diversity Lecture, 1999, ICA Publications 1999, pg. 17

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bell, Vicki, 'Mimesis as Cultural Survival: Judith Butler and Anti-Semitism' from Vicki Bell (ed), Performativity and Belonging, Sage, 1999

20

Bell, Vicki, 'On Speech, Race and Melancholia: An interview with Judith Butler' from Vicki Bell (ed), Performativity and Belonging, Sage, 1999 Bhaba, Homi, K, 'Of Mimicry & Man: the ambivalence of Colonial discourse' from the locations of culture, Routledge 1994 Bhabha, Homi, K., 'Foreword: Joking Aside: The Idea of a Self-Critical Community' from Modernity Culture and 'the Jew', ed, Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus, Polity Press, 1999 Boyarin, Daniel & Jonathan, Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity, Critical Enquiry, Vol 19 Summer 1993 pp. 693-725 Boyarin, Jonathan, Thinking in Jewish, University of Chicago, 1996 Butt, Gavin, 'The greatest homosexual? Camp pleasure and the performative body of Larry Rivers' from Performing the Body Performing the Text, (eds) Andrew Stephenson & Amelia Jones, Routledge, 1999 Damon Maria, 'Jazz-Jews, Jive and Gender: The Ethnic Politics of Jazz Argot' from, Jews and Other Differences, Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin (eds), University of Minnesota Press, 1997 Gilman, Sander, The Jews Body, Routledge, 1991 Gilroy, Paul, Joined-Up Politics and Post-Colonial Melancholia, ICA Diversity Lecture, 1999, ICA Publications 1999 Jacobus, Helen, 'Nuff Respect?', The Jewish Chronicle, January 14 2000 Mirzoeff Nick ed.,Diaspora and Visual Culture, Routledge2000 Garb, Tamar, 'Modernity, Identity, Textuality' from The Jew In the Text ed by Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb, Thames and Hudson, 1995 Pellegrini, Anne, 'Whiteface Performances: "Race," Gender, and Jewish Bodies' from, Jews and Other Differences, Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin (eds), University of Minnesota Press, 1997 Phelan, Peggy, Unmarked: the Politics of Performance, Routledge, 1993 Piper, Adrian, Out of Order, Out of Sight, Volume I : Selected Writings in Meta-Art, 1968-92, MIT Press, 1996 Rogin, Michael, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigration and the Hollywood Melting Pot, California University Press, 1996

21

Shohat, Ella & Stam, Robert, ' The Politics of Multiculturalism in the Postmodern Age' in Art & Design, Art & Cultural Difference, A&D 1995

Newspaper Articles Aaron, Charles, 'What the White Boy Means When He Says Yo' Benn, Tony, 'How I tamed Ali G', The Guardian, March 30 2000 Collins, Michael, 'Hold on to your hats', The Guardian Medua, March 27 2000 Gibson, Janine, 'Comics find Ali G is an alibi for racism', The Guardian, January 11 2000 Jeffries, Stuart, 'Channel Surfing', The Guardian, April 1 2000 Laville, Sandra, 'Ali G rapped for being "racially offensive", The Daily Telegraph, January 11 2000 Onyeka, Justin, 'Thinking Big', interview with Geoff Shumann, New Nation, 31 January 2000 Shannon, Sandra, 'It's me and Naomi in a bath, innit', Evening Standard, 29 March Slater, Ross, 'Should we laugh at Ali G', New Nation, 10 January 2000 Stuart, Julia, 'getting' jiggy wid Da Staines Massive', The Independent Tuesday Review, 28 March 2000 Various, letters to The Guardian,, 'All G-ed up about Ali', 13 March 2000 Film, TV, Video Bernhard, Sarah, Without You I'm Nothing, dir. J Boskovitch, 1990, US The Ali G Tape The Ali G Series, Channel 4, 2000