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Complete notes for lecture 6 in SOC 202....

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SOC 202 Week 6 notes Race, Blackness, New Black Cinema and the Hood Film

Situating Race and Masculinity in Popular Culture and Hollywood 

Hollywood and Popular Cinema: o Hollywood typically represents demographics in ways that reflect the hegemonic process of negotiation – this process reflects the ways certain subcultures, for example, can move upwards towards popular or dominant culture. o Youth subcultures – today, hip hop in the 1980-90s - demonstrate hegemony at work as hip hop and rap music represented a challenge & protest towards the dominant through socio-political music, clothing, rituals and language that was deeply symbolic.

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Cornel West: o Race represents different things to different people in different places at different times o Race reflects the formation of social groups has shaped the formation of real or Imagined Communities o Race also represents the lived experiences of individuals and groups and reveal clear and real dimensions of social inclusion, exclusion, equality and inequality.

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Stuart Hall: o Popular cinema “constructs a definition of what race is and what the imagery of race symbolizes o As such, we make sense of the world through these representations, and in this way, the social construction of race becomes a lived reality – for example, “I see that representation of myself”

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Critical Race Theory: o CRT examines the symbolic significance of the body and:  (a) traces the meanings embedded within cultural representations of “particular bodies as constituted within a social field”  (b) examines how these operate to sustain specific power relationships between groups and influence lived cultural experiences o Stuart Hall: cultural meanings organize and regulate social practices, influence our conduct and consequently have real, practical effects

New Directions in Blackness: New Black Cinema, Spike Lee and “Rapsloitation”  

Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film (Edward Guerrero,1993). Guerrero sees three primary areas of pre-2000s Black cinema o 1. The Pre-Blaxploitation era (pre-1970s) during which a mainstream image of the black body connoted subordination and submissiveness, both through race and gender. o 2. The Blaxploitation era (1970s) of political resistance dominated by black action films employing strategic reversals of mainstream ideology. o 3. The 1980s-90s when the filmmaking practices of both the new Indie and earlier Blaxploitation filmmakers began to merge and collaborate. o Our focus will be this period of time (80s-90s)

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The term New Black Cinema refers to a second generation of Black filmmakers and reflects their cultural production in and outside Hollywood beginning in the 1980s. o As a period of cultural production, New Black Cinema roughly begins with She’s Gotta Have It (Spike Lee, 1986) NBC: Telling stories of the “everyday experiences within the black community” as well engaging in the “cultural intervention and re-coding of existing discursive narratives and visual codes of Blackness on the screen” (Keith M Harris)

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Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989) Hip hop, rap, basketball and sneakers intermingle and are consciously injected with symbolic racial signification while also deployed formally as a style and visual world signifying Blackness, contemporary youth and urbanity. This wave of NBC that Lee ushers in saw Black filmmakers making films for both Black audiences and the mainstream public. One result: a fundamental change in the broader cultural sentiments during this time (1986-91): mainstream American culture had made a shift, from repressing race to actively consuming it. New Black Cinema: (Keith M Harris) Do the Right Thing visualizes the inner-city as a racially geographic and demarcated space and establishes hip hop and basketball culture (s) as the cultural familiars of that time and space (1989). That is, the hip hop & basketball was of that moment in time These links between place, race and culture and the popularity of NBC demonstrated that the inner-city as a setting was marketable beyond an audience of urban, black youth, and identified a broader demographic and market: the mainstream suburban (non-Black) teenager consuming the “Blackness” viewed on screen.

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New Black Cinema: (Keith M Harris) Do the Right Thing visualizes the inner-city as a racially geographic and demarcated space and establishes hip hop and basketball culture (s) as the cultural familiars of that time and space (1989). o That is, the hip hop & basketball was of that moment in time These links between place, race and culture and the popularity of NBC demonstrated that the inner-city as a setting was marketable beyond an audience of urban, black youth, and identified a broader demographic and market: the mainstream suburban (non-Black) teenager consuming the “Blackness” viewed on screen.

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Provocations on Sneakers (Dylan Miner, 2009) Prior to 1986, sneaker purchasing patterns were more closely aligned with use-value, as opposed to brand loyalty, social power, status, social media, celebrity endorsement etc. o As the Nike commercials reveal, post-1986 sneaker consumption was marked by a complex system of meaning, status, race and power. o For example, and as Miner argues, the rise of Air Jordan’s formally signals a shift from a sneaker’s use-value towards their social juice-value:  Juice Value: the ability of a mass-produced commodities such as a sneaker to be both transformative for the individual, as well as transformed by the individual themselves.

