Whitewashing The Dreamgirls Beyonce Diana Ross and The Commodification of Blackness
Whitewashing The Dreamgirls Beyonce Diana Ross and The Commodification of Blackness
Jaap Kooijman
‘Is Beyoncé the Diana Ross of our generation?’ a television reporter asked
Oprah Winfrey on the red carpet at the premiere of the 2013 documentary
Beyoncé: Life Is But a Dream. Her response was clear: ‘No, she is the Beyoncé
of our generation. You cannot compare her to Diana Ross. Diana Ross was
Diana Ross, and Beyoncé is Beyoncé’ (Graham 2013). Winfrey is right, of
course, as the careers of these two African-American female superstars are
more than three decades apart, during which the media landscape has changed
drastically. Much more than Ross ever was, Beyoncé is ‘an ambulant brand, an
advertisement for a new gilded age when commodities overpower e verything –
including race’ (Cashmore 2010: 138). Back in the post-civil rights era of the
1970s, when Diana Ross became a solo superstar, no one could have envi-
sioned an African-American female pop star featured on the cover of the ‘The
100 Most Influential People’ issue of Time magazine, as Beyoncé was in May
2014. As with many of her achievements, Beyoncé’s appearance on the Time
cover has been perceived as a sign of a ‘post-racial’ era in which race is no
longer a barrier to superstardom. However, as Farah Jasmine Griffin argues,
although Beyoncé does ‘occupy a space unimagined by earlier generations’,
this does not signify a ‘post-racial’ time, but ‘a historical moment in which
race and racism operate differently than in the past’ (Griffin 2011: 132–3). To
perceive the shift from the ‘post-civil rights’ Ross to the allegedly ‘post-racial’
Beyoncé as sheer progress fails to recognise how race and racism still function
in society and media today.
Beyoncé might not be the Diana Ross of our generation, yet the similarities
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between the two superstars cannot be ignored. Both Ross and Beyoncé started
as out as lead singer of a very popular African-American ‘girl group’, the
Supremes and Destiny’s Child; both were managed by a strong male father
figure from whom they had to distance themselves publicly to claim their inde-
pendence; and both became global superstars, not just as bestselling pop singers
performing in grand stadiums around the world, but also as movie actresses
and fashion icons featured on the covers of glossy magazines. Significantly,
both Diana Ross and Beyoncé publicly announced that they transcended ‘race’,
that they were ‘universal’ and ‘colour blind’ in response to continuous scru-
tiny by the media, music critics and fans questioning their ‘blackness’. ‘I don’t
think in terms of race [. . .] it’s people – not this race or that race’, Diana Ross
told Ebony magazine in 1981 (Massaquoi 1981: 44–6). Beyoncé, in turn, told
Vogue in 2009: ‘I’m universal [. . .] no one’s paying attention to what race I am.
I’ve kind of proven myself. I’m past that’ (Cashmore 2010: 144).
However, as Alice Echols has pointed out, contrary to white artists who
‘are hailed for their brave transgressions’ when crossing the racially defined
categories of the entertainment industry, black pop artists ‘who defy the tests
of “blackness” [. . .] may achieve superstardom, but they often find their racial
crossings leave them open to charges of self-loathing and selling-out’ (Echols
2002: 197). Debates about Diana Ross tend to centre on ‘questions of racial
authenticity’ (Brooks 2014: 206), labelling her as ‘an honorary white girl’
(Kempton 2005: 265) who was ‘out-whiting whitey’ (Cardwell 1997: 118).
In a 1976 Village Voice article, Jamaica Kincaid described Ross as the ‘last
of the black white girls [. . .] who had mastered without the slightest bit of
self-consciousness or embarrassment, being white’ (Kincaid 1976: 152). In
stark contrast, four decades later, Judy Rosen of The New Yorker described
Beyoncé as ‘by far the “blackest” – musically and aesthetically – of all the
post-Madonna pop divas; she represents African-American women’s anger
and power like no one in popular culture since Aretha Franklin’ (Rosen 2013).
