Gracefully Policing the Tyler Perry Phenomenon

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Gracefully Policing the Tyler Perry Phenomenon Leslie E. Wingard (bio) Interpreting Tyler Perry: Perspectives on Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality. Edited by Jamel Santa Cruze Bell and Ronald L. Jackson II. New York: Routledge, 2013. 340 pages. $98.94 (cloth). Tyler Perry’s America: Inside His Films. By Shayne Lee. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015. 208 pages. $31.35 (cloth). Womanist and Black Feminist Responses to Tyler Perry’s Productions. Edited by LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant, Tamura A. Lomax, and Carol B. Duncan. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 296 pages. $95.00 (cloth). Tyler Perry, author, filmmaker, playwright, songwriter, and actor, is perhaps best known for creating and performing in drag the character Madea, the worldly grandmother in a black, protestant (with a conservative evangelical bent) Christian family. With humorous misreads of scripture, a smart mouth, slaps and punches at anyone who offends her people, and threats to use the gun she totes, Madea practices extremely tough love. Through characters like Madea, Perry’s work specializes in merging sacred and secular elements in order to relay his Christian message about God’s grace. Emerging as a cultural producer in the 1990s and still prolific today, Perry has written and produced an impressive number of stage plays, films, and television series. In 2011 Forbes named him the highest-paid man in entertainment, citing earnings of $130 million for the previous year. Perry and his work, however, have not dodged controversy. In a 2009 television interview, fellow director Spike Lee called Perry’s shows “coonery and buffoonery.” A 2010 LA Times article called an episode of The Boondocks, a television series written by the cartoonist Aaron McGruder, one of the “sharpest public criticisms of [Tyler] Perry.”1 So too have scholars expressed reservations about his depiction of African Americans, gender politics, and faith. In a chapter of Womanist and Black Feminist Responses to Tyler Perry’s Productions (2014), [End Page 1251] “Screening God,” Andrea C. White asserts that all of Perry’s work features a faulty doctrine of grace, one “reliant on divine favoritism and works of righteousness.” White observes that this conception “represents a naïve theological understanding that precludes the radical nature of grace and reduces the divine-human relationship to a system of reward” (82). The three studies under review suggest that Perry’s work—when coupled with his audiences’ reception of it—could also contain a more profound concept of grace: a supernaturally inspired impetus to transform the perilous and unjust conditions under which many African Americans live. More specifically, all three books suggest that the sacred and secular must come together in a way that eventually enables sociopolitical productivity. In this essay I adapt from Brent Hayes Edwards’s work on black intellectuals across the African diaspora the term productive dissonance, which signals a collaboration between such things as nationality, class, gender, language, and sexuality that is not entirely harmonious and entails defining and redefining key terms for the greater good.2 Dissonance between critical and uncritical viewing of Perry’s work, “between the critical response and the reception by the black mainstream, which celebrates Perry’s works as icons of black popular culture,” is ongoing in cultural studies (Manigault-Bryant et al. 85). M. Shawn Copeland and White push Christian artists like Perry to address “social sin[s]” such as gender discrimination, economic injustice, and social class oppression, since these too are theological problems (Manigault-Bryant et al. 75). Copeland and White feel “divine and human agency” should always be considered together (75). Likewise, in understated or explicit ways, the three texts covered here all argue for a reconciliation of the sacred and secular. Each book prompted me to second its sacred/secular motion. More specifically, the texts urged me to reflect on what a productively dissonant experience with Perry’s oeuvre would look like. The writers of all three texts use their understandings of grace and forgiveness in their Perry analyses. Thus, I figured that considering ways in which exhibiting grace and forgiveness, in music, politics, and theater, can either strengthen or weaken communities in the United States could add depth to my readings of Perry’s work—as this consideration brings social justice...