Mr. Fetchit, Hollywood is Calling… (Again)

I just saw Fetch Clay, Make Man, an excellent new original play currently being performed in Manhattan at the New York Theater Workshop.  The play explores the unlikely friendship in the 1960s between Muhammad Ali and Lincoln Perry, the actor behind the notorious “Stepin Fetchit” film character of the 1930s, which has long been condemned as a racial embarrassment for his stereotyped portrayal of a lazy, slow-witted, and perpetually drunk black servant.  With two such charged figures in American race history, the play is an explosive rendering of different theories of ethnic empowerment.  In a small but powerful cast which represents Ali’s then wife and a few members of the Nation of Islam, the play engages a number of questions affecting marginalized groups.  Is empowerment achieved more effectively through assimilation or separation?  Are culture and politics ever separate for ethnic celebrities?  Where do women fit into a paradigm of resistance that focuses upon race rather than gender?

Any one of these issues could be the source of endless debate, but I was particularly struck by the similarities between the play’s vision of Stepin Fetchit and recent reconsiderations of Charlie Chan, a similarly reviled character for Asian Americans.  Disparaged since at least the 1970s for his shambling subservience and lisping faux orientalist wisdom, Charlie Chan was powerfully reexamined by Yunte Huang’s bestselling 2010 book, Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History.  In the book, Huang presents Chan as an important early figure of assimilation, adaptation, and hybridity, whose historical inspiration—the real ethnic Chinese Honolulu cop on which Chan is based—provided contemporaries with a tangible example of masculine Asian power, whose cinematic dramatizations were beloved and admired by contemporary Chinese, and whose novelistic conceptualizations exerted a powerful hold upon Huang himself, when the writer immigrated to America in the aftermath of China’s Tiananmen Square tragedy.  As result of this multilayered and original approach to the Charlie Chan legacy, Huang’s book has prompted a massive—and high profile—renaissance of interest in Charlie Chan.  At a 2012 academic conference in which I appeared on a panel with Yunte Huang, the author reported that award-winning Asian American filmmaker Wayne Wang had been developing a film based on his book—until shouldered aside by the even bigger guns of Robert De Niro (whose particular role in any potential film version was not yet clear)!

Similarly, in Fetch Clay, Make Man, part of the genius of Will Power’s script is that it makes even as complex and charismatic an individual as Muhammad Ali a touchstone by which we can begin to appreciate the still unplumbed depths of Lincoln Perry.  Misunderstood by contemporaries and subsequent history, Perry was a literate and articulate man who joined the likes of Gwendolyn Brooks and Langston Hughes in being regularly published by the Chicago Defender, an important African American newspaper.  Fetch Clay, Make Man revives this aspect of Perry, showing him sagely advising a tempestuous and somewhat naively idealist Ali about the conflicted agendas of those surrounding him and cannily negotiating on his own behalf with the head of Fox Studios.  As with Yunte Huang’s revisionary reinterpretation of Charlie Chan, Fetch Clay, Make Man emphasizes the achievements of early figures of racial assimilation and cultural interchange, and argues that sometimes the bravest and most important figures of multicultural understanding are those that have been scapegoated when they were really pioneers.  Reconsidering—and even embracing—these figures, both studies suggest, is a necessary first step in truly attaining the “post-racial” society that is so frequently tossed around as a term and ideal by which to imagine modern America.

Time to re-watch—and maybe remake—Charlie Chan in Egypt (1935), a fascinating Hollywood specimen in which Charlie Chan and Stepin Fetchit both appear?