Times indeed seem to have changed, but Beyoncé’s ‘blackness’, musically
and aesthetically, continues to be scrutinised and debated. The release of her
2011 solo album 4 prompted the question why Beyoncé’s skin colour seemed
lighter than on the covers of her previous albums, similar to the rumours
about Ross ‘airbrush[ing] herself into Doris Day oblivion’ on her album covers
(Taraborrelli 1989: 394). Discussing the issue of ‘whitewashing’ is impor-
tant to reveal how race is strategically used by the industry, as became clear
when Beyoncé was featured in a 2008 L’Oréal advertisement for hair colour
products; Beyoncé’s skin colour was significantly lighter in the advertisement
printed in Elle magazine than the very same one in Essence, a glossy targeted
at African-American women (Cashmore 2010: 145). However, too often the
debate is reduced to the question of whether or not the artist is ‘still black
enough’ or instead has ‘become white’. In his seminal essay ‘What is This
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“Black” in Black Popular Culture?’, Stuart Hall argues that ‘black popular
culture is a contradictory space’ that ‘can never be simplified or explained in
terms of the simple binary oppositions that are still habitually used to map it
out’ (Hall 1992: 26). Arguments of ‘whitewashing’ or ‘being not black enough’
tend to fall back upon a crude black–white dichotomy to make value judge-
ments about the artist’s (lack of) ‘authenticity’, rather than to examine the
roles that race and gender continue to play in the entertainment industry, and
specifically in African-American female superstardom.
This chapter neither questions the ‘blackness’ of Beyoncé or Diana Ross,
nor defends them against the accusations of being ‘whitewashed’. Instead, I
examine how ‘blackness’ and ‘whiteness’ function in the construction of their
star images (Dyer 1998), shaped not only by their performances on record
and film, but also by their offscreen appearances in promotional material and
interviews, as well as critical reception and tabloid press stories (see Kooijman
2014). Following Richard Dyer, without denying their individual agency, I
perceive these two African-American female superstars as ‘embodiments of the
social categories in which people are placed and through which they have to
make sense of their lives, and indeed through which we make our lives’ (Dyer
2004: 16). Rather than focusing on one star in one specific era, I emphasise
the historical link between Beyoncé and Ross in an attempt to show how their
star texts are interconnected and continue to inform each other over time.
Beyoncé’s performance as the Ross-inspired character Deena Jones in the film
version of the 1981 Broadway musical Dreamgirls (Bill Condon, 2006) most
explicitly merges the star images of Beyoncé and Ross, connecting them both
to the question of ‘whitewashing’ and the betrayal of authentic ‘black’ culture.
The chapter’s starting point is the revisionist narrative of the original 1981
Broadway musical Dreamgirls, in which the story of Diana Ross and the
Supremes is reduced to a tale of the group’s record company Motown betray-
ing authentic ‘black’ culture in its aim to become economically successful in
mainstream ‘white’ culture. This simple binary opposition is most apparent in
the replacement of the group’s ‘original lead singer’ Effie White (!), embody-
ing ‘blackness’, by the more commercial Deena Jones, embodying ‘whiteness’.