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Am I Black Enough for You?: Popular Culture from the “Hood” and Beyond (Todd Boyd, 1997) Sport and sporting “things” (sneakers, jerseys etc.) are read as masculine. Since the 1970s “basketball has been constructed as both masculine and basketball has signaled the embodiment of Blackness in contemporary popular culture” o As such, basketball and it’s affects (sneakers) operate as an ideal location to investigate and analyze Black masculinity. o In an ethnographic and sociological sense, “the cultural association linking Blackness to basketball” made basketball critical sites of study in terms of race and power.

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For Boyd, basketball is “the most visible stage” where a “lifestyle (Blackness) is played out”. Basketball, at a mainstream or dominant cultural level, and prior to the large scale mainstreaming of hip-hop culture was both: o (a) the most prominent and influential arena in which Black men have been granted access to a visible and visual stage on which to showcase physicality and creativity o (b) as a result of this visibly, basketball is an important space for racial and cultural definition in terms of masculinity, the family, community and power.

Situating the Hood Film within New Black Cinema & Popular Culture  

Between Apocalypse and Redemption (Michael Eric Dyson, 1992) The primary task of “Black film criticism does not posit a rigid sphere of academic analysis but class into question regimented conception of disciplinary boundaries while promoting overlapping and interpenetration of diverse areas of inquiry” o For example, “the relationship between the police and Black communities in the United States has become one of the most engaging discussions of the political and social landscape in the last twenty-five years.”

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Critical Race Theory argues that depictions of Blackness in media and pop culture has contributed to the negative perceptions and mistreatment of African-American groups – a mistreatment that is not strictly limited to the police, but are reflective of the overall criminal justice system This perpetuates long-held belief and discriminatory stereotype that the AfricanAmerican community is manifestly criminogenic in and of themselves which further fuels racism, prejudice and discrimination. Boyz in the Hood (John Singleton, 1991) o (a) demonstrates, these beliefs contribute to the maintenance of geographic restrictions in movement, freedom, mobility, as well as restrictions in opportunity for social, economic and political success o (b) reveals the intersection on rap music and NBC as fertile ground to communicate these very issues

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Michael Eric Dyson (1994): o “Rap music is a form of “profound musical, cultural, and social creativity. It expresses the desire of young Black people to reclaim their history, reactivate forms of Black radicalism, and contest the powers of despair and economic depression that presently besiege the Black community as crisis.”  For example, “while mainstream America has only begun to register awareness of the true proportions of this crisis, young Black creatives have responded via two independent popular cultures: rap music and Black cinema.”

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Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Tricia Rose,1994) o Both rap music and hip-hop are “highly influential, powerful and profitable and mainstream acceptance of both reflects a trajectory that moves from rejection to reluctant acceptance and then to full blown incorporation and co-potation” o For Rose, rap and hip-hop’s relationship to popular culture “contextualizes both as a type of popularity readily understood social fact: black culture is cool culture.”

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Between Apocalypse and Redemption: John Singleton’s Boyz N the Hood (Michael Eric Dyson, 1992)

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Singleton’s casting of Ice Cube as a central character (Doughboy) is shrewd, allowing him to seize symbolic capital from a “real life rap icon” while overlapping Cube’s NWA persona with a filmic persona – both navigating a geographic space rendered catastrophic: South Central Los Angeles (maybe Compton) Boyz thesis: o (a) communicate the crisis in SCLA while mythologizing the tropes and narratives that dominate it. That is, while gang life is central, it is not exclusive. o (b) illustrate the institutional structures in place that have created this catastrophic, geographic space.

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Keith M Harris: Black Crossover Film Boyz reflects the role of rap music within the crossover hood film. The popularity of music and expressive culture of the period provides the film with “an aural mise-en-scène of urban blackness” which: o (a) serves to reflect the anti-heroic romance of Doughboy who is “living for the hood” and, o (b) provides the film with an easy musical and marketing tie-in - a visual and aural aesthetic and a recognizable rap star in a central role

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Hood films are united, for the most part, by: 1) largely African-American creative talent, contemporary urban settings (Los Angeles or New York) 2) a strong connection to youth rap and pop culture 3) a thematic focus on inner-city social and political issues such as poverty, crime, racism, drugs and violence. Consequently, film critics and scholars were quick to explore and interpret this uniquely confined set of film

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Graeme’s notes

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We start here with the argument that "Hollywood typically represents demographics in ways that reflect the hegemonic process of negotiation – this process reflects the ways certain subcultures, for example, can move upwards towards popular or dominant culture".