Subsequently, I will discuss how the casting of Beyoncé as Deena in the 2006
film version not only added star power to the Broadway original, but also
used the already existing connection between Beyoncé and Diana Ross to give
form to the Deena character. Moreover, much of Beyoncé’s performance of
Deena is clearly modelled after the fictional character Mahogany that Ross
plays in Mahogany (Berry Gordy, 1975), thereby blurring the lines between
‘real’ and fictional personas even more. Finally, I will compare the song
‘Listen’, performed by Deena/Beyoncé, to ‘It’s My Turn’, the final solo hit
single by Ross before leaving Motown in 1981, the year when Dreamgirls first
appeared on Broadway. Connecting the ‘post-civil rights’ Diana Ross to the
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Blackness as authenticity
Set in 1960s Chicago, the musical Dreamgirls tells the story of the African-
American girl group the Dreamettes, who become the Dreams after their
manager Curtis Taylor replaces the group’s soulful lead singer Effie White
with the less talented yet better- looking and more commercial- sounding
Deena Jones in an attempt to reach a mainstream (read white) audience. With
Deena as the group’s focal point, Effie is pushed into the background and is
eventually forced to leave the Dreams, by then renamed Deena Jones and the
Dreams. As a single mother on welfare (her daughter fathered by Curtis),
Effie attempts a comeback with the ballad ‘One Night Only’, but soon finds
out that Curtis is paying radio stations to boycott her single in favour of a
disco version sung by Deena (by now married to Curtis). When the scheme is
exposed, Deena leaves Curtis and reconciles with Effie, whose ballad version
becomes a number-one hit song. As a grand finale, Effie joins Deena for the
final performance of the Dreams. Starring Jennifer Holliday as Effie and
Sheryl Lee Ralph as Deena, Dreamgirls opened on Broadway in December
1981 and received rave reviews, including from The New York Times, which
named Holliday’s solo ‘And I’m Telling You I’m Not Going’ as ‘one of the
most powerful theatrical coups to be found in a Broadway musical since Ethel
Merman sang “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” at the end of Act I of Gypsy’
(Rich 1981: C11).
Dreamgirls is a thinly veiled retelling of the story of the Supremes, in which
Deena Jones stands for Diana Ross, Effie White for Florence ‘Flo’ Ballard,
Lorrell Robinson for Mary Wilson, and Curtis Taylor, Jr for Berry Gordy, Jr,
founder and president of Motown. A Dreamgirls cover story in Ebony maga-
zine (May 1982) made the connection explicit:
Although enough names and details have been changed to avoid legal
problems, Dreamgirls is remarkably similar [. . .] to the story of the
Supremes – three girls from Detroit who were the Primettes, then the
Supremes, then Diana Ross and the Supremes. While, in the story of
the Supremes, singer Florence Ballard was dropped from the group
for reasons which many Supremes fans still consider ‘unexplained’,
in Dreamgirls, Effie is dropped because she is overweight, not very
glamorous, thought of as a troublemaker, and has a voice that is a bit
‘too black’ for ‘crossover’ appeal to White audiences in, say, Las Vegas.
(Bailey 1982: 92)
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The article leaves out one significant difference between the two stories.
Whereas the fictional Effie has a successful comeback and reconciles with
Deena and the Dreams, the real Florence did not succeed as a solo singer and
died in poverty at the age of thirty-two from cardiac arrest, eight years after
she had left the Supremes. In earlier drafts of the musical, Effie was supposed
to die before the intermission, much to the protest of Jennifer Holliday, who
had been promised a starring role on Broadway and did not ‘see how [she
would] accomplish this being in a secondary role’ (Lawson 1981: C5). By
refusing to be pushed into the background, Holliday mirrored her onstage
Effie character, eventually resulting in a fictional happy end that imagined how
Florence Ballard’s solo career could have been a success.
The credibility of Dreamgirls as telling the story of the Supremes was
reaffirmed by the responses of the two remaining original Supremes. Diana
Ross refused to see the show, sending her good friend Michael Jackson
instead (Hirshey 1984: 164); Mary Wilson went to see it several times,
knowing ‘in [her] heart that this story rang far truer than the producers could
have imagined’ and prompting her to title her bestselling autobiography
Dreamgirl: My Life as a Supreme (Wilson 1986: xii). In her book on girl
groups, Jacqueline Warwick correctly points out that ‘since the success of the
Broadway musical Dreamgirls, it has become customary to lament Ballard as
the truly gifted singer in the Supremes, unjustly ousted from the position of
lead singer for purely political reasons when Berry Gordy [. . .] groomed the
conniving and untalented Diana Ross for stardom’ (Warwick 2007: 159–60).
Nevertheless, by identifying their second Motown single ‘Buttered Popcorn’
(1961) – the only one on which Ballard sings lead – as the group’s first single,
Warwick repeats the suggestion that Ballard was the original lead singer of the
Supremes. In reality, Ross sang lead on almost all of the songs from the start,
including on their first and only pre-Motown single ‘Tears Of Sorrow’ (1960),
during their audition at Motown, and on their first Motown single ‘I Want A
Guy’ (1961). As Berry Gordy remembers the audition in his autobiography, it
was the ‘whiny voice of the girl singing lead’, meaning Ross, that caught his
attention and made him sign the group (Gordy 1994: 146). Pointing out this
historical inaccuracy does not undermine the musical’s main point that Curtis/
Berry favoured Deena/Diana over Effie/Florence because of her commercial
potential, but does raise the question why Ballard has to be perceived as the
‘original lead singer’ to make the Dreamgirls narrative work.
The answer lies in a simplistic black–white dichotomy on which the musical
is based: the full-figured, darker-skinned Effie White with a powerful soul
voice embodies ‘blackness’, whereas the skinny, light-skinned Deena Jones
with a pop voice embodies ‘whiteness’. Labelling Ballard the ‘original lead
singer’ not only emphasises the authenticity of Effie/Florence in opposition
to the artificiality of Deena/Diana, but also makes the choice for the latter
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His decision to back Diana totally over Flo also demonstrated how little
Gordy cared about race and how much he cared about success and money.
Diana epitomized style over substance and strove to look like Twiggy and
Jacky Kennedy, two of the whitest women there ever were. Flo was just
the opposite. She carried the essence of soul – a deep sadness – inside her
and in her voice. Gordy believed correctly that whites preferred style to
soul, and because whites were the major record buyers, he saw Ross as
commercial success personified. (Benjaminson 2008: 77–8)
Werner’s reference to the 1972 biopic starring Diana Ross as Billie Holiday
says nothing about the acting abilities of either Ross or Ballard. Instead, like
Dreamgirls, he uses the two Supremes as opposing poles in a black–white
dichotomy to describe the crossover into ‘white’ commercial mainstream
culture, in which the individual success of Ross is achieved at the expense of
Ballard, who stands for the ‘black’ community that is left behind.
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experience on the television talent show American Idol in 2004 echoed the
Dreamgirls narrative. In spite of her vocal mastery, Hudson was voted off early
on, an event that many (including pop star Elton John) believed was based
predominantly on her being full-figured and black (Meizel 2011: 179–80).
Starring in Dreamgirls was a triumphant revenge similar to Effie’s comeback,
as was Hudson’s posing on the cover of the American Vogue (March 2007).
However, like Jennifer Holliday before her, Hudson could not repeat her acting
success, suggesting that Effie in Dreamgirls is the only starring role available
to ‘larger’ African-American actresses. Mirroring the choice for Deena over
Effie, Hudson’s co-star Beyoncé subsequently starred as Etta James in Cadillac
Records (2008), even though to some critics Hudson seemed the more obvious
choice (Laurie 2013: 519).
The presence of Beyoncé added a star power to the film missing from the
musical, thereby increasing the importance of Deena Jones as a main character
and enhancing the idea that Dreamgirls was really about Diana Ross after all.
While Sheryl Lee Ralph, who played Deena in the Broadway version, always
insisted that she ‘was not playing Diana Ross’ (Ralph 2011: 124), Beyoncé
told reporters that during the filming she felt as if she ‘was channelling Diana
Ross’ and that she had a ‘shrine’ of Ross photographs in her dressing room
(Ulmer 2006). The film also stayed closer to the story of the Supremes by
changing the setting from Chicago (back) to Detroit and by imitating the
group’s style through close copies of their album covers and television perfor-
mances. Moreover, Dreamgirls tapped into the connection that already existed
between Diana Ross and Beyoncé. From the start of her career with Destiny’s
Child, Beyoncé had been compared to Ross, including by herself. In interviews,
Beyoncé named the Supremes as the group’s main inspiration ‘because they
were glamorous [and] that’s what Destiny’s Child tries to do’ (Farley 2001).