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This lecture is centred on considering how Blackness and popular culture intersect, both in terms of the above ^ and hegemony, but also in terms of a previously established subculture (hip -hop) and a sport (basketball) intersect also in establishing both as a part of dominant culture. For example, hip-hop was once excluded from dominant or pop culture but the hegemonic process of negotiation has seen hip-hop culture establish itself as arguably the dominant popular entertainment culture in North America.

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And so with that in place, Cornel West argues that:

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(a) Race represents different things to different people in different places at different times (b) Race reflects the formation of social groups has shaped the formation of real or Imagined Communities, and (c) Race also represents the lived experiences of individuals and groups and reveal clear and real dimensions of social inclusion, exclusion, equality and inequality.

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For West then, race means difference, racial difference in which we understand our place in the world differently. We may understand our place as different from others due to class and economics, geography, religion and gender, and we also do in terms of race. In short then, for West, race can represent our lived experience, that is the experiences we've had and how our race has (or may have) shaped them.

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Critical Race Theory examines the symbolic significance of the body, and in doing so also traces the meanings embedded within cultural representations of particular bodies as constituted within a social field. We are going to return to this point shortly after a particular screening, but keep in mind the idea here: our bodies are symbolic, meanings are attached to them within what they "mean" with social field, for example, social worlds.

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For example, and to offer a bit of context. I've walked home late at night, by myself, many times. My body, a male body, affords me a certain privilege in doing so in terms of gender, yes? That is, in walking home I've never been cat-called, I've never been subjected to someone wanting to speak to me, approach me or asking me to stop and spend time with them. Many young women, or women, have not had this same experience. That is, many women we know have told of us experiences while walking alone that include strangers yelling out windows, approaching, intimidating, asking inappropriate questions and so on. This is just a simple contextualizing of how our bodies are personalized and socialized, our bodies mean different things to different people, at

different times, and in this example, a body gendered male may experience a certain freedom in walking alone at night that a body gendered female does not.

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In keeping CRT (race, bodies, meanings) in mind, Part TWO examines popular culture itself and does so via a brief history of race, Blackness and cinema (Blaxploitation, for example). Our focus will be on the 1980s and onward, and will begin with New Black Cinema.

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NBC: For Harris, NBC focuses on "telling stories of the “everyday experiences within the black community” as well as engaging in the “cultural intervention and re-coding of existing discursive narratives and visual codes of Blackness on the screen." What Harris is referring to is power.

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In particular, Black filmmakers having the POWER to reflect the Black community through the eyes of a Black director from the Black community. This is a key point to note and return to the first part of the lecture: race and hegemony. Rather than having a non-Black person write a story about a Black experience, NBC ensures that the story is written by someone who has experienced that story in a similar manner. That is, and to provide another very simple bit of context: as a male, I can write a story about a male experience, and I suppose I could hypothetically also write a story about female experiences. Ok sure, but with that in mind, should I be granted that job simply due to my being male i.e. dominant, white, patriarchal? No, of course not! A woman should be granted the job to write about women just as, and as NBC argues, the Black community is best explored and written about by a member of the Black community.

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Of course, there are variations, shifts, negotiations etc involved in much of this but the idea here is that NBC ensures that stories about the Black community are written and directed by those who have experience (and lived experiences) within the world of the story told.

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According to Dyson, "the primary task of “Black film criticism does not posit a rigid sphere of academic analysis but class into question regimented conception of disciplinary boundaries while promoting overlapping and interpenetration of diverse areas of inquiry” For example, Dyson argues that “the relationship between the police and Black

communities in the United States has become one of the most engaging discussions of the political and social landscape in the last twenty-five years" (Between Apocalypse and Redemption (Michael Eric Dyson, 1992). 

This gets us started on CRT, popular culture and the Hood film genre. The lecture includes material from both Dyson and Tricia Rose and the material addresses the hood film in terms of race, power, pop culture, the police, racism and rap music. For Rose, in particular, she argues that rap music IS political music and states it is "highly influential, powerful and profitable and mainstream acceptance of both reflects a trajectory that moves from rejection to reluctant acceptance and then to full-blown incorporation and cooptation" (Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, Tricia Rose, 1994).

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Lastly, Boyz N The Hood (John Singleton, 1991).

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Like Lee, Singleton, also a young Black man, wrote and directed his debut film. He was also nominated for both Best Original Screenplay and Best Director, at the young age of 24! He was both the youngest to ever be nominated for the Best Director Academy Award, but also the first African-American to be nominated as well. This is an important history in terms of the pop culture we consume and enjoy today and this legacy (he died last year) is to be noted: 1991!...