Most tellingly, Destiny’s Child mimicked an iconic 1968 publicity picture of
the Supremes on the cover of Vibe magazine (February 2001), with Beyoncé
posing as Ross in the middle. Beyoncé recognised that the comparison to Ross
made her look like ‘a diva [who goes] around kicking people out of the group’,
leaving the media and fans to wonder when she would ‘do a Diana Ross’ and
go solo, which Beyoncé eventually did in 2003 (Bogle 2007: 361–2; Pointer
2014: 59). The Deena Jones character resembled both Ross and Beyoncé to
such an extent that Beyoncé feared ‘that audiences would think [Dreamgirls] is
my life story’ (Ulmer 2006).
While during the first half of the movie, the Deena character is modelled
after Diana Ross of the 1960s, during the second half Beyoncé’s performance
seems inspired mainly by the fictional character that Ross performed in the
movie Mahogany (1975), directed by Berry Gordy after he fired the white
British director Tony Richardson (Gordy 1994: 335–9). In Mahogany, Ross
plays Tracy Chambers, a young woman from the Chicago South Side who
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Effected with wigs and make-up colours, the transformations are a play
on and against ‘darkness’; Diana Ross is a high-tech Egyptian Queen, a
pale medieval princess, a turbaned Asiatic, a body-painted blue nymph.
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Figure 5.1 Diana Ross as Mahogany in montage sequence from Mahogany (Berry
Gordy, 1975).
Figure 5.2 Beyoncé Knowles as Deena Jones in montage sequence from Dreamgirls
(Bill Condon, 2006).
As her body colour is powdered over or washed out in bright light, and as
her long-haired wigs blow around her face, she becomes suddenly ‘white’.
(Gaines 1988: 18)
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noble savage’ (Bogle 2007: 92). Similarly, while enabling her to escape the
American reality of racial discrimination, the ‘white’ fashion world of Europe
reduces Mahogany to a spectacle of the exotic Other, turning her into an inani-
mate object to be desired because of her/its darkness. Tracy/Ross is not literally
becoming ‘white’, but her skin colour is disconnected from ‘black’ culture,
only to be consumed as a fashionable accessory by ‘white’ culture: ‘Losing her
black community identity, Tracy becomes Mahogany, acquiring the darkness,
richness and value the name connotes; that is, her blackness becomes com-
modified’ (Gaines 1988: 19).
Here a connection can be made to the ‘real’ Diana Ross and Beyoncé,
whose images, similar to their fictional counterparts Mahogany and Deena,
are also shaped within the context of fashion and glamour photography. For
example, both Ross and Beyoncé made the cover of Vanity Fair (March 1989
and November 2005, respectively), an event that can be seen as an indication
of superstardom, ‘particularly for African- American stars who rarely saw
their faces on the full cover of Vanity Fair’ (Bogle 2007: 362). Only two other
African-American female stars have been featured on a Vanity Fair single-
person cover: Tina Turner (May 1993) and, most recently, Scandal actress
Kerry Washington (August 2013). The two covers are remarkably alike, as
Ross and Beyoncé are both photographed with their bare back turned to the
viewer, while looking over their left bare shoulder. The Ross cover, shot by
Annie Leibovitz, shows a nude Diana wrapped in a white sheet, a childlike
pose that is reinforced by the title ‘Diana Ross: A Star Is Reborn’. With her
black skin literally wrapped in whiteness, the Ross portrait ‘contrasts white-
ness and blackness’, as bell hooks has argued: ‘Whiteness dominates the page,
obscuring and erasing the possibility of any assertion of black power. The
longing that is most visible in this cover is that of the black woman to embody
and be encircled by whiteness’ (hooks 1992: 71). Whiteness also dominates
the Beyoncé cover, shot by Patrick Demarchelier, as the ‘beylightful, beyli-
cious, beylovely [. . .] Beyoncé’ is positioned against and engulfed by an ultra-
bright white background. The commodification of blackness is emphasised by
the word ‘HIP-HOP’ printed in bright orange letters across Beyoncé’s body.
While initially the cover raised the question of whether or not Vanity Fair had
‘whitened’ Beyoncé’s skin colour (which assumes that an ‘authentic’ shade of
skin colour exists), the real significant issue is the way whiteness and blackness
are contrasted. Similar to the Mahogany montage sequence, the two covers
are (using the words of the above-quoted Jane Gaines) a play on and against
‘darkness’ in which both Diana Ross and Beyoncé become suddenly ‘white’ –
they have been commodified.
That ‘becoming white’ is more about commodification than actual skin
colour is made clear by the portrait of Diana Ross that Andy Warhol made for
her 1982 Silk Electric album. When designing the portrait, Warhol wondered
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‘what colour I should make her – I wonder if she wants to be black or white’
(Warhol 1989: 400). The final portrait (a close-up of her face looking over her
left bare shoulder, similar to the Vanity Fair cover) had Ross ‘looking as white
as [Ronald] Reagan himself’, as Sue Steward and Sheryl Garratt argue, con-
cluding that ‘once black artists do, against all odds, “cross over” to a bigger
audience, their fight becomes one of remaining black’ (Steward and Garratt
1984: 50). By taking the whiteness of the Andy Warhol portrait literally rather
than recognising its overt symbolism of commodified culture, Steward and
Garratt fall back upon the black–white dichotomy in which ‘remaining black’
signifies authenticity and ‘becoming white’ signifies artificiality. In her discus-
sion of the Warhol portrait, Nicole Fleetwood does not mention the colour
of Diana Ross at all (with the exception of noting her ‘shiny red’ lips), but
instead places the image in a longer tradition of Ross publicity photographs
that can be viewed as ‘a disruption of iconic whiteness’, arguing that ‘Ross is
noted for the cultivation of her iconic face and for producing a cross-racial and
gender-varied desirability’ (Fleetwood 2015: 63). Instead of either ‘remaining
black’ or ‘becoming white’, the Ross image challenges such a rigid black–white
dichotomy.
The artificiality of commodified culture enables photographers of both
Diana Ross and Beyoncé to use their skin colour as a matter of ‘artistic choice’
in which ‘black’ and ‘white’ are perceived as merely expressions of fashion,
seemingly free from politics. Not surprisingly then, in the Mahogany-style
photo shoot called ‘African Queen’ by Mark Pillai for the French fashion
magazine L’Officiel Paris (February 2011), Beyoncé is pictured in a wide range
of colours, from an extremely light-skinned portrait to a controversial ‘black-
face’ one. Although in Dreamgirls Deena/Beyoncé is also shown in a dark-
painted full-body shot as part of the fictional Vogue photo shoot, this time
Beyoncé’s donning blackface understandably sparked controversy. However,
like Mahogany in Rome, Beyoncé in Paris moves in an artificial and com-
modified ‘white’ world of fashion, disconnected from explicit ‘black’ politics
and history. The L’Officiel Paris photo shoot functions in a similar way to the
Mahogany montage sequence and the Vogue photo shoot in Dreamgirls, sug-
gesting that Mahogany and Deena as well as Diana Ross and Beyoncé occupy
an ahistorical and utopian space in which ‘black’ or ‘white’ no longer seem to
matter – but obviously still do. These images of Mahogany, Deena, Diana Ross
and Beyoncé may challenge the black–white dichotomy; they are produced
within an entertainment industry that continues to reduce black female artists
to icons of the exotic other, while maintaining iconic whiteness as the ideal
standard of beauty.
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only a few opportunities for African-American female stars like Ross, while
the actual impact of Motown in Hollywood remained relatively small. As Neal
concludes, ‘Ross’s image as an independent black woman was as saccharine as
her singing voice, while Gordy parlayed this imagery into a limited victory for
black capitalist patriarchy’ (Neal 1999: 90).
Eventually, in 1981, Diana Ross left Motown for a multimillion contract
with RCA, the same year that the musical Dreamgirls premiered on Broadway.
Her final Motown solo hit single was ‘It’s My Turn’, a pop ballad that, similar
to ‘Listen’, is a self-affirmative proclamation of independence. In her autobi-
ography, Ross discusses how the song expressed her need ‘to step up and take
my share of chances’ after feeling ‘completely disempowered’ at Motown: ‘All
of these people [including Berry Gordy] were making decisions for me, and
I had no voice’ (Ross 1993: 203). Both ‘It’s My Turn’ and ‘Listen’ enunciate
the symbolic shift from a weak, powerless voice to a strong, empowered one.
However, whereas the enhanced vocal prowess of the performance by Deena/
Beyoncé physically embodies this shift, Ross’ voice on ‘It’s My Turn’ does not
sound distinctively different from her previous hit songs, just as ‘depthless’,
‘synthetic’ and ‘saccharine’ as before. Rather than judging Ross’ voice in such
harsh terms, Richard Dyer and Daphne Brooks have recognised its escapist and
utopian character. As Dyer argues, Ross has ‘an almost unreal voice’ that has
‘the vocal “purity” of white song, but is also capable of all the “dirty” notes as
well’ (Dyer 1982: 36). According to Brooks, its ‘hyper-femme “womanly” and
yet “childlike” delicacy’ makes Diana Ross’ voice ‘its own kind of powerful
statement of extremes, a queer gateway and an invitation to [. . .] never stop
imagining that we might travel to other places – kinder, gentler, freer’ (Brooks
2014: 206–7). Imagining these ‘other places’ is what makes up the ‘dream’
of Dreamgirls (and Mahogany as well), embodied by both Diana Ross and
Beyoncé. Whether or not the dream can actually be fulfilled is less relevant
than the pleasure the escapist fantasy provides, as Richard Dyer wrote about
Ross in 1982, but which also seems to apply to Beyoncé three decades later:
‘Ross epitomizes a success that is still out of reach of most black people or
women (or indeed of working class white men). But isn’t that part of her act,
too? The sheer ecstasy of the whole Diana Ross thing is an outrageous revelling
in what success could feel like, but not how to achieve it’ (Dyer 1982: 37; see
also Kooijman 2016).
‘Listen’ reappears early on in the 2013 HBO autobiographical documentary
Beyoncé: Life Is But a Dream. The film’s second scene, entitled ‘Independence’
on the DVD edition, shows how Beyoncé fires her manager and father Mathew
Knowles, followed by her singing ‘Listen’ to herself in the back of her limousine
on her way to The Oprah Winfrey Show. In this way, another layer of meaning
is added to the song, now not just expressing how Deena/Diana breaks
with Curtis/Berry, but also how Beyoncé only can become fully independent
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Award really was ‘honouring the Motown legacy’, Ross said, using the oppor-
tunity to promote ‘high standards’ in black pop music: ‘We do not have to say
the F-word, we do not have to bump and grind [. . .] you can stand tall and
be classy, be ladies and gents, and have a long career.’ Ross’ words fittingly
emphasised that both the Motown legacy and her own superstardom were
all about social mobility, moving on up from the stereotypical expressions of
‘black’ culture. When Ross jokingly called her advice a ‘diva master class’, the
camera zoomed in on Beyoncé.
The 2007 BET Awards broadcast reveals not only how the star images
of Beyoncé and Diana Ross are connected, but also repositions them as the
main characters in the Dreamgirls narrative. Although both Effies – Jennifer
Holliday and Jennifer Hudson – are recognised and applauded, the television
show – as does the movie – ends up celebrating the success that the Deena/
Mahogany/Diana/Beyoncé character embodies. Like Ross, Beyoncé can be
perceived as ‘dramatizing the dilemma of crossover success’ (Early 2004: 122),
as the performances by both African- American female superstars address
questions about maintaining authenticity in a process of commodification, in
which authenticity is equated with ‘remaining black’, while commodification
is equated with ‘becoming white’. These questions are explicitly expressed
in both their portrayals of the fictional characters Mahogany and Deena, as
well as through their own ‘real’ star images, often challenging the simplistic
black–white dichotomy on which the dilemma of crossover success is based.
Although in the current, allegedly ‘post-racial’ times, Beyoncé is less easily criti
cised for ‘becoming white’ than Ross was three decades earlier, there is a clear
continuity in the way both African-American female superstars are expected
to account for their ‘blackness’ and how their commodification is discussed in
racial terms, based on a black–white dichotomy signifying ‘authenticity’ versus
‘artificiality’. Such a black–white dichotomy might remain irresolvable, yet
both Dreamgirls and Mahogany provide ‘a magical resolution’ (Dyer 1986:
136) by relying on the excess and flamboyance of the star’s performance, pre-
senting a utopian dream space where race no longer seems to matter. Whether
or not the dream works, to echo the words of Richard Dyer, depends a lot on
how much you go for Diana Ross and Beyoncé, and sensuous montage.
Coda: post-Formation
This chapter was written before Beyoncé released the single and music video
‘Formation’ on 6 February 2016, and before she performed the song live
during the Super Bowl halftime show the next day. As many commentators
have pointed out, with her performance, which included explicit references
to the Black Panthers and Malcolm X, as well as Michael Jackson, Beyoncé
presented herself as ‘unapologetically black’, prompting the comedy television
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show Saturday Night Live to feature a sketch entitled ‘The Day Beyoncé Turned
Black’ (13 February 2016). This is not to suggest that political ‘blackness’
was absent from Beyoncé’s earlier work. As the analysis of Beyoncé’s 2006
album B’Day (on which ‘Listen’ from Dreamgirls features as bonus track) by
Daphne Brooks convincingly shows, the album ‘articulates the questions and
concerns of black women who are wary of having their movements controlled
and policed in the public eye’, particularly in the wake of Hurricane Katrina
(Brooks 2008: 201). However, ‘Formation’ and the subsequent audiovisual
album Lemonade, released on 23 April 2016, present these political concerns
far more explicitly – and indeed unapologetically – to such an extent that they
cannot be ignored or dismissed.
When comparing the 2016 Super Bowl performance to Beyoncé’s perform-
ing ‘At Last’ as part of the festivities of President Barack Obama’s first inau-
guration in 2009, this political change becomes apparent. Both performances
were targeted at a general audience, larger than Beyoncé’s own, and both
explicitly referred to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, albeit in signifi-
cantly different ways. As I have discussed in more detail elsewhere, Beyoncé’s
performance of ‘At Last’ – from the 1942 Hollywood musical Orchestra
Wives but best known in the soulful 1961 rendition by Etta James – evoked
Martin Luther King, Jr’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, and as such the performance
became a celebration of the progress that had been made; Beyoncé serenading
the first African-American president reinforced the promise of the American
Dream and the possibility of its fulfilment (Kooijman 2013: 147–8). Beyoncé’s
performance of ‘Formation’ at the Super Bowl, in stark contrast, emphasised
what had not been achieved, that racial discrimination is still rampant and that
black militancy (hence the Black Panthers and Malcolm X) is needed to render
such injustice visible. The two performances do not contradict each other, but
instead bring the complexities of race and gender to the foreground, thereby
reinforcing Stuart Hall’s earlier quoted reminder that ‘black popular culture is
a contradictory space’, which cannot be reduced to such simple binary opposi-
tions such as ‘black’ and ‘white’ or ‘authentic’ and ‘artificial’ (Hall 1992: 26).
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Greg DeCuir, Alexander Dhoest, Richard Dyer, Martin
Lüthe, Maarten Reesink, and the participants of the Revisiting Star Studies
conference (Newcastle, 2013), the Research Colloquium of the John F.
Kennedy Institute (Berlin, 2015) and the NEH Videographic Criticism work-
shop (Middlebury, 2015) for critically commenting on earlier drafts and
presentations of this chapter.
121
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